Today over 2 million Europeans are teleworking in some form or other, and many of the conditions necessary for significant further increases in this number are already in place, as this document attempts to demonstrate. Telework is today high on the European agenda, both in the public and the private spheres. However, telework is not yet a mainstream form of work organisation.
This section describes this present status of telework in Europe and examines what has brought it about, both at the continental and the national level. As will be seen, the latter shows there are considerable differences in the take-up of teleworking and the ways in which it is developing in different parts of the European Union. For example, there are real differences between northern and southern Europe, clearly based on distinctive cultural and societal norms. These and other differences will be examined more explicitly in the country sections below. In addition, it is apparent that there are many factors in common, and these will also be examined.
Teleworking, as it is developing in practice, is a much broader phenomenon than the early advocates of the concept were able to anticipate. It means not only the 'classic' model of the home-based employee, or of those who telework from telecentres or neighbourhood offices. It includes, in addition, a growing number of mobile, or nomadic, workers. As we shall see, it further includes a large number of people who, whilst they would not necessarily consider themselves to be teleworking, make use of ICTs to a greater or lesser extent to work remotely - a form of working which we could perhaps describe as 'unaware' teleworking.
This leads to problems particularly where attempts are made to quantify the numbers of teleworkers or the number of 'teleworkable jobs'. As is clear, different ways of collecting telework statistics are being followed in different countries, making direct comparisons extremely difficult. However, some useful attempts have been made, and although these should be treated with caution for the reasons stated, if used with care they can be instructive. A useful roundup of such data is the Telefutures report from 1996 which also builds upon the 1996 TELDET report which presented data collected in 1994, as shown in Figure 3.1.
It should be noted that the data extrapolated from TELDET are estimates based upon geographical proximity to countries where surveys have been carried out. Where more accurate data for 1994 are available, these are presented in Figure 3.1. The difference between northern and southern Europe is clearly marked, and this is further reinforced by data on the percentage of the labour force with e-mail and with ISDN connections. Figure 3.2 (below), showing the national penetration of Internet hosts per 1,000 people, further underlines this distinct contrast.
It is obvious that there is an even bigger interest in many EU member states in the idea and potential of teleworking than the data in Figure 3.1 indicate. The interest being shown by government organisations in many different countries clearly emerges in the individual national reports, and more up-to-date estimates on the numbers of teleworkers, where available, show a clear growth.. This interest is often linked to a broader interest in the opportunities (and challenges) of the transition to the Information Society.
Figure 3.1 Comparison of national statistics on teleworking and related data (1994)
Labour force |
Teleworkers |
% teleworking |
Phone lines per 100 inhabitants |
% labour force with email |
% labour force with B-ISDN |
|
| Sweden | 3,316,000 |
125,000 |
3.77% |
66.96 |
43.68% |
0.56% |
| Finland | 2,400,000 |
60,000 |
2.50% |
55 |
22% |
- |
| UK | 25,630,000 |
563,182 |
2.20% |
49.42 |
17.16% |
0.96% |
| Ireland | 824,000 |
15,000 |
1.40% |
32.78 |
16.30% |
0.14% |
| Netherlands | 6,561,000 |
80.000 |
1.22% |
49.94 |
26.18% |
0.09% |
| France | 22,021,000 |
215,143 |
0.98% |
53.60 |
6.86% |
4.72% |
| Spain | 12,458,000 |
101,571 |
0.82% |
36.43 |
4.13% |
0.21% |
| Portugal* | 4,509,000 |
25,107 |
0.56% |
31.13 |
2.61% |
- |
| Luxembourg | 165,000 |
832 |
0.50% |
54.11 |
11.39% |
0.19% |
| Belgium* | 3,770,000 |
18,044 |
0.48% |
43.66 |
8.12% |
0.23% |
| Italy | 21,015,000 |
96,722 |
0.46% |
41.75 |
6.86% |
0.07% |
| Greece* | 3,680,000 |
16,830 |
0.46% |
27.57 |
2.10% |
- |
| Germany | 36,528,000 |
149,013 |
0.41% |
45.69 |
12.99% |
5.05% |
| Denmark | 2,584,000 |
9,800 |
0.37% |
58.88% |
19.17% |
0.22% |
| Austria | 3,278,000 |
8,195 |
0.25% |
46.5% |
9% |
- |
| TOTAL EU | 148,739,000 |
1,484,439 |
1.00% |
|||
| USA | 121,600,000 |
5,518,860 |
4.54% |
57.38 |
- |
1.02% |
| Canada | 14,907,000 |
521,745 |
3.50% |
57.50 |
- |
0.10% |
Notes:
For the countries asterisked, data on numbers of teleworkers are extrapolated from the
TELDET report: Telework, penetration, potential and practice in Europe, 1996, IOS Press,
Amsterdam.
