You may have heard that telecommuting is on the rise; then again, you may have heard that telecommuting is on the decline.  Does it depend on who’s talking? 

There’s no doubt that we live in a time when the possibility of working from home is more fact than fantasy; besides the ready availability of high-speed internet connections in residential communities, we now also have a growing number of affordable, flexible collaboration tools and services that have been specifically developed to ease the communication barriers between remote workers and their employers.  And as the cost of personal computing and office equipment goes down, home-based work spaces can even begin to rival the traditional corporate office in state-of-the-art trappings – the home office being capable of becoming rapidly equipped with high-grade servers, printers, faxes, and copy machines, as well as luxurious chairs, spacious desks, and “executive style” desk accessories.
    
But who telecommutes?  Again, we understand that almost any office worker could.  However despite this fact, surveys show that most regular telecommuters (as much as 80%) are not just any office worker – in fact, most regular telecommuters are employed in managerial, professional, or sales-related occupations. 

 

And while those distinctions are barely that – for example, “professional”-type occupations could describe anything from a system administrator to a lawyer, or from a writer to an accountant – we can find substantive value from the survey data by first using it to describe what telecommuters are not.  

Telecommuters are usually not assistants or receptionists; they are not clerks, messengers, or interns.  This being the case, we can safely assert that telecommuters are those that create or manage work and workflow rather than those that follow routine tasks and execute delegated procedures. Telecommuters are (for the most part) the essential “knowledge workers” in any industry.

Knowledge workers – those whose job functions lean heavily toward the management of various types of information – have recently been credited in the media and in business circles with a certain badge of distinction as we settle into the new century and its special interest in competing with global services markets.  Formerly, the concept of a knowledge worker included only those decidedly public-domain professions of librarian, educator, and perhaps historian.  Most recently, the definition has been expanded to include our modern definition of expert business professionals: extremely knowledgeable in their field, and capable of organizing and disseminating large amounts of information.  These “new” knowledge professionals are the telecommuting workforce now and into the future.  They are marketing managers, software developers, security analysts, program directors.   Creators of original content and producers of new ideas, they can and do work non-standard hours and produce on-demand material independently and unsupervised; and knowledge workers often offer unique combinations of expert skill sets to employers.

Whether or not you hear that telecommuting is a growing phenomenon may in fact depend on who’s talking.  And whom they are talking about.