The main point of telework is to locate your desk somewhere close to where you live that doesn’t require you to use a car to get there. One of my main goals in 1973 was to reduce the energy needed to commute to and from work. The automobile is the most used form of commute transportation in the US and other countries. It also creates a lot of greenhouse gases, thereby contributing to global warming. So, where’s your desk? At/near your home or somewhere that necessitates car use?
Continue reading Where’s your desk and other problemsTag Archives: productivity
Productivity, effectiveness or . . .?
One of the prime attractions of telework, at least from the employer’s point of view, is the increased productivity of teleworkers compared to their office-bound colleagues. I have issues with that description of the output of teleworkers or other information workers. I prefer to use “effectiveness” rather than productivity as a better term for telework’s impact. Here’s why.
Productivity
First, productivity is so twentieth or even eighteenth century. For the last century or two productivity has been defined as the result of effective effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.
Continue reading Productivity, effectiveness or . . .?
Productivity, innovation, creativity and telecommuting
As we have seen in the news lately there seems to be a fad in Silicon Valley based on the idea, particularly for companies that are currently in trouble, that togetherness is an absolute requirement for rescuing the company from a fate worse than death. That is, according to this theory, productivity, innovation and creativity only happen in groups of people constantly engaged in face-to-face communication. So if the company can only get all of its people collocated as much as possible great things will automatically happen.
I have mentioned in previous blogs that I don’t believe this theory, based both on my personal experience and survey evidence we have collected over the years. I think that these companies might better spend their time improving their management capabilities rather than herding all their employees into some mental gymnasium. Let me explain this with my own assumptions. Continue reading Productivity, innovation, creativity and telecommuting