Why isn’t teleworking more widespread yet?

Despite  growing numbers of remote access options and improving technology and Internet connections, employers are still hesitant to allow employees to work from home.  Well, more accurately, it is fine if they work from home when they get home from work in the evening or during weekends, but it is still tricky to convince the boss to allow you to work from home instead of coming to the office.  The idea that employees need to be in the office to be productive is so deeply ingrained in most business cultures that it is extremely hard for most managers to believe a person will actually be productive when no one is around to monitor them.

Of course, in reality, it won’t be too hard to tell if someone is actually working from home or just sleeping all day.  In the end, for most businesses it is the results that matter.  If the person is not delivering results when working at home, or in the office, they probably won’t be kept around for long.

There are many industries and jobs where everybody needs to be in the office and teleworking is not a viable option.  But many jobs can be done just as effectively from a home computer as they can from an office computer.  It will be interesting to see if the culture changes as people who grew up with remote access technologies move in to managerial positions.