Remote work is a work arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work, such as an office building, warehouse, or store. It is also known as telecommuting, distance working, telework, teleworking, working from home (WFH), mobile work, remote job, work from anywhere (WFA), and flexible workplace.
What is Remote Work
Remote work is a work style that enables professionals to work outside of a regular office setting. It is founded on the idea that work does not have to be done at a certain location to be completed properly.
Consider this: instead of going to an office each day to work from a certain workstation, remote employees may complete their assignments and exceed their goals wherever they choose. People have the freedom to plan their days in such a way that both their work and personal life may be lived to the maximum and coexist harmoniously.
History of Remote Work
In the 1970s, the term “telecommuting” was used to represent work-related substitutes of telecommunication and associated information technologies for travel.
Telecommuting became a popular topic in pop culture in the 1990s. The phrase “work is something you do, not something you go to” was created in 1995.
This slogan has many variations, including “Work is something we DO, not a location we GO” and “Work is what we do, not where we are.” A variety of enterprises, governments, and non-profit groups have embraced telecommuting.
Telecommuting may be used by businesses to save expenses (telecommuting employees do not require an office or cubicle, a space which needs to be rented or purchased, and incurs additional costs such as lighting, climate control, etc.).
Teleworking is used by certain firms to enhance the quality of life of its employees since it decreases travel time and time spent stopped in traffic.
Additionally, teleworking may make it simpler for employees to integrate their job commitments with their personal lives and family responsibilities (e.g., caring for children or elderly parents).
Some firms use teleworking for environmental reasons, since it may decrease traffic congestion and air pollution by reducing the number of automobiles on the road.
Terminology of Remote Work
Although the terms “telecommuting” and “telework” are synonymous, there is a distinction between the two. Telework refers to any sort of technology-assisted work performed outside of a centrally situated work area (including work done from home, outside calls, and so on).
Telecommuters often keep a typical workplace and work from a different location one to three days per week. Telecommuting is more explicitly defined as work performed at a place that decreases commute time.
These places may be inside the house or at a distant business, which is made possible via a broadband connection, computer or phone lines, or any other electronic medium used to interact and communicate.
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Telework, as a broader concept than telecommuting, has four dimensions in its definitional framework:
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Work location, which can be anywhere outside of a centralized organizational workplace;
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The use of ICTs (information and communication technologies) as technical support for telework;
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Time distribution, which refers to the amount of time replaced in the traditional workplace
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The diversity of employment relationships between employer and employee, ranging from contract work to full-time employment.
Statistics of Remote Work
Teleworking was favored by 36% of Europeans polled in the European Investment Bank Climate Survey as a way to combat climate change.
According to estimates, over fifty million U.S. workers (about 40% of the working population) may work from home at least part of the time in 2012, however in 2008, just 2.5 million employees, excluding the self-employed, regarded their house to be their principal place of business.
The number of workers claimed to have worked from home “on their principal job” in 2010 was 9.4 million (6.6 percent of the total), albeit this figure may include self-employed people. According to Global Analytics Workplace, over 3.7 million people (2.8 percent of the workforce) worked from home at least half of the time in 2017.
Best Tech Companies For Remote Jobs In 2021
| During Covid-19 Company Name & Hiring Surge Status | December 20th company to a friend as of would recommend this (%) of employees who | Glassdoor December 20th on approve of the CEO as of (%) of employees who | 20th on Glassdoor Positions as of December Total Number of Open | CEO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Modern Tribe | 100% | 100% | 8 | Shane Pearlman |
| Dataiku Hiring Surge during Covid-19 | 99% | 100% | 227 | Florian Douetteau |
| Zapier Hiring Surge during Covid-19 | 99% | 99% | 12 | Wade Foster |
| PartnerCentric | 97% | 100% | 3 | Stephanie Harris |
| Slack (Salesforce acqusition pending) | 97% | 98% | 87 | Stewart Butterfield |
| Fuse | 96% | 93% | 11 | Bill Carter, Issa Sawabini, Brett Smith |
| ScienceLogic | 96% | 98% | 36 | David Link |
| SAP | 95% | 97% | 1.8K+ jobs on their site | Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein |
Summary
Remote work is a work situation where employees do not commute. Working from home (WFH), mobile work, remote employment, work from anywhere (WFA), and a flexible workplace are all examples of flexible workplaces.
Technology of Remote Work
Telecommuting has its origins in early 1970s technology that connected outlying offices to downtown mainframes through dumb terminals utilizing telephone lines as a network bridge.
