People seem to have a great urge to name everything. When I first began to explore ways of getting people out of their cars to go from home to a downtown workplace. I called the process telecommuting simply because it focused attention on stopping or reducing commuting by car. In 1973, when the grant came in from the National Science Foundation to actually set up and study this possibility, we formalized the term and added teleworking as a synonym. The tele- meaning distant in both cases: the work gets done without moving the workers to the workplace; only the information flows back and forth.
As time went on, and the concept kept evolving, we had a need to further specify what this tele-stuff was all about. Different names for it kept cropping up so I felt the need to define each term more explicitly in order to ensure that, in a conversation or other interchange, all parties were talking about the same thing. So, here’s the 2024.7 attempt, an update from my 2022 version, using my 1998 definitions[1] as the base. [Note: the number of days worked in one of these modes may actually vary from week to week; the numbers quoted are averages over a year.]
Distance working
ANY form of information working whereby the worker may only occasionally have contact with the principle office, communicating via any available technologies. This includes, but is not limited to, all of the forms listed below. Benjamin Franklin was a distance worker when he was negotiating with the French.
Teleworking
ANY form of substitution of information technology (such as telecommunications and computers) for work-related travel: moving the work to the workers instead of moving the workers to work.
Telecommuting
Periodic work out of the principle office, one or more days per week either at home, a client’s site, or in a telework center. Telecommuting is a more restrictive form of teleworking.
Hybrid working
The at least one day per week in the office version of telecommuting. This is the form we used (but didn’t call it that) during most of our early telework projects at USC and JALA[2]. It accounts for the great majority of all telecommuting activity and has done so for 50 years.
Working from Home (WFH)
This is the most popular name for all this in the US today. It can refer to either home-based telecommuting or teleworking, depending on the distance from home to office. Workers who live at distances such that a daily commute to the office is impractical are teleworkers. Telecommuters who partially commute by going to near-to-home telecenters or satellite offices are not WFHers.
There are also lots of people who work from home but are none of the above. Artists, crafters, authors, trainers, farmers and so on. Which is why I don’t particularly like the too-broad term as too ambiguous.
Remote working
A form of teleworking in which the worker may not have a fixed home base, moving from one location to another with some regularity, and/or may work for one or more employers located anywhere.
Flextime
A variant of work scheduling in which working hours and/or location are different from “normal”. This can, but does not necessarily, include a version of teleworking.
General
In all of the above my personal focus has been on developing fast and effective ways to reduce energy consumption, especially of fossil fuels, as a quick and low-cost means of slowing the rate of global warming. This made me concentrate on cars because they were collectively one of the important sources of the greenhouse gases that increase global warming. So, to the extent that newly more distant teleworkers use longer internal combustion car trips or, worse, jets to travel when they do go to the office, it defeats my purpose. Such is life.
[1] Page 1 of Managing Telework: Strategies for Managing the Virtual Workforce. Published by John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. 1998.
[2] University of Southern California and JALA International.