For other estimates, the sources are: Source (except Austria, Finland and Sweden):
Telefutures: a study on teleworking in Ireland, 1996, by Imogen Bertin and Gerard
O’Neill, Forbairt and Telecom Éireann.
Note - to insert footnoted data
Interest in teleworking by governments and public sector organisations is also often an aspect of more general concerns with economic development and employment creation. For example, research shows that the use of advanced communications services directly promotes the creation of new job opportunities in most areas of the economy and not just in the ICT sector, as such services are used to support innovation, create new products and services, widen existing markets and develop new ones.20 Public sector interest is also linked with concerns to ameliorate traffic problems in urban areas or with a desire to protect rural or geographically remote areas of a country from the pressures of depopulation and economic recession. The Dutch Ministry of Transport expressed their interest in telework for transport policy reasons as early as 1989, and counterparts in other member states followed this example (e.g. Italy, Sweden, Austria).
If telework is now firmly on the governmental agenda in many member states, it is also increasingly an issue which companies are interested in pursuing. As the reports make clear, the lead in the conscious promotion of telework programmes is often being taken by large companies which are themselves engaged in the IT and telecoms fields. Perhaps inevitably many SMEs, especially those in traditional economic sectors or which have been well established for many years, are less pioneering.
Figure 3.2 National penetration of Internet hosts per
1000 people
This can be contrasted, however, by a wave of new SMEs, typically established during the last decade and often around new ICTs tools and processes. These include SMEs set-up as a result of the out-sourcing of many tasks from larger companies during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as those in the ICTs sectors themselves which are at the forefront of exploration of new markets and new jobs, for example based on the Internet, multi-media and forms of electronic trading and cooperation. These newer, high-tech SMEs are often more advanced in the use of both electronic commerce and telework than the majority of larger companies, and are in many cases showing the lead in how the common tools, work processes and organisational forms of both telework and electronic commerce can be exploited. Such SMEs will not, of course, figure in a review of specific telework programmes given that they are typically practising telework as a matter of normal operations.
Many companies are running pilot programmes based on the classic model of the home-based teleworker who telecommutes rather than commutes physically to the office. Examples can be found in several countries, including Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Britain. Generally speaking, the work practice encouraged is 'alternating' teleworking (i.e. part-time at home, part-time in the office).
Some companies are also experimenting with the idea of telecentres and neighbourhood offices, for example in the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands. In several countries, corporate organisations are playing an important role in the work of a national telework association.
Increasingly, trade union organisations are developing experience of negotiating telework agreements and, more generally, are issuing reports and publications on the subject for their members. Trade union involvement is reported in most of the member states. Although not every Trade Union embraces telework as a positive option, the European Trade Union Confederation, and in particular the European confederation of white collar unions, Euro FIET, are exploring the opportunities and promoting "best practice" with teleworking21.
One important development is the creation (or planned creation) of teleworking associations in almost every EU member state. The associations themselves take different forms - some are primarily trade bodies for companies with a telework interest, some bring together companies, government officials, academics and interested individuals, whilst others combine these roles with an attempt to recruit individual teleworkers and telecentres. Whatever the differences, in each case the telework association provides a valuable point of contact for all types of enquiries about telework in response to the growing public and media interest in exploring new ways of working and new ways to organise work and life. On a European level a consortium of telework activists organised themselves in the European Community Telework Forum in 1992.
The media in general is clearly attracted by teleworking, and is playing its role in helping to disseminate the idea more broadly. As several individual country reports demonstrate, media interest has picked up considerably in the past few years. Journalists are interested in the subject and actively search out information. A genuine professional interest could partly be based on the fact that most journalists undertake their work using teleworking methods. Nevertheless, one still sees media photographs of a teleworker working alongside a child playing in the room.
In the advertisement campaigns of some IT and telecommunication companies in a few
countries, the idea of telework is starting to be introduced. Notable examples are BT in
Britain with their full page campaign "Why not change the way we work?",
Toshiba's European campaign "So how do you get to work", Telia in Sweden,
Canon in its European campaign "Work where you want", IBM Lotus using the
phrase "Work the Web", and many others. 
There are also now specialist telework magazines published in several EU countries, including the UK, Ireland, The Netherlands, France and Germany. In other countries newsletters exist, sometimes produced by the national telework association.
Active telework e-mail discussion groups exist with participants from several countries. Given the predominance of English as the language medium in much electronic communication, it is good to be able to record that these are operating in several different European languages. The number of web sites carrying telework information is growing enormously.
There is also continuing interest in the possibilities of telecentres and telecottages, to provide bases for teleworking away from central offices. The European experience here is mixed, with some early networks of telecentres (for example in Denmark) having failed to survive. Telecentres remain an important element of the overall telework picture in the UK and Ireland and, to a lesser extent, in Scandinavia. Today the "survival rate" of new telecentres seems to be improving, as demonstrated by some recent examples in the Netherlands and the UK.
