Abstract
The concept of telework has received a great deal of attention around the business world in recent years. And also, it has been widely reported that telework actually has numerous merits. Thus, many researchers have speculated that the number of teleworkers will rapidly increase in the near future. On the contrary, there are few research which point out telework's demerits. Especially, it has been argued that limitations on communication between workers as well as with managers are the considerable demerit of telework. However, there has been no research that empirically verify this problem. Therefore, despite this strong belief by many researchers, the real picture of this problem is still unknown. We have conducted a field survey research to verify whether telework generally leads toward lack of communication. Then we have presented some hypotheses based on our findings. To achieve the aim of this research, we analyzed day-to-day job related communication data that are collected through log-sheets from two telework groups, and then investigated their communication patterns. Finally, based on our findings, we have suggested some hypotheses and implications on the communication problem in telework environment.
