Nafishah Othman

A Conflict between Professional vs. Domestic Life? Understanding the Use of ICT in Teleworking for Balance in Work and Family Units

The advancement of information and communication technologies such as personal computers, the Internet and mobile phones has enabled people to work any time and anywhere. Teleworking, the practice of setting up home offices for employees with appropriate resources for computing and communication, is one example of this new flexibility. Teleworking brings new challenges as well as benefits, and a variety of studies have examined the impact of teleworking in terms of costs and benefits. A major attraction for teleworkers is the control it allows them over the way they structure their work and lives. However, the intrusion of work into the home blurs the boundaries between work and home life and may result in conflict between work and family. This work-family conflict is a direct result of the mutual incompatibility between the demands of work and family roles (Akdere, 2006). The aim of this research is to study the work-family balance of Malaysian teleworkers by exploring the nature of interactions between work and family activities, in order to get a better understanding of the experience of teleworkers in balancing their work and family life. This study will use the work-family border theory (Clark, 2000) to describe the phenomenon, and to explain how individuals manage and negotiate the work and family spheres and the borders between them in order to attain balance.

Telecommuting in Malaysian government offices

The Government of Malaysia is working hard to bring the country into a developed and industrialized country by the 2020.To support this development, the government agencies collaborating with non-government agencies increasingly involve in numbers of high technology projects, which must be supported by committed and dedicated service-based civil servants, IT and non-IT professionals.Government-based agencies and institutions, however, are having problems to retain their employees for different reasons; family matters, working distance, unattractive salary and environmental aspects.To solve this problem, the Government should give an opportunity for the employees to work away from offices and to work for more than one employer.In this sense, telecommuting shall become a solution for civil servants in service-based industry and among IT professionals. Employees can work at home or at a remote centre through the use and support of high and reliable ICT infrastructure.The success of telecommuting programs especially in Malaysian environment is depending on numbers of criteria and sub-criteria.This study identified the criteria as rules, regulation and policies, infrastructure, finance, selection, training, environment and benefits.