1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Scope and Motivation
This report investigates the preference to telecommute from home and from a
telecommuting center. Telecommuting can be defined as the practice of working from
home, or a location close to home, instead of traveling to work during the normal work
day. Often, telecommuting involves the use of technology such as computers and
advanced telecommunications equipment to maintain contact with the regular workplace
(Mokhtarian 1991). The most frequent form of telecommuting practiced today is
telecommuting from home. Unfortunately, working from home may disrupt the
employee's household. Instead, an employee may prefer to work from a fully-equipped
office in the neighborhood, otherwise known as a telecommuting center, or telecenter
(Bagley, et al. 1994). Thus, the employee now may prefer to work at the regular
workplace, at home, or at the telecenter.
Given that these work location options are available to the employee, which option
is s/he likely to prefer? The research described in this paper was conducted to answer this
question. A model of work location preference was developed using information on
attitudes about each work location, commute characteristics, and sociodemographic
information. Such models can be used to predict the work location preference of
employees. These models will be useful in forecasting the adoption of telecommuting
(and, hence, its effectiveness as a transportation demand management strategy). Also, the
models may have implications for the design of more efficient and comfortable working
locations.
1.2 RABO Project
The data used in this study come from employees participating in the Residential
Area-Based Office (RABO) Project, which "is designed to evaluate the value of residential
area-based telecommuting centers as a transportation demand management strategy"
(Bagley, et al. 1994). The Federal Highway Administration and the California
Department of Transportation (Caltrans) have funded the project from 1992 through 1997.
Caltrans has contracted with the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of
California, Davis to develop and evaluate twelve telecommuting centers in California and
to monitor the performance of all telecenters operated in the state (Bagley, et al. 1994).
As of July 1995, evaluation data have been collected from the twelve RABO sites and
from three unaffiliated telecenters (several other unaffiliated centers are only being
informally monitored). The evaluation of the project includes an analysis of the patterns
of telecenter use, transportation impacts, and user attitudes and attributes. The primary
instruments for evaluating these areas are a sign-in log, a travel diary, and an attitudinal
survey, respectively. Because preference models use attitudes about work locations as
explanatory variables (see section 1.3 below), the attitudinal survey will be discussed
further.
The attitudinal survey was designed to measure sociodemographic attributes, work
characteristics, attitudes, and perceptions of telecommuting arrangements in the workplace.
There are three dimensions to the survey process. First, all participants were surveyed
before and after the center-based telecommuters began using the telecenters. Secondly,
both employees and their managers were surveyed. Finally, besides the telecenter users,
two control groups were surveyed: home-based telecommuters and non-telecommuters.
All twelve versions of the attitudinal survey have similar questions even though each
version is tailored to that specific group. The data from the before surveys completed by
the three employee groups are used in this report to build models of work location
preference.
1.3 Outline
The process used in this paper to develop preference models is described by
Koppelman and Pas (1980). First, a survey was designed to capture attitudes, perceptions,
and / or feelings about work locations (see Appendix A). Other information on
respondent attributes and work preferences are also collected. After the data are cleaned
and consolidated, the attitudinal questions are factor analyzed to reduce the number of
questions to a smaller set of underlying dimensions. This smaller set of factors is more
likely to be a basis for individual decision-making than the large number of inter-related
attributes. Using both attributes and factor scores, logit models are employed to predict
the preference to work from home and to work from a telecommuting center.
This report has seven sections. Following the introduction, current literature about
telecommuting and telecommuting centers is reviewed. Next, the results of the attitudinal
surveys are described. The fourth section discusses the factor analysis of job satisfaction
and work location questions. Then, the logit models of preference are described and
discussed with relation to theories about telecommuting preference. The conclusion
summarizes the results of this research and suggests areas for future study. A
bibliography and technical appendices are included.
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