Dagmar HRASKOVA Monika ROLKOVA
University of Zilina University of Zilina
E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. Teleworking is in the current environment of globalization carried out by using modern information and communication technologies. It is one of flexible forms of work and working time organization, which helps to reconcile work and family life balance. The paper analyzes the benefits of the implementation of this arrangement for the employee, employer and society, but on the other hand, also presents some disadvantages and risks posed by this type of work management. It describes a current state of teleworking, group of jobs that are suitable for this kind of conception, relevant working conditions and the proportion of teleworkers in selected countries.
Keywords: teleworking, telecommuting, employee, employer, work arrangement
JEL classification:
M54 – Labor Management
Introduction
Current time of globalization is characterized by the continuous development of information technologies. Even because of that, in Europe there have been developed more and more new forms of employment and work organization characterized by flexibility towards the needs and interests of all stakeholders, i.e. employers, employees and unemployed persons as well. One of the innovative methods of employment is working at home, teleworking and telecommuting.
Teleworking nowadays rapidly gets into the consciousness of workers in various sectors of business services, it also represent a future in Slovakia. For the new way of home working - teleworking, or "virtual commute" (telecommuting) - our language doesn´t have simpler and unambiguous Slovak term. The principle of that is limitation of the need to commute to the company and to perform the work at agreed hours and days of the week. Instead of a fixed time and the local mode, teleworking allows optimize individual performing of work according to the needs of worker in terms of time and space (place of work is most often at home). Limitation of physical presence in the workplace can be partial or total, depending on the type of work and the employer requirements. The teleworking includes following modes of work, for example: work of mobile workers - businessmen, engineers, consultants, other professionals in the field, the work of distributed virtual teams with members in several locations, telecentre work close to home, uniting more workers of different professions, etc.
Currently, the performance of dependent work of employee that is made somewhere else than in the location of his employer, has some specific features that require different legislation than the employment of an employee who performs work at the employer. According to agreement with the employer a place of work can be different from the employer's workplace, this place could be a home or other place of work as well. There are of course jobs that are specifically connected to the employer´s workplace, for example: administration in government - because of business hours or hours for the public, work of receptionist and others.
When working at home the essence lies in the fact that the performance is done in the working time, but this working hours can employee establish usually by himself. Consequently, for these forms of employment are specified deviations of the rules of employment in place of work in the employer's workplace, such as provisions of the determined weekly working time and downtimes are not applicable to teleworking, with important personal obstacles to work the
company does not pay wages to employees except of the death of a family member, does not pay employees for overtime, wage surcharge for work on holidays, wage advantage for night work and wage compensation for the difficult job performance. Our research objective is to describe the current situation of flexible working arrangements in labor market and explain pros and cons for all involved participants – employees, employers and society. In our paper we use as the scientific method the systematic review. Systematic review as a form of scientific expression is a summary of recent developments of theory and empirical research in defined area (Hendl, 2008). Based on a critical review of the literature, we described the current state of teleworking. In the first section of the paper we explore the benefits of this working arrangement, in second section we describe the criteria of suitable jobs for teleworking and appropriate working conditions, in conclusion we show some successful examples of company that support this work conception and present the proportion of teleworkers in various countries. The research issue of this article is to answer two questions: 1. Why and where use companies use teleworking as the method of employment? 2. What are the requirements that should be considered if the company would like to apply the teleworking model?
In the first part of the article, we introduce the current state of teleworking in the USA and EU countries, in the second part we describe advantages and disadvantages of this model of work for employer and employee as well, and we mention the work conditions of teleworkers, in the end of the article we provide the recommendations for teleworking business model in the company.
Teleworking in the USA and EU
In Western Europe and USA, this form of employment has begun to emerge in early
80´s in the last century. The most popular it is in the USA. It is possible mainly because of good conditions, especially because of early building of the information society in the USA. This trend is influenced by total utilization of ICT, the internet, the spread of computers in households. As Hoffman (2011) says: “Remote work is no longer an experiment or a last resort solution. It is a business model.”
In the European Union the countries with the highest proportion of teleworkers in 2011 according to Eurostat (in: Institute of Employment, 2012) are Luxemburg (12,2 %), Denmark (12,1%), Netherlands (11,6%) and France (11,5%).
