Renie's summary,response,and conculsion.

Topic: Telecommuting makes work better

Summary: Telecommuting seems perfect, but when you work from home, you’re separate from not the worst parts of work (no disgusting bus, no dash to work, no one to supervise you), but also the best parts, associated with the problems, feeling of isolation and low self-discipline for the staff, diminished productivity, business information exposure for the company.

Isolation is the number one disadvantage, because e-workers don’t have colleagues to share professional ideas, to cooperate with each other. In the long run, lack of involvement in the team, isolation will take place, and also they will lose the moral, motivation, and inspiration which will lead to low productivity.

When e-workers work from home, they may easily disturbed by the surroundings, either because of the distraction from the family or their own ability to focus on duty which will give rise to low self-discipline. In addition, telecommuters’ every connection to data base may threaten the network security of the company.

In brief, when people benefit from telecommuting, at the same time, it brings about potential damage to individual, company, and the culture of which will be damaged.

Reference: Katherine Lewis, What are the disadvantages of telecommuting?


Response: I don’t entirely agree with above mentioned points, to begin with, when a company want to carry out telecommuting and to ensure employees working from home successfully, they should at least be aware of these disadvantages. In the second place, isolation could be a problem, but it can cultivate their ability to work independently, and if everyone fulfills his own task, the productivity actually will be improved. Company can make a schedule how often need e-workers to have business meetings, lunches, or even sports competitions to enhance company’s cohesive force.As for the distraction, before company put this in to practice, they would pay great attention in deciding which employees are suitable for this task, it is obvious that those in the list absolutely have strong responsibility, self-discipline, and well-organized ability, besides these, company would also have such kind program to train employees how to keep business secrets, moreover, it’ doubtless that company keep updating its own data protection system regularly to guarantee business security even without telecommuting, and this problem now can controlled by telecomputer which has no memory function, can check work attendance, and keep data secrecy.


Conclusion: In conclusion, at present society, there is an increasing number of employees who hope for a better work condition, meanwhile, can help them to save time, fees, and can improve life quality and work productivity. Telecommuting can achieve those objectives, however, along with its drawbacks. Company actually can layout a rang of measures to minimise the impact and maximise the benefits for staff and company, as well as the society in term of transportation, resources, and air quality, now this kind of economical working model plays a crucial role in some companies and society which are affected by financial crisis.

In western countries, over 40% corporations including P&G, Xerox, HP, adopted telecommuting, in Japan, Hitachi, Fujifilm, Mitsubishi also reform their working systems to varying degrees, and in developing counties, there are spring out many companies that put telecommuting into practice on a trial basis, consequently, telecommuting will become a trend of working in the near future.