Proceedings of 8th European Assembly on telework (Telework2001)

72Preliminary results <strong>of</strong> the EMERGENCE surveyIn 2000, the EMERGENCE project carried out a survey, <strong>of</strong> over seven thousand establishments inall EU countries plus Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Once the results had been weightedto make them representative <strong>of</strong> all <strong>European</strong> establishments, 49% were found to be practisingeWork. Figure 2 shows the breakdown by type <strong>of</strong> eWork.This shows that the stereotypical employee teleworker based solely at home is in fact one <strong>of</strong> theleast popular forms <strong>of</strong> eWork. Only one and a half per cent <strong>of</strong> establishments in Europe employpeople to work exclusively from home in this way, although the proportion rises to over 2% in theEU (15). It is much more common to use the new technologies to support multi-locational workingby employees, already practised by one <strong>European</strong> employer in ten, a form <strong>of</strong> working much lesslikely to be associated with social isolation. As many again are using non-employees for this work.Nearly one employer in six (17.3%) uses freelances to deliver some form <strong>of</strong> information service.Using a tighter definition <strong>of</strong> freelance eWork, to include only work which is delivered by means <strong>of</strong>telecommunications, we still find 11.4% <strong>of</strong> <strong>European</strong> employers are using ’e-lancers’.Turning to eWork carried out on <strong>of</strong>fice premises, we find that employers are already makingsignificant use <strong>of</strong> IST technologies to carry work out remotely. One <strong>European</strong> employer in fourteen(6.8%) has a back <strong>of</strong>fice in another region. Bearing in mind that the ’regions’ we are talking abouthere are large - NUTS1 level - regions, which, in the case <strong>of</strong> smaller countries like Ireland, Portugalor Luxembourg, constitute the whole country, this represents a significant displacement <strong>of</strong> work.To these can be added a further 1% <strong>of</strong> employers who make use <strong>of</strong> telecottages or telecentres asremote bases for their employees.These forms <strong>of</strong> internal teleworking are heavily outweighed, however, by the use <strong>of</strong> e-outsourcingas a mechanism for carrying work out remotely. Over half <strong>of</strong> all establishments (56%) outsourceat least one business service involving information processing. Restricting our definition only tothose which use electronic means <strong>of</strong> delivery (’e-outsourcers’) we find 43% <strong>of</strong> employers makinguse <strong>of</strong> this practice. Much <strong>of</strong> this outsourcing is carried out within the region where the employer isbased (34.5%) but substantial numbers <strong>of</strong> establishments (18.3%) are outsourcing to other regionswithin the same country, whilst 5.3% are outsourcing outside their national borders, as can be seenfrom Figure 2.