What are the barriers to successful teleworking/telecommuting?
It’s like the old real estate adage: location, location, location. The primary barriers to telecommuting or teleworking are management, management, management. I am often asked: “If telecommuting’s so great, why isn’t everyone doing it?” The most frequent reason is that their bosses don’t want them to do it. The reason that managers are loathe to adopt telecommuting is simple: it’s scary to be in the position of managing people you can’t see, if you depend on managing by walking around. So, the first step in starting telecommuting in an organization is to convince managementparticularly mid-level managersthat telecommuting is in their best interests as well as those of the telecommuters. My most recent book, Managing Telework, goes into the gory details of how to do this. Secondly, telecommuting isn’t just something you decide to do one day and start doing the next. Successful telecommuting requires some careful planning, some attention to technology, to liability and other legal issue
