Like any other technology, teleworking comprises both positive and negative features. The nature of the impact and risk involved varies according to the type of teleworking, the context in which it is carried out and the way it is used, or according to whether it is considered from the point of view of the individual, the firm or the community in general.
Implementation of teleworking in a firm can provide not insignificant benefits in the form of savings and competitive edge.
The savings to be made are in the form of lower charges and optimisation of existing resources.
·
Lower overheads: home-based teleworking (also
nomadic telework) enables the employer to save office space otherwise used in
the case of an employee working full time on the firm's premises. At the same
time, it is possible to save on electricity consumption. The relocation of
personnel to satellite offices situated away from the city centre can also
generate savings in that real estate costs and tax rates are often lower in
suburban areas or rural districts.
·
Optimisation of IT resources: as the teleworker often carries
out his work at different times to those of his colleagues working in the firm,
the employer can make optimum use of the central computing systems as it is
then used outside peak hours.
·
Optimisation of human resources: for the duration of a project,
multi-site companies often make use of networked teleworking for building an
internal skills network comprising people with expertise in specific areas. Here, it is a matter of making
maximum use of internal company skills, regardless of the location of the
normal workplace of the people concerned. Their services can be called on
without them having to move to another work site.
·
Continuity of service: by enabling young mothers to
continue working during their maternity leave, the pilot project carried out in
California and a number of experiments conducted in Germany in the insurance
sector demonstrated that teleworking could play a part in ensuring the
continuity of a service or programme. Home-based teleworking also gives
employees the chance of continuing to work while looking after their children
or in the case of minor illnesses that would have prevented them from going to
the office in the normal way. The system also facilitates the employee's
re-integration after a period of sick-leave. As shown at the time of the last
earthquake in San Francisco, teleworking can ensure continuity of work in
disaster situations (earthquake, floods, fire). In cases where the computer
system at the head office is destroyed, the teleworker can continue working,
provided he has the necessary back-up.
·
Lower absenteeism: it has many times been shown that
there are fewer cases of sick leave among teleworkers than among traditional
employees. Pacific Bell, for example, has found that the rate of absenteeism
among teleworkers is 25% lower than among their company-based fellow workers.
The
teleworking system makes it possible to:
·
increase the flexibility of the
company's organisation: networked and nomadic teleworking, in particular, endow the
organisation with a greater degree of flexibility and reaction potential
·
facilitate recruitment of personnel: by removing geographical barriers,
teleworking makes it possible to hire the most highly qualified personnel
wherever they happen to be situated. Given that an ever-increasing number of
firms are now going in for teleworking, it is clear that offering the chance of
teleworking has become a competitive pre-requisite
·
improve commercial penetration: nomadic teleworking, in
particular, enables sales personnel to come closer to their customers while
maintaining strong links with their company
·
raise employee productivity: in reducing travelling time
between home and office, home-based teleworking cuts down lost time and the
resulting tiredness. Teleworkers can moreover concentrate more easily on the
job than their office-based colleagues. Several experiments have shown that
teleworkers are more productive than their office colleagues. For example, the
Californian pilot project demonstrated that teleworking could help to raise
productivity by 10 to 30%
·
enhance the quality of work: it has also been shown in the
course of several experiments that teleworkers tend to produce better work than
their fellow workers
·
enables human resources to be
mutualised:
networked teleworking makes it possible to implement projects in which work
efforts and available skills can easily be combined, regardless of their
geographical location.
The advatnges
for employees lie primarily in improved living and working conditions.
The
following are the benefits most frequently put forward in regard to the
teleworker's living conditions:
·
lower
travel costs
·
a
reduction in travelling times between home and office
·
fewer
traffic and parking problems
·
more
contropo over the constraints of daily life
·
more
time for family life and thesocial life of the neighbourhood
·
less
stress: teleworkers generally enjoy a greater number of positive changes in
their personal and work relations than other types of employee.
The
following are the most common benefits:
·
opportunities
for physically handicapped people
·
the
possibility of local employment
·
flexible
working hours and work sites
·
improved
work concentration
·
permanent
access to work tools
·
freedom
of action and organisational flexibility
·
the
chance to enjoy the special atmosphere of working in small groups not subject
to any major hierarchical order (telecentre)
·
the
possibility of reconciling work obligations with the demands of family life
(home-based teleworking).
The
advantages for the society are of a dual nature: better territorial planning
and environmental protection.
Since
it enables geographical barriers to be removed, teleworking constitutes an
opportunity to bring work closer to the worker and relocate activities in
remote or isolated areas and in regions suffering from a population drain.
Telecentres and telecottages have made it possible to set up activity centres
in rural zones, mountainous regions and insular areas.
This
decentralisation of the work market enables regions situated far from the towns
to build up the local labour market and limit the departure of local
inhabitants.
