Telecommuting Best Practices Prior and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Telecommuting, a work practice where work tasks are conducted away from a central office, was introduced in mid-1970's. While the telecommuting practices were steadily rising during the succeeding decades, they were not brought to prominence till recently. The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns all around the world put many companies and employees in a position to implement work-from-home (WFH) practices, where most of the actors where not completely prepared. The experiences from these "forced" experiments range from completely positive to highly negative. Emerging studies suggest that the positive experiences motivate the companies and individuals to practice telecommuting even after the pandemic ends. In this paper we examine evidenced positive and negative aspects of telecommuting prior and during the pandemic in order to develop a list of best practices that could help companies and employees get the most out of the WFH as long as the pandemic lasts and after it ends. The areas of concern important for telecommuting we observe, include but are not limited to technology use, personal traits, working schedule, workspace, communication and management issues, work-life balance, socialization and wellbeing etc. The 7 best practices we pinpoint in our research address issues in one or more of the telecommuting areas of concern.

Planning scenarios for improving the performance of education personnel after COVID-19 at XYZ University

“…The Government of Indonesia through the DKI Jakarta Provincial Manpower, Transmigration, and Energy Office has issued a Circular Letter of the DKI Jakarta Provincial Manpower, Transmigration and Energy Office Number 14/SE/2020 of 2020 concerning Work at Home Appeals (Work From Home) ("SE Disnakertrans dan Energi DKI Jakarta 14/2020") which follows up on the Instruction of the Governor of DKI Jakarta Province Number 16 of 2020 concerning Increasing Awareness of the Risk of Infection Transmission Corona Virus Disease . The WFH scheme is part of the concept telecommuting (remote working) (Allen et al, 2015;Bezovski, 2021;de Klerk et al, 2021;Mendrika et al, 2021;Pillai & Prasad, 2023), which is actually not new in the world of work and urban planning, this concept has been known since the 1970s as one of the efforts to overcome traffic congestion from daily commuting home-office (Hamlin & Heathfield, 1991). However, it is undeniable that the concept of working from home is still unfamiliar to most people or workers, especially in Indonesia (Irawanto et al, 2021;Pranata et al, 2022;Sitorus et al, 2023;Subari & Sawitri, 2022;Yamin et al, 2021), because before the pandemic, the normal condition of working people was the routine of going to the office to carry out work activities in a uniform environment (Beck & Hensher, 2020;Frankeberger et al, 2022;Lipták & Musinszki, 2022;Mantesi et al, 2022;Reineholm et al, 2023).…”

Normative telecommuting: the effects of group composition and task interdependence on telecommuter and non-telecommuter performance

“…Despite the shift away from telecommuting in the period around 2010 as a few high-profile firms like Yahoo! and Best Buy reversed their positions on telecommuting and moved away from the practice, telecommuting was estimated to be used by 43% of the US workforce at least some of the time by 2016 (Bezovski et al, 2021). The proportion of US employees who worked from home was estimated to be 5.8% in 2019 (Appold, 2021).…”