1996 - European Telework Week

Telework 96
2.7.3. Maximising the advantages, minimising the problems
Teleworking potentially offers advantages to business, to individual workers and to
society as a whole. But there are also possible pitfalls to guard against. It is clearly
necessary to ensure that the implications of teleworking programmes to the individuals
and organisations involved are properly understood and prepared for.
Italtel's observations, as reported by the Worknet project, are interesting in this respect.
Italtel developed a pilot home teleworking scheme for 13 long-standing employees.
Apart from its natural interest as a telecoms manufacturer in the market potential of
telework, the company had hopes that the programme would bring it two main benefits:
Improved efficiency, through improved productivity, reduction of overheads, increased
flexibility and a reduction in hierarchical management
Improved use of labour resources, through better retention of staff and recruitment from a
wider pool of staff.
At the end of its pilot, Italtel managers estimated that the performance of staff had
increased by 20%. The firm concluded that the preconditions for successful telework
include the following:
• identification of the business objectives (personal enthusiasm for teleworking is not a
good business reason);
• careful analysis and selection of the tasks to be performed;
• careful selection of volunteer teleworkers;
• relationships between managers and teleworkers based on trust;
• support of senior management;
• appropriate training before and during telework implementation;
• teleworkers to have already worked for the company.
Italtel's teleworkers remained company employees, and the programme was subject to
trade union approval. The Dutch government teleworking pilot reported by the Teleurba
project also involved employees.
The question perhaps is whether the experience of teleworking is different in the case of
self-employed individuals. The Worknet project studied a number of telework pilots of
this kind, including the case of the small Italian advertising and graphics firm Expo
where the worker concerned had already been operating as a freelance writer. He was
aware that some assessments of teleworking had stressed the isolation of working from
home, but he reported that this did not turn out to be an issue for him. He declared
himself very satisfied with the advantages of working from home using a modem: "The
benefits are the time saved travelling between home and Expo, and fewer interruptions in
my working day - excellent!" He added, however, that isolation could be a problem for
future generations of workers who telework from the start of their working lives.
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