von brankospejs / Adobe Stock / Rick Carlson / Jack Nilles / Telecommuting – An Alternative to Urban Transportation Congestion / Thought Catalogue / Unsplash / Big Think
Key Takeaways
- The pandemic accelerated the widespread acceptance of remote work — but former NASA consultant Jack Nilles first proposed the idea of “telework” in the early 1970s.
- With the original goal of relieving traffic congestion, Nilles gauged telework’s effectiveness with a series of studies.
- Nilles and his team discovered that remote workers’ productivity increased by 10 to 20%.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is credited with accelerating the widespread acceptance of remote work, with proponents citing benefits like increased flexibility, greater employee satisfaction, and cost savings. But when Jack Nilles first proposed the idea of “telework” in the early 1970s, the University of Southern California researcher had another goal in mind: reducing traffic congestion.
It was a phenomenon that Nilles, a U.S. Air Force veteran turned NASA consultant, dubbed the “telecommunications-transportation tradeoff.” Viewing remote work as a potential substitute for commuting, Nilles sought to gauge telework’s effectiveness by partnering with a major national insurance company (whose name he still can’t divulge for legal reasons). A group of employees worked from local centers equipped with “minicomputers” that transferred data to the company’s mainframe. In the 1974 pilot study, Nilles concluded that this approach resulted in higher productivity and reduced turnover. If widely applied, he later wrote, telework could have a “significant impact on transportation costs and design.”
But remote work didn’t fully catch on for decades. Now, 26% of full-time, remote-capable U.S. employees telecommute, while 52% operate in a hybrid environment, according to the latest Gallup data. Yet views may be shifting again as the federal government and major corporations like Starbucks, Dell and Microsoft abandon work-from-home all together.
More than five decades after the first documented study on telecommuting, Big Think spoke with Nilles, the “father of telework,” about its past, present and future.
Big Think: You started your career in the U.S. Air Force and then worked in the aerospace industry. What inspired you to begin studying the environmental benefits of remote work?
Jack Nilles: The job sort of got boring, so I decided to look around and see where else in the Earth-bound world we might apply some of the space technology we’ve developed. As part of this search, I came across an urban planner in Santa Barbara, California, who said, “If people can put man on the moon…why can’t you do something about traffic?” That was a eureka moment for me. I said, “We’ve got the technology, but nobody is doing anything about traffic, other than complaining.”
So I proposed a research study to my employer [The Aerospace Corporation], where I was Secretary of the Corporate Planning Committee. They asked what would be involved, and I told them they’d need lawyers and sociologists and psychologists. Their answer was, forget about it. I changed careers entirely from inventing spacecraft to inventing a different kind of future.
I left for the University of Southern California [in 1972]. I invented a title for myself, the Director of Interdisciplinary Program Development, and worked with the different siloes and schools under a grant from the National Science Foundation. We began our research on what we called “the development of policy on the telecommunications-transportation tradeoff.” But we knew we’d have to conduct the study not with graduate students but with an actual corporation.
Big Think: How did you conduct the study and what did you learn?
Jack Nilles: We partnered with an insurance company — the name of which I’m still not allowed to divulge. Their problem was, they had a fairly large clerical staff and their turnover rate was roughly 33% annually. One of the prime reasons was that employees lived elsewhere from where the company was based in the San Fernando Valley. There was an implicit penalty for the stress and strain of getting a ride to work, driving or using mass transit, and the company had to pay its staff higher salaries. Even so, people got tired of the commute and left.
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We started our project in 1973, when I coined the words “telecommuting” and “telework,” which was easier for people to understand than “the telecommunications-transportation tradeoff.” And it was a success. Several months later, their turnover rate went to zero and productivity went up about 15%, in their terms. We calculated that, if they applied this to the rest of the company, they could probably save $3-4 million a year in reduced costs.
Big Think: How was the study received? Did you face backlash or criticism?
Jack Nilles: The insurance company said they liked [remote work], but [were] not going to do it. They said they were a non-union company, and if their employees were spread out in so many locations, the unions could organize them more easily. Some months later, I was at a conference that included a strategic planner for the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations]. I was explaining telecommuting to him and our experiment. He said it was a terrible idea — if a company has their employees scattered all over the city, how will we ever get them organized? For totally opposite reasons, it was discarded by both sides.