The continuing and exponential declines in cost, together with improvements in performance and usability of personal computers, paved the path for the office to be moved to the house.
Branch offices and home employees were able to connect to organizational mainframes using personal computers and terminal emulation by the early 1980s.
Telework is made possible by products like groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videoconferencing, virtual call centers, Voice over IP (VoIP), and the falling cost of high-quality laptop computers.
It may be effective and valuable for businesses since it lets employees interact across great distances, saving substantial amounts of time and money on travel.
As broadband Internet access becomes more ubiquitous, an increasing number of employees have enough bandwidth at home to utilize these technologies to connect their homes to their workplace intranet and internal phone networks.
Theory of Media Richness
The communication technology is not mature enough to duplicate face-to-face workplace interactions. Mistakes and misunderstandings may become more common.
According to media richness theory, face-to-face encounters allow for the processing of rich information: confusing problems may be explained, quick feedback can be supplied, and individualized communication is possible (e.g. body language, tone of voice).
Telecommuting necessitates the use of multiple modes of communication, such as the telephone and email.
Emails have a time lag that prevents instant feedback; telephone discussions make it difficult to discern the feelings of the person or team on the other end of the phone, and both of these means of communication do not enable one to see the other person. Telecommuting alters typical organizational communication practices.
For example, teams employing computer-mediated communication using computer conferencing take longer than face-to-face groups to reach group choices.
Theory of Job Characteristics
Some of the possible advantages and downsides of telecommuting may be addressed by job characteristic theory, which contends that the characteristics and duties of the job itself influence workers’ work attitudes and behavior.
When five job characteristics skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback are present, the employee will experience more internal work motivation, satisfaction with personal growth opportunities, general job satisfaction, higher job performance, and lower absenteeism and turnover. Many studies have shown that work features have an impact on employees’ behavior and attitudes.
Furthermore, work features might interact with individual variations to influence employee attitudes and behavior. Telework, in particular, alters autonomy and feedback as compared to face-to-face work, and may therefore impact workers’ actions and attitudes.
Changes in autonomy and feedback, according to Job Characteristics Theory, impact work behaviors and attitudes more than changes in skill diversity, task identity, or task relevance.
Autonomy
Autonomy impacts perceived responsibility in such a way that if the job allows for freedom, independence, and schedule flexibility, the employee should feel accountable for the work results.
Telework offers schedule flexibility and independence since being away from the workplace allows the worker more options. Teleworkers do not have to adhere to workplace norms and may schedule their work at various times of the day.
Telework gives workers the flexibility to pick where they work, when they work, and even what they wear to work to perform at their best. Teleworkers may feel more responsible if they feel in control of and accountable for their job.
Teleworker autonomy provides for less work-family friction. Teleworking allows you to schedule your job around your family obligations. Enhanced control over life’s demands
Other Hypotheses of Remote Work
Individuals attribute significance to work features, according to social information processing. Individuals may develop their perceptions of their surroundings by analyzing social signals.
This social information is derived from colleagues’ overt utterances, cognitive appraisals of job or task aspects, and past actions.
This social environment may have an impact on people’s ideas about the nature of their employment, the expectations for individual conduct, and the possible repercussions of action, particularly in unclear circumstances.
Because social interchange and customized communication take longer to comprehend in computer-mediated communication than in face-to-face conversations, there are fewer social signals in telework.
Theory Of Socio-technical Systems
The theory of sociotechnical systems (STS) analyses the interplay of social and technological variables. STS studies the interactions between people, technology, and the work environment to create work that improves worker satisfaction and productivity.
The hypothesis, which was originally designed to explain the contradiction of greater technology but decreasing productivity, may now be applied to the design of telework. The minimal critical specification is one of the STS concepts.
This concept emphasizes that, unless necessary, there should be as little explanation of goals and how to do activities as possible to avoid shutting choices or impeding effective actions.
Telecommuting allows teleworkers to choose how and when to do their responsibilities. Similarly, teleworkers are responsible for using their equipment and resources to carry out their duties.
This increased responsibility for their job also enhances their influence, lending credence to the notion that teleworking is a privilege and, in certain firms, a promotion.
Theorem of Adaptive Structure
The notion of adaptive structuration investigates changes in organizations when new technologies are introduced. According to adaptive structural theory, structures (generic principles and resources provided by technology) might vary from structuration (how people use these rules and resources).
