The Negative Effects of Telecommuting

Nowadays, technology is a big part of the life. Big companies, private businesses, universities and people in general use technology for communication and obtaining different kinds of information. People do not need to visit their offices five or six days a week since some companies allow workers to work in their houses. Moreover, almost every year telecommuting expands despite of risks appeared with using technology in everyday life. This paper will focus on negative effects of the growth of telecommuting as isolated insecure society that feels out of the loop, uncontrolled work of employees and compromised data security.

Being a part of public institution is important side of the life in the community that can be forgotten by teleworkers, because they are isolated from the rest of community. “Employees who work at home often feel that they are out of the loop of everything from office gossip to policy changes. Isolation causes feeling of insecurity” (Tan-Solano & Kliener, 2001, p. 124). Resulting from isolation is insecurity that can destroy productivity of company and team working. Moreover, some people can face problems of sabotage, while telecommuters are working at home, other workers in the office may influence on directors or on managers, which is unfair for the rest of employees. Mostly, nobody is insured from that kind of work situations. In the same way, people, who work at home, can notice that they do not have social life as they could have at work place. Keeping in touch with colleagues is important for productivity, because sometimes work demand fast contact with colleague for finding mistakes in documents or making clear some aspects of work. The importance of community has benefits as getting advises and feel that people need you. Campbell (2005) claims that more people give then more they achieve so much back. People own a lot of knowledge that can be useful for work and the work needs intercommunication face-to-face. The community endues people successfulness by involvement (Campbell, P., 2005, p.667).

Mostly telecommuters enjoy their opportunity of working at home, however, for supervisor it is difficult to control and check in the distance. Hanzak (2002) asserts that loyalty, recognition and responsibility can become ignored by teleworkers and the statement ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is the evidence of supervisors’ difficulty of controlling and recording the work of subservient employees. Also, the statement that was mentioned before, shows that mistakes or unfinished work have the possibility to be invisible for managers and employers. In other words, if managers do not see problems, it does not mean that the problems do not exist. According to statistics (Reaney, P., 2012) 65 percent of workers, all around the world, believe that telecommuting can make productivity because of availability to easily connect. However, 62 percent of employees claim that telecommuting brings social isolation and negatively influences on the progress. Considering the fact that even if managers know about the growth of telecommuting in the recent years they do not know what strategy to follow for supervising virtual workers. The only one thing can significantly alleviate supervising in a distance is ‘Trust’ (Schneider-Borowicz & Sharon M., 2003). Nevertheless, most managers understand that there is a huge risk of unfinished work that is expediently hidden by teleworkers. For using “Trust” strategy managers or employers need intelligently designate responsible telecommuters to increase productivity of company. Otherwise, telecommuting impinges on close supervising and hide mistakes of telecommuters.

The final disadvantage of telecommuting is data security, which is vulnerable to destroy or can be easily broken by compromised accounts of telecommuters. Usually, companies protect internal software, which has all information of organization’s activities, and for some interested people there is an opportunity to hack that database. Interested people are competitors, hackers who can make money from selling that information or hackers who just block that information and blackmail owners. Even most organization’s anti-virus is updated enough times, ransom ware can not be stopped by anti-viruses, because hackers do not put any viruses in software. They can monitor computer and change files or codes of files. The monitoring is possible, if any telecommuters would leave any long–time opened files, it is giving the opportunity to change password or other important files (ZulaZuza, 2013). Considering this possibility, telecommuting via different private computers can bring a huge risk of compromised database of organizations. “The potential problems this may create range from unauthorized people accidentally gaining privileged information to a deliberate interception of company data by competitors” (Robert, 1991, p.21). For some perspective, competition on the market makes people to pay for hackers to get information where telecommuting provides with a huge chance. In evidence “Ninety precent of U.S.A. organizations' computers had been breached at least once by hackers over the past 12 months” ( Vijayan, J., 2011). This statement mentions only U.S organization, however, there is a huge number of companies that using telecommuting all around the world and likelihood majority of this number were at the risk of compromised database security.

In conclusion, working in a distance is uncomfortable for the majority of workers since it brings unsociable life and insecurity for being far from the rest of company in case of sabotage in the office or other unexpected situations. Secondly, doubtfulness and unproductivity communication between managers and telecommuters since work is uncontrolled and inconspicuous. Lastly, technology, which is used by telecommuters, is distrust since viruses and hacks can compromise it. It is clear why some companies abandon telecommuting for workers and attempt to save files as privet as possible.