Organization Intervention Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Organization Intervention - Essay Example Some researchers contend employees who are spending more hours working have less time for family responsibilities, leisure activities or personal development (Rochon, 2000). It is therefore reasonable to assume these long hours of work would have a direct impact on employee’s work/life balance. Intervention Corporate America has seen a dramatic shift in work dynamics over recent years. Days of traditional 9-5 work done from within a corporate office building are evanescing and being replaced by the virtual office, a phenomenon known as telecommuting. Today more than ever before, workers are using portable electronic tools to carry out work away from a conventional office setting, often without leaving the home. In order to maximize the outcome of this new era, organizations will need to stay abreast to this shift, and will need to be to understand and grasp its intricacies. Telecommuting is one solution that can be used by Eddie Bauer Inc. to improve effectiveness and efficien cy in the workplace. Previous research has proven it difficult to delineate a universally agreed upon and comprehensive definition of telecommuting. This is likely a result of the wide variety of tasks that can now be carried out remotely and the sheer number of ways in which accomplishment of these tasks can be achieved (Harpaz, 2002). Some have defined telecommuting as "whenever an employee is paid for work done at an alternative worksite and total commuting time is thereby reduced" (Gibson, Blackwell, Dominicis, & Demerath, 2002, p. 76). Others consider telecommuting to be working wherever is needed to in order to satisfy client needs (Gibson et al., 2002), and still there are other definitions of telecommuting incorporating self-employed, formal or informal agreements, and percentage of time spent working at alternative worksites. While many operationalizations of telecommuting have been presented, emphasis on the utilization of electronic communications from home or another loc ation as the primary channel of contact between the paid work carried out and the employing organization, its members, and customers has been a consistent feature noted across literature to date (Gainey, Kelley, & Hill, 1999). This paper defines telecommuting as working from home on a regular basis and does not include supplemental or additional work taken home at night (Virick, 2002). Review of Intervention The first telecommuter on record was a Boston bank president who, in 1877, installed a phone line between his bank and home. Although telework was foreseen as a viable organizational possibility as early as 1950 (Hill et al., 1998), telecommuting itself was not formally introduced until the 1970's when companies considered telework a method of protection from fuel shortages during the OPEC oil crisis (Hill et al., 1998). Since its advent, interest in telework as an alternative to the traditional office setting for organizations has continued to grow (Siha & Monroe, 2006). Accomp anying this interest has been a dramatic increase in the number of American teleworkers (Hill et al., 1998). Though an exact number of telecommuters has been difficult to quantify due to the lack of a universal definition, research estimated that the number of teleworkers increased more than tenfold in a decade to roughly 22% of the American workforce in 2001 (Gibson et al., 2