Big Think: When did people start becoming more open to the idea of remote work?
Jack Nilles: In the early 1980s, we started a project with several Fortune 100 companies. They liked it and decided to adopt it for many of their employees. Except for IBM and AT&T, I still can’t disclose their names — we couldn’t talk about it.
Telecommunications technology in 1973 was such that you could not set people up in their homes. Our fallback was to have them work at these [local] centers with minicomputers. When personal computers began appearing in the late 1970s, you suddenly had the potential of including your office work on your [home] computer. That didn’t start to become real until the mid-1980s. With the internet, communications became widely available, and then the problem became more about aligning with corporate culture. You could always find some way in which people could use existing technology to communicate effectively at a distance, at least some of the time, whether once a week or every day. Clearly, there was going to be some spectrum of possibilities.
We started our project in 1973, when I coined the words “telecommuting” and “telework,” which was easier for people to understand than “the telecommunications-transportation tradeoff.”
Then, somebody from the state of California, whose job was reducing the state’s need for real estate, came to me. Over the years, I devised a program with the state of California, starting around 1985, with several hundred state government employees, both in San Francisco and Sacramento. We developed a fairly intricate system of first defining the success criteria. We had to look at the legal issues involved. We trained managers on how to be managers when you can’t see your employees, and vice versa. The study was a success.
Big Think: How did you then develop your telework system?
Jack Nilles: Instead of plunging people into it, we developed work rules and procedures — who’s responsible for what; when and how you report. We never had a problem finding potential telecommuters. People love to be able to work at home — it was much harder to convince their employers that they were actually working. Time and time again, we discovered that remote workers’ productivity increased, even with one day a week, by 10 to 20%. We later partnered with the state of Arizona [and Washington and the city of Los Angeles]. Remote work was slowly and steadily growing around the world. In the 1990s, I did a lot of work in Europe, which was even more complicated.
The resistance is the same everywhere: managers who are scared to deal with people that they can’t see. It’s a universal phenomenon. But with experience and proper training, it works.
But the magic event that really made people understand how it all works was COVID. It wasn’t a choice — if you wanted to survive [as a company], you had to get employees out of the office. Overnight, we had a world full of instant telecommuters. Because most organizations basically had no experience with it, I thought there would be a lot of collapses. But the technology was good enough by 2020 that they could finally figure it out for themselves. The first month or two was traumatic for many people, but they made it. And sure enough, the employees loved it — so much that their CEOs are now telling them to return to the office.
Big Think: What about the downsides of remote work?
Jack Nilles: Loneliness is something we considered from the beginning. We work on this by making sure that remote employees are indeed communicating with other people — with the rest of the world and not just their employers. People have to be careful and be aware of it.
Our biggest issue is not people feeling left out as much as people working too hard and getting them to stop in the afternoons and evenings.
Big Think: Are environmental concerns still the mainstay of your argument in favor of work-from-home?
Jack Nilles: The environmental concerns were, of course, a major reason for doing the research. But selling to companies in the interest of making money means you have to look for other reasons — teleworkers are more productive, you can recruit them more easily and your other costs go down. The bottom line: impact. That being said, the environmental aspects are becoming more and more important with climate change.
Big Think: What do you think the future holds for remote work?
Jack Nilles: For small companies, it’s easy. For medium companies, it’s so-so. For many big companies, it’s a no, especially in the financial industries. This transition started as a result of COVID, and it will continue. We’re seeing the movement of people out of big cities into smaller towns. More people are coming into the office part time. It’s starting to feel like normal business, finally. This is actually faster than I expected acceptance to happen because of the mental inertia that it takes for people, especially once they reach management level, to change the way they look at the world.
I’m glad, of course, that it worked. But it gives me another set of worries that maybe it worked too well. We’ve got people who work remotely, and who knows what else they get into? But generally, I’m satisfied, especially 50 years since the first study. Today, it’s not just an American phenomenon — it quickly spread to the rest of the world. The resistance is the same everywhere: managers who are scared to deal with people that they can’t see. It’s a universal phenomenon. But with experience and proper training, it works. We’ve got millions of people doing it, instead of hundreds in the 1970s and ’80s. The future looks pretty ripe for it.
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