Technology Is Blurrinq Lines Between Home and Work - Brief Article

HR Magazine, Dec, 1999 by Bill Leonard

The virtual office never closes. And that's good news and bad news for workers and employers alike.

The good news is that technology is giving employees flexibility and the ability to spend more time at home. The home office is becoming more commonplace, and a recent report showed that in nearly 30 percent of all U.S. households someone reported that they had worked at home in some capacity during the past year--by telecommuting, bringing work home or operating a home-based business. According to the latest statistics from the Labor Department, half of all homes in the United States have a personal computer.

While many workers now have unprecedented flexibility in when and where they can work, the proliferation of home offices presents several huge challenges to employers--and consequently to human resource professionals. First, businesses will have to find new ways to define and measure productivity. Home offices also raise questions of who owns, maintains and pays for equipment such as laptops, beepers, fax machines and cellular phones.

The biggest challenge created by home offices, however, may be the increased worker stress from overwork. "The virtual office never closes, opening the potential for abuse if employers require homework above the normal working hours. We need to make sure that workers use technology--not the other way around," reads the Labor Department's report, Futurework: Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century.

"Devices like beepers and e-mail can make it difficult to escape work and even harder to catch up with missed work," says Deborah Parkinson, research associate for The Conference Board's HR/Organizational Division and author of another report, Work-Family Roundtable: Technology's Effect on Work/Life Balance.

Copies of the Labor Department report are available online at www.dol.gov/dol/asp/public/ futurework. Information on The Conference Board study is available online at www.conference-board.org or by calling (212) 759-0900.