The remote work is not suitable for each employee. The managers should delegate it only to independent but responsible individuals who are satisfied with this model and are able to cope with its disadvantages. One of the good examples is IT company Cisco in Great Britain and Ireland – more than half of their employees are virtual workers. The effectivity of this system is visible in result that only 5 % of their employees left them voluntarily during the year which is one of the lowest rate in IT sector (Blyth, 2010, p.31). In USA the company Cisco has even 90% of regular telecommuters, company Accenture 81%, Intel 80% and all of these companies are in the 100 Best Companies to Work For of Fortune Magazine (CNN Money, 2012). The experience shows that teleworking is starting to be one of the most valuable benefits for the employee. For example in United States 72% of employees say flexible work arrangements would cause them to choose one job over another (The Edge Report, 2008 in Global Workplace Analytics).
Teleworking – Pros and Cons
Teleworking is an innovative work conception, which allows employees to work productively outside the traditional office or workplace. It is therefore considered to be part of a general trend towards the progressive development of the workplace, as it ranks among the phenomena of the information age, growing up from information - based work, as well as from the rapid advancement of technology. The driving force of development of this form of employment is
technological progress. Today's workforce, equipped with mobile phones, laptops and other technology is ready to perform work anywhere. Technology is not the only reason or incentive of teleworking popularity, but also it is the balance of work and family life. Currently, many employees evaluate their priorities, paying more attention to the choice between work and private life, and increasingly they are also looking for their employment opportunities that allow flexible working hours, health, or financial benefit.
Teleworking is a form of employment, which provides the following benefits: For the employee:
reduces time needed to commute to work
reduces stress situations (traveling at rush hour, conflicts in a team)
reduces costs related to job
provides better and more productive working environment
increases the possibility of better organization of work and private responsibilities as well
improves quality of life, health of employee
provides the opportunity to work for disadvantaged (disabled) people.
Most employees who have experience with teleworking, perceive improvement of quality of their lives. Behind this view are lot of factors such as higher job satisfaction, less stress, greater flexibility in organizing work-time or opportunity to spend more time with family.
For the employer:
offers the opportunity to acquire and retain skilled workers
reduces absenteeism, sick leave
reduce overheads in the company (for energy, equipment)
saves office space
increases productivity and employee satisfaction, loyalty to the organization.
Teleworking is useful for example for foreign companies to start their activities in Slovakia, it is preferable to create well equipped homeoffice for their representative than to rent the entire building along with a full service personnel, or for distribution companies as well. Although teleworking is not suitable for all categories of employees, many employers would allow their employees to work remotely at least part - timely. In Austria, this type of work could also be used by some local officials or government - part of the agenda they process at home and in the office they sit only in the public hours.
It is not always the intention of the organization itself to build employment policy that supports telecommuting. If the employee feels that his case is correct or even the only appropriate way, then he must persuade the employer about the following matters:
how much money will be saved for employees transferred to work in remote mode compared to office work
there can be possibility to try out a new style of work during a probationary period
there is no need to lose contact with other employees, as the employee can have effective phone and electronic communication with a focus on specific tasks without loss of time and money and according to personal needs regular communication (the presence in team meetings etc.) or at least by video or voice conferencing
For employee it is appropriate to apply for the following requirements:
reimburse the operating costs for telephone and other connections (ISDN, cable TV with the possibility of data transmission and internet access) or to pay the installation of a telephone connection (cheaper in the name of the owner households than of the employer), the best use of call-back for communication with corporate network and the internet,
reimburse the additional costs associated with work - own office equipment, hardware and small articles of consumption clearly applied only to work for the employer, an alternative way is to use only the company's computer equipment, both because it is
covered by corporate support (repair, reinstallation, upgrading software, etc.), and secondly, the company will gradually depreciate it,
distinguish between own costs, which would exist in any case, and additional working costs at home, and on the basis of this division apply requirements to the employer - of course, the goal is win-win situation for both sides within a reasonable compromise of terms of reimbursement of specific costs.
For the whole society:
reduces amount of traffic during the hours of increased traffic, it may also help reduce the costs of roads and their maintenance
reduces air pollution
increases employment and labor flexibility
contributes to reducing of social exclusion
improves working engagement of disabled people
contributes to development of marginalized regions.
For some organizations and individuals teleworking can represent a dramatic shift in how they perceive the workplace and the job itself. Although in our country teleworking is not much spread, in Western Europe this way of employment is already extended. Most popular is teleworking in Scandinavia, but it is used increasingly in the UK and even The Ireland, where people prefer traditional forms of employment recently. Because this type of work brings for certain type of people some cons, not all Europeans inclined to teleworking, this form of employment is refused especially because of following:
limiting possibility of direct communication with colleagues at work – isolation of employee is setting the stage for better concentration and thus higher productivity, but some people miss the interaction with colleagues in the office
work excessing the limit can cause stress - shift to teleworking opens access to work 24 hours a day, teleworkers can be lured to work more hours, than obligatory working hours
teleworker must determine the rules in relation to work - teleworking provides more flexibility in program of personal issues, work from home can be carried out only under the condition that the employee will not be disturbed at work by family members,
distrust of superiors - the management believe that teleworking is a good idea, but still doubt about whether working from home is the best for their company, many of them are suspicious of employees, of their ability to organize working hours outside the traditional workplace.
