While it clearly offers a large number of opportunities, the introduction of teleworking also throws up a series of challenges. Many of these result from a mismatch between the institutions of a society designed for space-bound working and the realities of the emerging Information Society. None of these problems - which currently constitute challenges to the development of beneficial teleworking - are insurmountable, but they do need to be understood and addressed.
Surveys of teleworkers and their managers have fairly consistently shown that social isolation can be a major disadvantage of remote working, and a deterrent to adopting it. This is only the case, however, where workers spend all of their working time away from colleagues. Good practice in teleworking supplies opportunities for social contact in the form, for example, of a minimum number of days spent in the office, strong identification with the organisation, a supportive company culture, the provision of satellite and neighbourhood offices, etc., (for employees) or in the form of informal support networks for self-employed teleworkers.
Almost every survey of the subject ever carried out has produced evidence that the single most important barrier to teleworking is perceived as 'management attitudes', sometimes couched in vaguer terms such as 'conservatism' or 'fear of change' and sometimes spelled out more explicitly as, for instance, 'fear that remote workers can't be managed effectively', 'fear that teleworking will expose weak management practices', or the fear of middle managers of a redundant role. It is tempting to respond to such evidence with an assumption that all that it is necessary to do to remove this barrier is to re-educate managers and/or wait for the older generation of conservative managers to retire and be replaced by a more progressive young generation. Such a response, however, denies a crucial reality: that attitudes are not free-floating personal attributes but are produced and reinforced (or alternatively challenged) by the institutional structures and cultures in which people are situated.
Thus workplaces in which people are rewarded on the basis of being seen to be present, rule-following, giving and receiving orders, having a large number of subordinates or performing well at committee meetings will tend to produce a greater resistance to flexible and dispersed working practices than those in which people are rewarded by results. Where the organisational culture is unsympathetic to teleworking, or managers are poorly trained, teleworkers may find themselves socially isolated, marginalised and denied access to ongoing training, full participation in decision-making, and promotion prospects. There is considerable evidence that teleworking works best where hierarchies are flat, bureaucratic rules are minimised, job descriptions are flexible and workers are encouraged to work to targets which they have negotiated with their managers or team-mates. It is also easier to introduce into organisations which already have a well-developed electronic communications culture - in which staff are already used to using voice-mail, e-mail and other forms of communication which make location irrelevant and which facilitate asynchronicity. The introduction of intranets is currently spreading this kind of communications culture rapidly.
The shift from the rule-bound culture of a traditional, hierarchically structured office in which rules are externally determined to the self-managed environment of teleworking requires a considerable shift, not just in attitude but in competencies and knowledge. There is some general recognition that there is a need firstly for training managers in the management of teleworking; secondly for training potential or new teleworkers in both generic skills (such as how to use communications software) and job-specific skills; thirdly for providing ongoing training to existing teleworkers (as with office-based staff) to enable them to upgrade their skills; and finally for training for support staff and other office-based workers in the skills required in a networked organisation.
Most organisations have traditionally relied strongly on tacit, face-to-face methods to deliver a great deal of learning, both about the general skills required to carry out a particular job or the specific skills of how to get along in a particular organisation. Once the experienced staff who in the past delivered this form of training are no longer present at the core of the organisation, then they are unavailable to teach the next generation...There is therefore a need to invent new ways of learning from colleagues which do not depend on continuous co-presence in the office.
To some extent, it is possible to address this problem at the level of the individual company. At a societal level, however, an exclusively employer-based approach will leave certain groups excluded. There is also an urgent additional need for training to be made available for self-employed teleworkers and those working for small firms, and for training for the unemployed in general information skills.
At a still more general level, people need to learn how to work independently - to swap the habits of deference and rule-following which may have served them well in the traditional organisations for a new set of competencies involving self-reliance, decision-making, effective time-management, self-motivation and the ability to communicate and negotiate effectively and courteously with colleagues, clients and managers without face-to-face presence. Associated with these skills are another set, involving the ability to negotiate boundaries between work and non-work activities which make it possible to exploit the new opportunities which teleworking offers to integrate work with family life without falling into the danger of workaholism on the one-hand, or demotivated under-performance on the other.
These skills are not only useful for teleworkers, of course; they also contribute towards the general development of conscious work organisation, entrepreneurship and encouraging the unemployed or those facing redundancy to seek out and create new work opportunities.
Although it is rarely a driver of teleworking, the appropriate infrastructure is an essential prerequisite. At the most basic level, no teleworking can take place without a telephone link (fixed or mobile) which makes it possible to support speech and a modem. However there are many applications for which greater speed - and hence bandwidth - are necessary, notably those involving data-intensive applications (such as visual images, video or multimedia applications) and those for which speedy interaction is necessary in real time (such as interrogating remote databases or a variety of functions which involve dealing with customers by telephone whilst simultaneously retrieving and/or entering data, including customer service, telephone interviewing, tele-sales, etc.).
A lack of infrastructure capable of supporting data-intensive teleworking at acceptable speed, such as ISDN, xDSL, or two-way Cable, is not only a serious barrier to the uptake of teleworking in an absolute sense, it also introduces relative differences between European regions: some countries, notably on the Mediterranean fringes, lag well behind others, notably in the Nordic north, in the quality and extent of their telecommunications networks, and, as a result, there are major disparities in access. Within countries too, there are differences, for instance between urban and rural areas. A recent study in England, for instance, found that rural areas were less likely to be covered by cellular networks, less likely to have access to ISDN, less likely to have access to cable networks and less likely to have a choice of telecommunications supplier than urban areas. Whilst Sweden, Finland, Denmark, France and Germany have made major efforts to ensure that rural areas are well-served, a similar situation does not pertain in other EU countries. The authors of the study concluded that, 'Demand is growing dramatically for access to information networks, such as the Internet. High volume users in rural areas will be disadvantaged if they cannot get access to ISDN services. As demand increases further for broadband services...it will be difficult to meet expectations in rural areas'23.
