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Communication Technology and Inclusion Will Shape the Future of Remote Work

In the past, remote employees have had a bad reputation. Many employers believed their workforce would be too easily distracted at home, where their managers couldn't keep an eye on their direct reports. Remote work was very rare a decade ago. Working from home was usually only available as a special arrangement to accommodate families in specific cases. However, teleconferencing and telework technology have advanced to the point where some businesses thrive with completely remote teams. In fact, it's not uncommon for businesses to allow their employees to work from home once or twice a week. Remote work can also help prevent the spread of illness, helping companies avoid lost productivity and protecting public health. For example,  the outbreak of COVID-19  prompted many employers to shift to a remote work model for all employees possible in a bid to limit the spread of the coronavirus. To determine the effectiveness of communication technology and working remotely, we'll
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Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed

In the nineteen-sixties, Jack Nilles, a physicist turned engineer, built long-range communications systems at the U.S. Air Force’s Aerial Reconnaissance Laboratory, near Dayton, Ohio. Later, at  nasa , in Houston, he helped design space probes that could send messages back to Earth. In the early nineteen-seventies, as the director for interdisciplinary research at the University of Southern California, he became fascinated by a more terrestrial problem: traffic congestion. Suburban sprawl and cheap gas were combining to create traffic jams; more and more people were commuting into the same city centers. In October, 1973, the  opec  oil embargo began, and gas prices quadrupled. America’s car-based work culture seemed suddenly unsustainable. That year, Nilles published a book, “ The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff ,” in which he and his co-authors argued that the congestion problem was actually a communications problem. The personal computer hadn’t yet been invented, and there
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