Without policies for when workers should be plugged in and on-call, organisations put their relationships with employees at risk.

Knowledge workers long ago discarded conventional modes of 9-to-5 paper pushing. Mobile technologies and home offices have made countless jobs more flexible and manageable, expanding the traditional definition of work and allowing more people to be productive.

However, these technologies have also contributed to the ballooning of the workweek in recent years. As it becomes easier for workers to be in touch anytime and from anywhere, there's a potential for overload.

"Between 1977 and 1997 the average work week among salaried Americans increased from 43 to 47 hours, and over the same period, the number of workers putting in 50 hours or more jumped from 24 to 37 percent, and you can make the case that technology is really facilitating this," says Kazim Isfahani, an analyst with Giga Research.

"Most people who take their laptops home tend to log in multiple times a day. They may log in during the workday, but they may also log in after dinner [or] after they put the kids to bed, and still get a couple of hours in," he says.

Notes Bruce Sargent, program director for IBM's real estate and site operations organisation, "You could be working 24 hours a day, because there's always someone out there who's looking for something or wants to deal with something, or talk to you about something, no matter what time of the day or night it is."

Sargent, who works out of his home and spends much of his time on the road, manages 35 employees throughout the Northeast, coordinating the activities of IBM's outsourced facilities management.

"Just because that person decided to do work at that time doesn't mean that I need to be working at that time," he says.

After-hours work is seldom explicitly demanded, but the pressure is there, implicit in the issuing of remote and mobile computing tools.

"Now, because you have so many different types of technology, whether it's the PDA or broadband and wireless, there is almost no excuse for you to be less productive. If you are telecommuting, you're being given a benefit, so you better be more productive," says Giga's Isfahani.

By expecting things to take care of themselves, many organisations are taking a major risk. The onus is usually on employees to avoid digital overload, but it's well nigh heresy to ask what the limits are.

Failure to define rules of how and when workers should be plugged in and on-call, and to draw-up mutually agreed-upon performance goals can sour the employer-employee relationship. Yet exhaustive policies governing the use of these technologies are the exception, according to industry analysts.

Workers and their managers must communicate early and often about ground rules and expectations. Open channels go a long way toward keeping the digital lifeline from becoming a digital leash.

"People need to have a balance between work and home. There's not an expectation that you are literally reachable 24 hours a day," says IBM's Sargent. "The employee's welfare comes first."

That kind of attitude is an important ingredient, because employers hold all the cards when it comes to the law because, strictly speaking, there are no upper limits to the hours a salaried professional can be asked to work.

Are unions an answer?

The nascent high-tech and white-collar labor movement might provide a means for hammering out terms and conditions in the digital workplace, but it's too early to tell, according to observers.

A rep at one union reports little action on this issue.

"I have not seen much in the way of telecommuting policies, or heard much from our members, or other workers that we talk to on this issue," says Marcus Courtney, an organiser and public relations committee chair with the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, WashTech. WashTech is partly funded by and affiliated with the Communications Workers of America.

"I have heard people talk about the on-call situation with pagers. Most of the time, if they are salary employees, they do not get compensated for that time. If workers had organised representation at a workplace, and this was an issue they wanted addressed, a union contract would do that," he says.

BU's Harper sees significant hurdles to organising the digital workplace, in part due to the fragmentation and isolation it often gives rise to.

"Karl Marx's analysis was you organise around a workplace, because the workers are together. It certainly makes union organisation more difficult to have workers dispersed," he says. "It's part of the increasing depersonalisation that makes the labour markets work both more efficiently and more cruelly, harshly. I think that it's easier to fire someone you don't have as much contact with."

Even assuming employers and employees are agreed on the terms of access, there remains the issue of execution.

"It boils down to whether the technical infrastructure and helpdesk can keep up, and whether corporate managers are adept at monitoring the performance of these employees," Isfahani says.

Adds IBM's Sargent, "It's setting the expectations up front. And you work through those expectations as a team. There are some that are negotiable and some that are not."

Employees shouldn't fear Big Brother in this setting, since employers generally look at the results, not a running total of minutes online, Isfahani contends. "If a telecommuter is being measured against agreed-upon metrics, then it's a non-issue. Does your employer really care if you're putting in 10 hours of work or 80 hours, as long as they get that deliverable on time?"

"I'm not monitoring anyone's time online," Sargent says. "And if anyone tried to go down that path, I would shoot that down quickly."

Despite the prevalence of remote and mobile connections to the enterprise, businesses are still trying to get their hands around this management challenge, according to Michelle Rodino, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh studying the role of new media in the workplace, and a WashTech member.

"Management how-to literature on telecommuting emphasises the importance of determining whether employees can work independently," she says. "It seems that managers are still not sure they can effectively supervise or monitor their workers remotely."

Ultimately, the technology is fairly neutral, in that it tends to reflect or magnify existing relationships.

"Workers who truly schedule their own hours and determine how they approach an assignment will probably find these technologies more liberating than a worker who's expected to work according to a schedule and work plan that's essentially determined by a supervisor," Rodino says.

"There's an assumption that technology itself has the power to free us or control us. That gives us an easy answer but it really obscures the underlying causes and effects of stress, control, and discontent in the workplace."

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