What got me started in research on telecommuting in the first place was this: In 1970 an urban planner said to me: “If you can put man on the moon, why can’t you do something about traffic?” At the time I was concentrating on ways to adapt my “rocket science” expertise from outer space to earth. The question struck home.

I started with first principles: why do we have so much traffic? The answer was that much of it, roughly half of the time, was from people driving between their homes and work in an office at some distance away.

Next question: what do they do when they get to the office?

Answer: much of the time they’re interacting with someone else, usually over the phone, or doing solo thinking.

My reaction: that’s dumb, why don’t they just do that at home and skip getting involved in traffic, wasting energy and creating air pollution?

The research begins

I was so intrigued by the thought that I changed careers, from the advanced design of spacecraft to research on what I then called telecommuting. Starting with a research team at the University of Southern California and with the participation of a national Insurance company we tested telecommuting in a real world situation. The project was a great success. The companies major objective, to reduce it’s turnover rate, was met. Other costs were reduced and productivity increased.

This process was repeated again and again over the years, with a variety of organizations, both private and public, as we learned the details of how to develop and manage telework projects. Most of these projects were also successes, that is, until new senior management was installed and decided to return their organizations to the old way of doing things. Never mind the facts.

Since each new project took from months to years getting started it was always disheartening when a new CEO took over and returned to the 19th century. So, I kept looking for the magic elixir or word that would change upper management’s attitude toward this new, highly productive form of work.

The turning point

The magic word turned out to be Covid. Overnight, organizations around the world were forced to either adopt telework or go out of business. Many organizations, having ignored the possibilities of telework, we’re forced to muddle through somehow. Most of them made it.

But now managers are still trying to go back to the old ways, demanding that employees return to the office. Yet employees resistance is such that “hybrid working” is now grudgingly accepted and central cities are trying to invent new ways of using all that empty office space.

The world today

Five plus decades later, the communications technology is much, much better but there are still far too many people uselessly clogging the freeways and contributing to global warming. Teleworking is still growing to reduce the problem.

By the way, if you want to view a documentary about this process, see Work Different online.