The idea of progress : to what extend is telecommuting a good alternative to traditional office work

THE NOTION OF PROGRESS

First, I am going to define the notion of idea of progress. We can say that progress is a forward movement, an advance or a development. It can also be defined as a graduam betterment, especially : the progressive development of humankind. Plus, progress is the idea that the world and the society can evolve positively in therms of sciences, technology, modernization, living condition, which contributes to making the world a better place in general. To illustrate this, I am going to focus on telecommuting, which is an important progress for a lot of employees, through what we studied in class. Telecommuting is a modern trend which consists on working from home or from others places except workplaces, with computers and internet. We may ask ourselve to what extend is telecommuting a good alternative to tradaitional office work ? In a first part, we will see the advantaged of telecommuting and then in a second part, we will see the drawbacks of it.

I-Advantages (audio « a virtual company », «  I got nothing done today »

The telecommuting is a trend that more and more companies use like Laura Schoppe’s company, Fuentek. Founded in 2001, this virtual company which commercialized new technology is today a multi-million dollar company. According to Laura Shoppe, telecommuting was the better choice for her and all her 40 employees because they are more productive and welling to get the job done, Laura gets better loyalty too and she does not have to invest in offices. This company is home-based, but it shows that we can excel without working in an office, and that telecommuting idea is a very serious way to work. to reduce travel costs. It also permits to offer better services to the custumers.Telecommuters benefit from flexibility of time and location. It means that they can organize their schedule plan as they want and have flexibility to have their own lives and spend times with their family. Plus, they can work remotely where they want too. Due to that they can avoid, if they want it, traffic jams, and stress which is caused by the long trek.

Morever, working in an office is quiet difficult as we saw in the document “I got nothing done today”. Indeed the employees are all the time disturbed by phone calls, colleagues, meetings. They don’t progress in their job and so they are less productive. They were at work, they did some tasks but they didn’t actually get meaningful work done which can be frustrating. Reason why some people telecommute, because they need long stretches uninterrupted time.

II-Drawbacks ( audio about telecommuting with Thelma, David and Christopher, Video « flexjob »)

Despite the increasing trend of telecommuting, there are still some people reluctant to do it because there are some drawbacks. As we saw, David, who go