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.

Judging from the comments I get, there is still a fair amount of confusion as to what, exactly, are the definitions of teleworking, telecommuting and remote working? My answers go into some detail but, first, here are my general definitions:

• Teleworking: ANY form of substitution of information technologies (such as telecommunications and/or computers) for normal work-related travel; moving the work to the workers instead of moving the workers to work.
• Telecommuting: Periodic work out of the principal office, one or more days per week, either at home, a client’s site, or in a telework center; the partial or total substitution of information technologies for the commute to work. The emphasis here is on reduction or elimination of the daily commute to and from the workplace. Telecommuting is a form of teleworking. Telemedicine is another form of telework except the emphasis is on the type of work performed rather than the trip savings.
• Remote working: Another popular name for teleworking. I personally dislike the term because of the the possible inference that the workers are somehow disengaged from their work rather than simply working at a distance from the principal workplace.
• Hybrid working: The split between teleworking and traditional office working in which X days per week, on average, are spent teleworking and the rest in the traditional office. Our previous research shows that X tends to hover between 2 and 3. This form has implications on the design of the formerly traditional office. But that’s the subject of a future blog post.

Those are the quick definitions. Now here are some details.