Advocates of teleworking, however, highlight many benefits of working from home - environmental, social and economic. They argue that the environment and, finally, the traffic situation, especially in big cities would be helpful if all the people don´t go to work every day. Although the work from home for an employer is generally assessed positively, the results of research show that it works to the mutual satisfaction, if an employee spends some day of the week in the company to have a feeling that remains in the center of company life, does not feel lonely when working alone, has no sense of exclusion from the team.
Source: The Virtual Leader (2011)
This is the reason why working from home is less frequently done by men, or it is done usually later in lifetime. Women generally use their maternity leave to transition to teleworking, after maternity leave they often struggle to adapt again to work and teleworking can help them shorten the time spent away from work, or allow them to work at least part-timely and not lose working habits.
An employee may feel lonely and socially isolated due to the absence of face-to-face contact and less frequent opportunities for personal and professional relationship building. The
literature suggests that remote workers’ feelings of isolation are influenced by their managers as well as their own competencies (e.g. autonomy). Managers should encourage their virtual employee to join company activities which foster relationships with the colleagues (Mulki, Bardhi, Lassk & Nanavaty-Dahl, 2009 in Busch, Nash, Bell, 2011). Research also discusses the role of technology and how it can provide opportunities for greater social and professional exchanges between teleworkers and their colleagues and managers. Common forms of communication technology (e.g. e-mail) do not provide a high level of information richness and can inhibit social exchange (Marshall, Michaels, Mulki, 2007 in Busch, Nash, Bell, 2011).
Working from home can greatly help disabled people or parents who care for young children. Teleworking is also ideal for professionals who work independently on tasks, such as programmers, translators, accountants and entrepreneurs engaged in the visual arts. Psychologists, however, warn that working at home is psychically demanding, it requires great discipline and bears significant risks, lack of boundary between work and private life can often result in some type of temperament to stress or even burn-out. The main obstacle to the development of teleworking is currently probably its image. These positions should have the same selection process as other positions in the company, so the employees who remain in the company don´t feel envy towards those who can work from home. "Company" employees must also learn that those who work at home, are not always easy to be reached or they are not still available. The economic benefit of teleworking is not easy to measure because a number of factors are the reasons for increase in productivity. The benefits of teleworking, however, can be measured in cases where the results are electronically monitored. Possibility of working remotely brings not only higher employee productivity and savings on travel, but the staff also offer great flexibility, which significantly contributes to employee satisfaction, thereby increasing their work effort and quality of work. If we talk about the use of teleworking in various jobs, in Australia, for example, the statistics show the situation in 2005:
Figure 2: Teleworker Jobs in Australia
Source: Sensis Business Index (2008)
For new style of work to create awareness and higher levels of staff engagement, all of them should be informed about the successful and beneficial impacts on the results of the company, in other words on increasing productivity and satisfaction of individual workers. The company should not force anyone to take this kind of work for their own if they don´t want to. Psychological aspects of "lonely" job, which are in addition to concern about job retention and career growth the main barriers to implementation of working at home, have the greatest impact on the strength extroverts, but meets the requirements of introverts. Employer's obligation to create actions towards the elimination of workers isolation should be covered for home work as well. The employer is required to create the working conditions for employees engaged in working at home or teleworking, to ensure they are not disadvantaged in comparison with comparable employees in the workplace of the employer. Home office staff performing telework can work in home office - e.g. in separate lounge, study or just part of the room - a work area, tailored to work, telecentres - teleworkers prefer such venues because of the ability to video conferencing, faxing and because it eliminates problems with software and hardware or in virtual office – the proportion of teleworkers who are becoming mobile workforce by creating such an office is increasing.
Conclusions
To answer our first research question about using of teleworking as the method of employment, based on results of described companies, we can see that teleworking is not a solution for everyone, but in most cases it can substantially reduce costs, accelerate product development and increase sales. If a business plan explains the benefits, then there is no problem to get top management agreement to remote work. To answer our second research question about the criteria of application of teleworking in the company, we have to say that implementation of the new organization of work represents a significant change for each company, and therefore teleworking is not possible to be started immediately. It should be started with a small (pilot) number of employees and the results of the pilot operation will prove the effectivity and then the