Telecommuting
Bargaining with the Baby:
Boundary Management Dilemmas for Teleworkers
By: Ellen Ernst Kossek, School of Labor & Industrial Relations, Michigan State University
Co Authors: Susan Eaton, Harvard University; Brenda Lautsch, Simon Fraser University
“As for my personal telecommuting style, I dispense with the pajamas and bunny slippers, opting instead to work naked for the first hour of phone calling and e-mailing, then shower. Do I miss nylon stocking and the rush-rush of the office? NO! Do I feel better about my performance? Absolutely! Do I think having the freedom to work where, when and how you choose might work for others? Definitely! Change is always an opportunity for learning.” Excerpt from Work Naked (p. 4: 2001).
Myth: The home is a benign place to work and enables workers to “have it all-“ excel at both work and family. Work is portable to home without any downside.
Reality: For many employees, moving the workplace to the home can hurt an employee’s home life and create new social dilemmas, especially if workload is not reduced and space and technological infrastructure inadequate.
The number of workers using flextime and flexplace is growing (Galinsky & Bond, 1998). The preceding quotation suggests a prevalent theme in the current management literature: teleworking at home has mostly positive outcomes for the worker and work is portable to the home without many downsides. Home-based telework typically offers flexibility in the timing (flextime) and location of work (flexplace); two characteristics that are repeatedly seen as a way to achieve balance in work and family life (e.g., Christensen & Staines, 1990: Hill, Hawkins,Ferris, Weitzman, 2001).
Having control over when and where work is done, also can help employees jointly manage long work hours with the unpredictable demands of dependent care (Barnett, 1994). Besides increased ability to balance work and home, another benefit suggested by Perin (1998: 52) is that by teleworking, an individual can “count on uninterrupted stretches of time for ‘real work’ of writing plans, reports, suggestions, recommendations …and for the contemplation, deep reading and ‘incubation time’ the quality of one’s work depends upon.”
Taking an approach that challenges the myth that telework necessarily enables work-family balance, this presentation will use learnings derived from a multi-year research project I have directed as a co-Principal investigator with researchers at Harvard University and Simon Fraser University. We have developed a dataset based on interviews with several hundred employees (including a control group), and follow-up interviews with several hundred of their managers at organizations on the leading edge of managing flexible/virtual work. I will challenge the prevalent hype around flexibility and the virtual workplace. The management literature has oversimplified the benefits of making jobs flexible and virtual, which we label “ portable work.”
A main issue addressed is: “Sure- growing numbers of more employees and employers have flexibility in when, where, and how work is done, but what did they trade off?” What other problems and conflicts did the workplace of the 2lst century create and what myths of flexibility need to be debunked or at least examined? For example for some jobs, flexibility means an employee is available to workers 24 hour-7days a week! In the long run, is this really good for employers, individuals, and their families? Our data suggest that for many employees, moving the workplace to the home can hurt an employee’s home life and create new social dilemmas, especially if workload is not reduced, space and technological infrastructure inadequate, and the family has little understanding of these roles. For example, one key subtheme we are finding is that teleworking changes family and friend’s expectations. Here are some sample quotes from early analysis of interviews to support this theme.
Key Theme: Teleworking Changes Family and Friends’ Expectations
- “They think you’re available, and people tend to think you’re not really working.”
- “They expect that I’m available at home. When I’m not, it annoys them.”
- “My wife is always looking for me to do other things besides work.”
- “My husband goes out of his way to stay with the schedule. The children have a harder time understanding, though.”
- “My children call from school more often than when I am at work. My family expects that I can do things like running errands at lunch.”
- “They think I won’t get as much done, my co-workers. My children think I’m available when I’m at home.”
- “My friends will want me to do lunch with them. My kids are more demanding when I’m at home.”
- “My kids and even my wife don’t understand that my focus is on work.”
- “They think I’m not working. It’s very annoying. That happened more in the beginning.”
- “Yes, it’s hard for them to understand that I’m working for my office and not available.”
A recent telework review (Kellogg, 2001) notes that negotiating boundaries and understanding issues of time and space is an increasingly important issue in the modern organizational and family environment. A theory article by Kossek, Noe, & DeMarr (1999) referred to this issue as one of work-family role synthesis: the strategies an individual uses to manage the enactment of work and family roles. It involves decision-making choices governing boundary management and role embracement of multiple roles.
Some employees are integrators, preferring to mix boundary roles through out the day; while others are segmenters, preferring to separate roles (Kossek, et al., 1999; Nippert-Eng (1996). Despite these theory papers, very little empirical investigation has been done on how teleworkers actually enact boundary, time and space negotiation. More study is also needed on how boundary management relates to the activities of family members, how it affects one’s work practices, and how it shapes personal and organizational outcomes (Kellogg, 2001). Specifically, I will describe different types of teleworkers’ boundary management strategies and how we measured them.
Besides discussing the changing family expectations noted above, I will also discuss variation in family demands, caregiving strategies, and family climate for balancing work and family (cf Kossek, Colquit, & Noe, 2001), and links to personal and organizational outcomes. My data analysis is suggesting that ironically, the benefits expected from portable work, like having more time with one’s children and an easier time meeting family demands may actually be elusive. The benefits of flexibility may actually be only symbolic. For example, children and elders may become confused as they “see mom and dad as physically available,” but become annoyed when not mentally available. Neighbors may call on the phone and become perplexed when the employee is unavailable. Issues over space and who get to use the home computer are also raised. Barking dogs and crying babies and other distractions may create problems when clients call a home number. My presentation will close with suggestions for future research to follow-up on the issues raised.
References:
Barnett, R. C. (1994). Home-to-work spillover revisited: A study of full-time employed women in dual-earner couples. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 56, 647-656.
Bond, J. T., Galinsky, E., & Swanberg, J. E. (1998). The 1997 national
study of the changing workforce. New York: Families and Work Institute.
Christensen, K. E., & Staines, G. L. 1990. Flextime: A viable solution to work-family conflict? Journal of Family Issues, 11, 455-476.
Froggatt, C. 2001. Work Naked. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Hill, J., Hawkins, A., Ferris, M., Weitzman, M. 2001. Finding an extra day a week: The positive influence of perceived job flexibility on work and family life balance, Family Relations, 50: 49-50.
Kellogg, K. 2001. From telecommuting to telework: Looking back in order to look ahead. Doctoral paper for graduate course credit. Cambridge., Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kossek, Ellen Ernst, Noe, Ray, & Colquitt, Jason. 2001. Caregiving decisions, Well-being and Performance: The Effects of Place and Provider as a Function of Dependent Type and Work-Family Climates, Academy of Management Journal. , 44 (1): 29-44.
Kossek, E., Noe, R., DeMarr, B. 1999. Work-family role synthesis: Individual and organizational determinants. International Journal of Conflict Management. 10(2): 102-129.
Nippert-Eng, C. 1996. Home and work: Negotiating boundaries through everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Perin, C. (1998). Work, space and time on the threshold of a new century. Teleworking: International Perspectives. P. J. Jackson and J. M. van der Wielen. London, Routledge.
Permission Granted from Prof. Ellen Kossek
|
