Paperless Telecommuting

Paperless Telecommuting

Much has been said and written about telecommuting in the past decades, and the number of people who work from home has increased dramatically, and will continue to increase, because of the trends outlined earlier. A telecommuter replaces his/her daily commute to the workplace with electronic communication, through the phone and Internet. While many telecommuters have dedicated home offices from which they perform work tasks, some telecommuters, called nomad workers, perform work tasks from any number of locations such as cafés, bookstores and libraries.

While telecommuting has been promoted by many organizations and enterprises, it is also associated with some disadvantages, both for the employer and the employee. To some degree, these criticisms have hampered the implementation of telecommuting programs. But these points of disadvantage, in many cases, can be resolved through paperless practices with Information & Communication Technology ICT devices and software. Going paperless will facilitate many aspects of telecommuting, and I will address some of these here.

Telecommuters often find themselves isolated, because they lack face-to-face interaction with colleagues, supervisors and clients. And this dearth of personal interactions with colleagues can even lead to a lack of loyalty toward employers and colleagues.

When telecommuting is done in a paper-based fashion, the telecommuter still ends up confined to a location, with limited mobility and complicated practices regarding the access, distribution and sharing of documents and work files. A paperless workstyle that enables total mobility of the office, however, will allow workers to more easily arrange and engage in personal, face-to-face interactions with others. A paperless workstyle can deliver telecommuters from the boundaries of their home office, and allow for the occasional nomadic workstyle that will bring them into contact with colleagues or simply other people, instead of being isolated at their homes. A paperless office can also enable the telecommuter to occasionally use the employer's leased or rented office facilities to interact in a more direct way with colleagues and supervisors.

To develop and maintain friendships with colleagues and supervisors while telecommuting, an employee or employer can ritualize routines in which co-workers engage in daily chat sessions, or have their cyber-coffee together at specific pre-arranged times. Another bonding mechanism might be for colleagues to interact in a more informal manner by playing stimulating games with each other through the Internet.

One of the reasons that face-to-face communication is so important is that a large proportion of communications taking place between two or more individuals is conveyed by nonverbal means such as body language, facial expressions, eye contact and tone of voice. The information conveyed through these types of communication will obviously become compromised through a phone, or even a regular webcam.

Virtual teams, also called Geographically Dispersed Teams (GDT), consist of people who work together across time, space and even organizational boundaries, through ICT. A member of a virtual team is not necessarily synonymous with a teleworker, though, for a couple of reasons: (1) that team member may not exclusively work from home, and (2) virtual teams frequently consist of employees who work both from home but also in smaller groups in offices at different geographic locations. Virtual teams enable hiring and retainment of talent regardless of location. It is obvious how paperless work practices can greatly facilitate the operations of dispersed, or virtual, work teams. Because they rely on electronic communication, they can greatly benefit from paperless practices in document sharing and mobility. A good source to learn more about how to enjoy the advantages of a paperless work-style is the book by George Dimopoulos, Paperless Joy.

Those who introduce paperless practices in their daily work routines will be able to enjoy many advantages. I am specifically addressing paperlessness from the telecommuting perspective in this article, that will be beneficial at the individual, organizational, corporate, societal and global level.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/George_Dimopoulos/1174844

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6524337

~ (By George Dimopoulos).