The availability of telecommunications is not the only issue here. High costs for installation, line rental or usage can also constitute barriers to teleworking. Here too, there are major differences between European regions. However the global nature of teleworking also makes it necessary to make comparisons with other parts of the world. In the USA, for example, flat rate access seems to have boosted teleworking, as noted by Nicolas Negroponte: "It should not matter how much you use the Internet. It should be there, ready to use, with a flat rate access. As long as this is not ‘normal practice’ in Europe, Europe will not be able to make up for lagging behind the US."24
Like the telecommunications infrastructure, the appropriate hardware and software are necessary prerequisites for successful teleworking. However the speed with which new products have become available in recent years, and the rapidity with which their price has fallen have meant that, with a few exceptions, they do not constitute a major obstacle to teleworking.
Nevertheless, a couple of problems do arise. Firstly, there can be significant problems of interoperability between hardware and software systems so that compliance with suitable standards continues to be an important issue. Secondly, it remains the case that much of the hardware and software currently in use is less than perfectly adapted for the purpose of teleworking. In general, the market can be left to deal with responding to consumer demand for change and producing new products.
However there remain some areas where a lack of appropriate hardware and software does represent a barrier to teleworking. Here, research and development might serve to stimulate the development of new products, including: hardware and software adapted for the needs of people with disabilities (for whom teleworking represents a major employment opportunity); software availability in minority languages, and programs to support translation to and from such languages; and software to support co-operative, interactive group-working in ways which are more subtle than the - mainly somewhat crude - groupware currently on the market.
The European Commission is already funding research and demonstrator projects in this area. This will be extended and developed further under the Fifth Framework Programme, building on the lessons from business process re-engineering and from software development and from the human aspects of team-working, on which there is a long tradition of qualitative research in Europe, especially in Scandinavia.
Most European employment and social security legislation, as well as most contracts of employment, is premised on the assumption that the worker spends his or her working day on the employer's premises, carrying out a pre-defined set of tasks, during predetermined and regular hours. This is ill-adapted to meet the needs of a workforce which may be working from multiple locations (including domestic premises), working irregular hours, spread throughout the day and night, and carrying out a much wider range of tasks than was traditionally the case in workplaces with a strict and hierarchical division of labour.
Because the legislation changes markedly from one EU member state to another, it is difficult to generalise with confidence about the extent to which its terms constitute an actual barrier to teleworking. There is a general consensus among participants of the European Telework Development project (see Annex 2)25 that special legislation to cover teleworkers is not appropriate; most of the problems which arise in relation to teleworking could be more appropriately solved by amending existing regulations, with in some cases, the allowance of a little 'breathing space' for experimentation as new forms of work emerge.
A recent, comprehensive study in the 15 member states of the EU by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions examined the treatment of teleworkers in labour law, social security law and health and safety law in each country and concluded that the main issues did not relate specifically to teleworking (which is not defined in law in any country) but to employment status26. Insofar as teleworking is accompanied by a change from employee to self-employed status, teleworkers may lose their rights to such things as protection against unfair dismissal, maternity, paternity or parental leave, paid holidays, sickness pay, inclusion in pension schemes, or lay-off or unemployment pay, although the precise details of this disentitlement vary from country to country. The European Commission is itself now heavily engaged in promoting fruitful dialogue on these issues amongst the social partners and others concerned27.
In general, it is not the legislation per se which constitutes the barrier, since it rarely explicitly forbids homeworking or flexible working. Rather, the barrier arises from the (often legitimate) fears of workers that they will be disadvantaged by losing some of the protection which is available to on-site workers if they become teleworkers.
Measures which might contribute towards addressing these problems include:
In the longer term, a major review of the tax/benefit system in each member state should be carried out with the object of making it more appropriate to the needs of a flexible workforce, whose hours of work may vary from one week to the next and who may work for more than one employer simultaneously. At present, flexible workers are at a disadvantage, albeit in ways which vary considerably from country to country, in all member states in this respect. While this remains the case, a disincentive to taking up flexible work - which includes many forms of teleworking - will continue to exist.
In addition to the barriers to teleworking which arise from the inappropriateness or lack of clarity of employment legislation and collective agreements, additional obstacles sometimes arise from regulations affecting specific sectors or professional groups or from general rules for the conduct of business (whether formally agreed and enshrined in official regulations or de facto practices arising from past custom). These vary enormously from country to country and sector to sector and include:
Assumptions that work will take place on the employer's premises during fixed and standard hours are so embedded in the structure of many of our social institutions that it sometimes takes a real effort of the imagination to see the extent to which these taken-for-granted structures may constitute barriers to teleworking. Examples of such barriers are:
Whilst they do not appear to constitute critical barriers to teleworking, there are a number of other regulations which constitute at best minor irritants and at worst major headaches to those setting up new teleworking schemes. Some of these, in the form of tax regulations, are imposed by public authorities. Others result from the practices of private organisations, such as insurance companies, landlords or mortgage providers.
Tax regulations, whether these refer to income taxes, value-added taxes, local property taxes or other forms of taxation, are extremely complex and vary considerably between member states. In some cases, a simplification of tax regulations and procedures, or a general harmonisation across the EU, might facilitate the development of teleworking. In others, the problem arises not so much from the regulations themselves as from their complexity and a lack of understanding among the general public about how they function. In such cases, the issuing of clear guidelines to teleworkers by the appropriate authorities would be helpful.
In the case of mortgage and insurance providers, the development of codes of practice would provide a helpful first step towards eliminating the anomalies which sometimes unfairly penalise those who use their homes (or cars) for business purposes
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