ICT’s disruption of traditional employment relationship basis of RTO tensions
By Frederick Pilot
April 4, 2025
Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) over recent decades are fundamentally altering our perceptions of knowledge work: what it is and how and where it’s performed. Particularly in the context of the employment relationship between knowledge workers and knowledge organizations.
As legally defined in the United States, employment empowers the employer to determine when, where and how employees do their jobs. For knowledge work, that has traditionally meant 8-5, Monday through Friday in a commute in office setting owned or leased by the employer.
ICT advances have virtualized and decentralized knowledge work to the point that arrangement makes less and less sense. Knowledge workers can increasingly get their work done outside of those constraints of time and location. That gives them more ability to choose when and where they work.
Having that agency – the ability to decide – is at the heart of the return to office tensions between knowledge workers and their employers. To employers, it appears to undermine their traditional role to direct how, where and when work is performed.
Knowledge workers are now claiming agency over those domains, recognizing going through the motions of commuting daily to an office to use computers and phones in a sea of cubicles during a set time frame no longer makes much sense.
It really hasn’t since the dawn of the commercial Internet in the 1990s. The social distancing public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic broke the habit of the daily commute to the office for both knowledge workers and knowledge organizations.
Habits change when behavior changes. The pandemic forced a change in behavior, making knowledge work less dependent on transportation of knowledge workers to commute in office locations. Modifying habits is how change fundamentally begins and becomes the new norm.
Frederick:
Thanks for your ongoing research on the decentralization of knowledge work in the 21st century.
In case you have not lately read my own work on your topic, I’d be interested in learning your reaction now to my historic essay “Telecommunications’ Big Idea” that I wrote in the waning years of the last century as a I was shifting my research focus from telecommuting, telework, and organized work design to transportation and personal mobility. This essay is posted at
https://www.tfi.com/pubs/ntq/articles/view/98Q4_A3.pdf
In response, if you have written in your blog on the new “hybrid” model of work in the office, point me to it, please.
Best regards,
John Niles
Global Telematics, Seattle