Whilst teleworking is increasingly a topic for discussion within EU member states, it is also true that there is as yet little transborder communication and awareness on the subject (with the particular exception of the UK and Ireland). However, this is changing. The opportunity to make hypertext links between web pages effortlessly across national borders is being actively pursued, for example by European Telework Development, an EU-funded project under the ACTS programme. This project is also spearheading the translation and adaptation of the UK/Irish 'Teleworking Handbook' in at least four other EU countries.
The European Assembly on New Ways of Working and Telework, which will take place for the fourth time in Stockholm at the end of September 1997, the European Telework Week initiative, which has been run since 1995 and which will take place again in November 1997, and other international conferences, also provide important opportunities to bring a pan-European perspective to telework promotion and media coverage. (See section 3.17.4 below).
A number of factors affecting the development of teleworking in the different nations and regions of the European Union can be identified:
Clearly, the different speeds at which information and telecommunications technologies are developing can affect the opportunity for teleworking. These differences are not just between member states, but also within states (for example, between urban areas and geographically-remote rural areas). This reinforces the importance of taking steps to ensure that the European model of the information society is one which is 'people first', with no developing gap between the information haves and have-nots.
More specifically, there are some key elements which we can identify as the driving forces behind the creation of a large telework force. The first one of these is the extraordinary growth of GSM mobile telephony. 42 million mobile phones are now in use in Europe. Even if we assume that only a small amount of business use is made of them each day, this still amounts to an enormous degree of remote working: the equivalent of 2.6 million person-days, if each phone were to be used for 30 minutes a day for business purposes.
This sort of working is not seen as fitting the classic telework model, but nevertheless can be considered as a form of teleworking. People may thus be 'unaware' teleworkers for a significant part of their working hours. Indeed, if this sort of broader telework definition could became more widely promoted, the transition from conventional working methods to teleworking would be itself better understood as not a sudden and abrupt transformation, but rather the slow, inevitable development of new ways of working as the information society itself develops.
Another driving force is the Internet, and its extension into the use of Intranets within organisations. The individual country reports detail some of the recent Internet initiatives, including e-mail discussion lists and web sites. It is clear that a large amount of teleworking is now being done in the Internet environment. The large national variation in the take up of the Internet is shown in Figure 3.2 above, especially again the clear north-south contrast within Europe. Figure 3.3 shows, on the other hand, the tremendous growth of the Internet as measured by the number of hosts worldwide.
Figure 3.3 Worldwide growth in the Internet: number of
Internet hosts (millions): 
Source: EITO 1997, quoting Network Wizzards, http://www.nw.com and Analyses.
The development of electronic commerce, often over the Internet, together with other technological innovations such as safe electronic payment systems and e-money, will also drive forward changes towards teleworking methods. As mentioned above, electronic commerce is developing fast and often uses the same or similar tools (both technical and otherwise), work processes and organisational forms as does telework. Thus we are now seeing that, in many cases, the growth of electronic commerce and telework is taking place hand-in-hand, especially in the context of SMEs. In this context, it is important to note that 90% of small businesses in Europe employ less then 10 people. Electronic trade in such organisations, which typically act as individuals22, is difficult to distinguish from telework.
Already, increased use is being made by business of telephone-based delivery methods (examples are the direct bank and insurance operations). This in turn is promoting the fast growth of dedicated call centres, often at some distance from companies' traditional bases. Call centres handling international traffic are also becoming a feature of European life, and are becoming established in several countries including Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands.
The main driving force, however, is the increasing realisation by European enterprise that teleworking can in many situations contribute to achieving the competitive benefits of flexible working and productivity improvement. This economic imperative is setting in place a demand for teleworking, and in many cases this is being matched and even led by individual workers' realisation of the personal benefits to be gained.
This European survey also reveals a number of restraining factors on teleworking. The biggest of these appears to be awareness. Although more and more individuals, and especially decision-makers, are aware of teleworking, this tends often to be only at the level of working at home a couple of days a week. The challenge is to translate this shallow awareness into deeper hands-on experience and practice, especially amongst the more traditional SMEs, and typically in the context of the changing organisation and process of work.
Apart from awareness, other restraining factors of importance in many but not all parts of Europe include:
All these barriers are real enough and need to be seriously faced and resolved in order to promote telework that is both economically and socially beneficial.
An additional challenge, hardly yet appreciated, is the opportunity telework presents to re-integrate socially excluded groups, such as the unemployed and the disabled, into the labour market.
All in all, however, the developments described will ensure that the importance of telework, in its broadest sense, for the future economic and social health of the European peoples will continue to grow. The individual reports in this chapter, taken together, prompt the welcome conclusion that the importance of telework is already being recognised in every part of the European Union.
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