Wired workplace demands adjustments.

• Position: Telecommuting - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

While numerous companies have been quick to adapt to the opportunities to do business using the Internet, they still are grappling with the management challenges the wired workplace presents. Nowhere are the challenges greater than in telecommuting, maintains Brad Alge, an assistant professor in the Krannert Graduate School of Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., whose research is in the changes technology is bringing to organizations. He says there is no one authoritative source on the number of telecommuters nationally. He cites a realistic numbers as "somewhere between 7,000,000 (from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) and 20,000,000 (International Telework Association and Council)....

"Companies have embraced the Internet as a way to recruit, select, and retain employees," Alge notes. "It is now expanding into organizations' training and development efforts." Yet, management, by and large, still hasn't succeeded in coming to terms with telecommuting. Computers and communication systems are becoming sophisticated and powerful enough that many employees can accomplish just as much sitting in a bathrobe at a desk at home--or with a laptop and cell phone at the beach for that matter--as at their desk in the office. However, for some would-be telecommuters, slow, dial-up computer modems can still be a limiting technological factor.

There are bottom-line benefits to telecommuting from the employer's point of view, he says, in that it is less expensive to provide office space for 10 employees than for 100, and early studies show that telecommuters' productivity tends to improve. So why haven't more companies adopted telecommuting? "It's still a difficult sell to management," Alge explains. "Telecommuting demands that management examine how the policies it institutes affect employees." For some workers, it obviously just won't work. "You can't have employees manufacture widgits on an assembly line at home." Telecommuting can work for knowledge workers since it may be the perfect arrangement for occupations such as computer programming, accounting, editing, and some clerical...