eWORK 2000 - European Telework Week

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New Ways to Work 2000European Telework4.5.2.3. Not enough control over costEstablishing telework requires substantial investments to be taken by an organisation. Instead of providing twofully equipped workplaces to teleworkers (one in the office the other one at the teleworker’s homes)organisations should make use of desk-sharing in the office. However, many still shrink back from desksharingsince this implies a breach in work culture. From many such examples we know that half-hearteddesk-sharing results in problems to achieve an efficiency of teleworking. The cost saving potential can not beharnessed when following such a strategy. It is also remarkable that in the vast majority of cases theteleworkers have accepted desk-sharing and rather easily adopted it.Many organisations with large sales forces have also started to provide these with teleworking equipment intheir homes but still provide an additional workplace in the headquarters or at least one for each 2-3 salesforce members. One can observe an apparent lack of courage to introduce touch-down offices where only afraction of workplaces for this target group compared to their overall number is provided. There are manyexamples which prove that this is absolutely sufficient and does not result in any form of dissatisfaction amongthe workforce.As already mentioned above, telework is not for free. Often, organisations make the mistake to only use thecosts of purchase instead of ‘Total Costs of Ownership’ for their ROI calculation and are surprised when allof the sudden additional expenses become apparent.Still in many organisations we find an ad-hoc-management of hardware maintenance and repair instead ofproviding this as an internal service or by an external service provider. In most such situations this results inunnecessarily high costs and decrease in motivation and productivity of the workers concerned.As a bottom-line one can say: When telework is being treated as an add-on, it will most likely cause extracosts instead of cost savings!4.5.2.4. Employee exploitationWe can still find examples where teleworking is used as a means of employee exploitation although this hassubstantially decreased over the past years.Some organisations still impose teleworking on to their workers (‘semi-voluntary’ telework) with all negativeconsequences for the teleworkers but in the long run also for the organisation.Others use the admission to telework to extort overtime etc. from employees or disregard the teleworker’s rightto off-duty time. In such situations telework is used to hollow out employee rights. Since the early days ofteleworking we also know that some try to implement it as a first step towards enforced self-employment oruse teleworkers as work peak buffers (like zero work contracts but without retainer), trying to reduce theirown costs.- 44 -
New Ways to Work 2000European Telework4.6 Looking Beyond: Telework as a New Way of WorkingTelework is not an isolated phenomenon. It is one of a plethora of options chosen by first-mover organisationsto adapt to changing circumstances, e.g. market conditions, and secondly by individuals to attune working lifeto personal preferences and obligations. As Jackson (1998) has pointed out, studying instances of teleworkbears the danger of overlooking this context. Especially when trying to benchmark individual countriesaccording to the progress they have made in encompassing innovative forms of work, it would be inadequateonly to look at telework without taking into account what other more appropriate options there might be for thecountry in question to achieve similar goals. There can be no doubt, for example, that the availability of freespace in the private homes of average US households gives the USA an advantage over European countriesand especially Japan regarding home-based telework. This does not mean, however, that the latter can notmake use of ICT to innovatively overcome time-space-restrictions. Also, the degree of flexibility teleworkoffers from the employee's point of view might also be attained through other means, e.g. flexi-time,management by objectives, outcome-related pay.From a broader perspective, telework can be interpreted as one of a number of developments leading into thedirection of greater flexibility of the way paid work is organised (while the degree to which this flexibility goesto the benefit of the employer or the employee side varies and is negotiated politically and socially). A moreflexible workforce means that labour can be better allocated according to where (and when) it can be usedmost productively. On the other hand, only changes that benefit not only the business community but alsoemployees are politically feasible. These developments occur mainly along the dimensions of working time(daily, monthly, annually, employment commencement, retirement age), working place(s), type of contract andinter-organisational co-operation.What might be called the traditional, post-war work paradigm consisted of the following determinants:• permanent employment with a contract of employment;• “life-time employment”;• standardised working hours (“9 to 5”);• full-time employment (35-40 hours/ week);• state-provided social security provision;• workplaces are co-located in centralised buildings (offices, factories, retail outlets etc.);• strong intra-organisational co-operation based on face-to-face meetings, while contacts to external personsand organisations are limited to certain gateways (e.g. purchasing and distribution departments).A changing economic environment together with shifts in social attitudes and the widespread application ofnew ICTs result in the emergence of what may be called the 21 st century work paradigm tending towardsspatial dislocation, “self-employment” (if in status or just in job characteristics) with wide-reaching selfresponsibilityas to ensuring social protection, greater diversity and flexibility in working time patterns andstronger boundary-transgressing communication and co-operation. This paradigm is far broader than theprevious one as it comprises a much larger spectrum of different ways of working. Still, old-style employmentpatterns will continue to exist and remain at the core of the labour market, but they will be only one of avariety of work patterns that is serving the requirements of 21 st century economies.Telework gives us a feeling of how work of many of us will look like in the future. While still many believetelework to be an exotic form of work organisation, we strongly believe that in a few years time hardlyanybody will make a big fuss out of it anymore. It will then have become part of our working lives and most ofthe knowledge workers will have adopted it in one form or another. We will then no longer use the termtelework but will be back to what it really is: just a new form of “work” and nothing more. The term“telework” has helped us to discuss the emerging changes of and in work but now becomes superfluous. Let’snow get back to normal. i.e. back to work.- 45 -
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