There is a relationship between the intended use of technology and how individuals utilize it. Telecommuting creates a social framework that both allows and limits certain relationships.
For example, in an office situation, it may be customary to engage with people face to face. Other means of engagement must be explored to achieve interpersonal interchange when telecommuting.
According to AST, the norms and resources for social interactions will alter as technologies are employed throughout time. Teleworking may cause conventional work practices to change, such as shifting from face-to-face conversation to electronic communication.
Task Relevance, Task Identity, and Skill Variety
Three of the five work characteristics, namely skill diversity, task identity, and task importance, have an impact on how much employees believe their occupations are meaningful. The degree to which a work necessitates a diversity of activities and abilities to fulfill the objective.
An increase in skill diversity is regarded to enhance the job’s difficulty. Increasing the job’s difficulty raises the person’s sense of meaningfulness, or how much the individual cares about and considers useful his or her work.
Telework may not have a direct impact on the person’s skill variety and task meaningfulness when compared to working in an office; nevertheless, the skill variety and meaningfulness of individual tasks may arise when working in a group. If the job done at home is centered on the individual rather than the team, there may be fewer chances to use a wide range of abilities.
Potential advantages
Worker preference — home-sourced employees often need or want to work from home. They are typically grateful for the chance.
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Lower expenses for the business since home-based employees sometimes furnish their telephone and computer systems. The employer also saves money on office space.
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Using home-sourced employees who are local to the area where they are calling eliminates the bias that may be produced by regional accents, mannerisms, and speech rates.
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Possible tax benefits for employees who use a portion of their home for company activities.
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It enables employers to give employment to persons who are unable to go to a job due to a handicap.
Environmental advantages
If the 40% of the US population that has telework-compatible occupations and wishes to work from home did so half the time:
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The country would save 280,000,000 barrels of oil (45,000,000 m3) (37 percent of Gulf oil imports).
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The environment would be spared by removing 9 million automobiles off the road permanently.
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The energy potential from fuel savings is more than double what the United States presently generates from all renewable energy sources combined.
Effects on health
According to a World Health Organization and International Labour Organization study for 2021, the spread of teleworking, if it raises working time to more than 55 hours per week, might cause worker health loss.
At the report’s release, the World Health Organization’s Director-General warned that an increase in teleworking in response to the Covid-19 pandemic could increase the burden of disease from exposure to long working hours, and urged governments to take effective action to ensure healthy working time limits were established by law and enforced globally.
Summary
Telecommuting gives teleworkers more control over their work schedules and enables them to have a greater impact on the company’s bottom line. People who telecommute may not have as many skills or tasks to choose from as those who work in an office.
Frequently Asked Questions
People usually ask many questions about Remote Work. A few of them are discussed below:
1. What exactly is a remote job?
Remote job (also known as work from home [WFH] or telecommuting) is a sort of flexible working arrangement in which an employee works from a place other than the corporate office. Remote employment might be temporary or permanent, part-time or full-time, seldom or regular.
2. What are the advantages of working from home?
The benefits of remote work are:
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Less time spent commuting.
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More freedom.
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Greater adaptability.
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Improved work-life balance.
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Increased output.
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Enhanced motivation.
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Staff turnover has been reduced.
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Reduction in the requirement for office space.
3. How can I find an entirely remote job?
According to studies considering the benefits and drawbacks of working from home, employees with flexible working arrangements are less likely to leave, have better job satisfaction, and are more productive than their in-office counterparts. Certainly, removing the office’s talkative neighbors may have had a role.
4. Is it true that remote employees get paid less?
According to Payscale, workers who telecommute 100 percent of the time (totally remote) earn more than those who do not work remotely at all. This corresponds to the wage disparity between white-collar and blue-collar employees.
5. What is the value of working remotely?
Employers gain as well, in addition to lower compensation. According to the Global Workplace Analytics report, companies save $11,000 per person who works remotely 2.5 days per week owing to greater productivity, cheaper real estate expenditures, and absenteeism, among other considerations.
Conclusion
Remote work is becoming increasingly popular due to the benefits it provides to both businesses and individuals. It also received a lot of attention after the COVID-19 epidemic, which prompted many firms to immediately transition from a typical face-to-face work environment to a wholly remote workforce for health and safety concerns.
Remote working’s long-term popularity is linked to the benefits it may give, such as decreased or eliminated commuting times, recruiting and hiring advantages, and productivity gains.
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