Fifty years of telecommuting: An interview with Jack Nilles

Even in the pre-internet days it wasn't technology that stood in the way of telecommuting, but office politics.

Remote working brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic will remain part of our working patterns, according to multiple market analyses. That will come as welcome and overdue news to Jack Nilles, known as the Father of Telecommuting.

Born 1932 in Evanston, Illinois, USA, Jack has spent the latter 50 of his 90 years studying and evangelising telecommuting, without previously achieving what Covid is now predicted to do. Jack told Tom Abram, director of Archives of IT, about his experience in an interview in June 2022.

Jack invented the term 'telecommuting' to describe the employee perspective whilst directing a study of teleworking (the employer perspective) in a West Coast insurance company nearly 50 years ago, in 1973. Jack had studied Physics and Electronic Engineering at university and worked in the US Air Force and Defence industries, specialising in the early military applications of space technology. However, driven by the frustration of his own wasted hours of travel and an intellectual fascination with multi-disciplinary studies, he found his way into academia at the University of Southern California. It was there that Jack proposed the study of technical, human and business aspects of remote working.

The experiment moved operations out of a central HQ to dispersed local hub offices which employees could reach easily without driving. The thesis was that there was a "telecommunications-transportation tradeoff" that would not only get cars off the road by reducing employee travel, but save money.

One might have expected comms and computing technology to be a barrier to spreading heavily paper-based operations across multiple campuses, without the internet, scanning, mobile telephony, video calls and so on that we now rely on. However, even with 1970s technology, the project was a success. "…Staff turnover rate went from one-third to zero; productivity rose by 15%; office space costs were reduced. We estimated that they would save four to five million dollars a year in either savings or direct benefits in terms of improved productivity if they kept doing this."

The practice did not get adopted, though. It was not technology but management and union politics that were the blockers: the big fear was that unions would step in and unionise the workplaces in the suburbs of Los Angeles. You can read a full description of the research programme in Jack's book, The Telecommunications-Transport Tradeoff: Options for Tomorrow.

This was not the only trial of telecommuting or teleworking between 1973 and 2020. Studying, advising on and promoting telecommuting became a big part of Jack's life through JALA, the organisation he and his late wife Laila ran. Jack's website provides access to a huge body of knowledge about the diverse issues of remote and home working, based on telecommuting projects with many organisations.

Large scale and long term adoption has been elusive, though. There were occasions when the practice was adopted, but in most cases temporarily. There was the great oil crisis in 1973, when petrol was just not available; it wasn't a question of 'Is it too expensive?' - you just couldn't get any. The 1989 earthquake in California made driving tricky for a while, so telecommuting came in useful then. As Jack says, "So that got people's attention finally, and I tried to make people aware of this, but it still was very difficult to convince the CEO of a big corporation that he or she (at that time it was mostly he) didn't need all these people in the office every day so he could keep an eye on them. That was the big impediment from then on until Covid."

Jack believes that history to-date shows that after a disaster such as a pandemic, or an earthquake, when people have had to work from home, there has been a trickle back effect. He adds: "I've been through a couple of those, and you get immediate telecommuting right after the disaster and then when the roads get fixed you get back to work again."

Maybe the ONS suggests that this time the trickle is stemmed, and the change is permanent? Jack would certainly be delighted to feel that the case is proven - at last!

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