The
positive impact of teleworking on the environment lies in the fact that
teleworkers have less need than their office-based colleagues to travel. In the
case of the home-based teleworker and the telecentre worker, the reduction in
commuting time in peak hours helps to reduce air pollution. The shorter time
spent in travelling to the head office also applies to nomadic and networked
teleworkers.
Shorter
commuting time also enables the company to make savings in areas such as fossil
fuels and travelling expenses, while reducing the risk of accident and the
effects of fatigue on health (stress, less resistance to illness, etc.).
The cost of implementing the system can be
relatively high:
depending on the nature of the activity, the amount of equipment required and
the size of the property investment (in the case of a telecentre, for example);
the employer may well consider the initial installation costs too high.
Teleworking is neither a right nor an
obligation: a
successful teleworking experiment often gives rise to expectations among those
not involved in the experiment. The problem is that not all activities, indeed
not all situations, are adaptable for teleworking and the employer may have
objective reasons for not continuing the experiment, despite demands from
personnel. At a very early stage, he must make it clear that teleworking is not
a right. At the same time, he cannot force an employee to become a teleworker
against his will.
Teleworking is not always possible: some activities lend themselves
directly to teleworking. Information and information processing activities are
particularly well adapted, whereas manual activities and the processing of material
items are not.
The setting up a an office at home is not
always advisable:
does the employee have the necessary space at home? are the premises suitable?
The company has responsibilities in the matter of hygiene and security and it
must ensure that the confidentiality of its data is respected. If this is not
the case, the telecentre solution should take preference over the home-based
office.
Not everyone has the required teleworker
profile: even in a
situation where the activity lends itself well to teleworking and all employees
concerned are willing to do the work, there may be those among them who do not
possess the necessary qualities. Teleworkers must be recruited from among
people who are independent, experienced, motivated and capable of exercising
self-discipline.
Some managers have difficulty in practising
remote management and control: there are certain executives who are unable to assess the performance
of the personnel they manage without seeing it at first hand. Without the
possibility of physically controlling and communicating face to face with the
teleworker, they are unable to avoid problems and misunderstandings.
Danger of disputes over equipment ownership: who does the home-based office
equipment belong to? Some items may belong to the company and others to the
employee. It is therefore important to clarify from the outset who the owner is
of this or that piece of equipment. A home-based teleworking contract must
specify the equipment installed in the home-based office and who owns it.
Danger of disputes concerning equipment
maintenance:
regular maintenance and periodical upgrading of equipment and software are
indispensable. Who is to be responsible for these activities? If the equipment
is damaged because of negligence or misuse, who is to be responsible for the
repairs?
Trade unions are sometimes against the
principle of teleworking: some employee unions may look on home-based teleworking as providing a
means for the employer to circumvent certain rules laid down in labour law (working
hours, conditions of hygiene and security, etc.).
There is a
triple risk for the individual inherent in the "all-screen" practice
(where the computer screen is involved in every operation), which is becoming
an increasingly important feature of distance-working: in the area of living
and working conditions, in regard to work content and methods and where the
management of teleworking is concerned.
Looking
first at living and working conditions,
dealing with everything on the computer screen away from the office can have
the following effects:
·
additional
fatigue bound up with the extra effort required to read what appears on the
screen (ocular fatigue), efforts to memorise texts (it is harder to memorise
several pages of screen text than printed pages) and the working posture (neck
and back ache, pains in the wrists and arms)
·
a
faster work pace in cases where the workstation is part of a chain (as in
workflow applications for automating administrative tasks)
·
the
risk of conflict between the requirements of professional activity and domestic
constraints (home-based teleworking). The partner, children, parents and
neighbours sometimes find it difficult to understand and accept the fact that
the teleworker – office employee or executive – remains riveted to the computer
for days on end.
Secondly,
the problem of work content and methods: the computerisation of work done away
from the office can have various forms of impact:
·
The
risk of degeneration of tasks and an increasing degree of repetitiveness. From
the very start, it has been claimed that the applications offered by
information technology would give us precious extra time by automating
repetitive tasks. Admittedly, new professions have appeared with the growth of
the Internet and multimedia (Webmaster, multimedia designers, etc.), but in the
traditional professions, the change benefits only qualified information workers
(journalists, researchers, consultants, etc.) as their work tool enable them to
save time without necessarily affecting the content of their work
·
For
employees, the danger of losing freedom of action in organising their work.
Given that it is the machine that directly specifies the order in which the
tasks are to be processed, it becomes difficult to start with the file or
operation of their own choosing
·
The risk of an upheaval in work communities, resulting directly from
geographical fragmentation. This is accompanied by a lesser degree —even a
complete loss, in some cases— of training contact and the sharing of experience
with other members of the work group
·
less
direct contact with the managerial structure, bound up with the existence of
the "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome.
Lastly,
where the management of teleworking
is concerned, the automation of telework can bring about:
·
difficulties
of adaptation by teleworkers at the moment of changing their normal practices
·
individualisation
of work supervision (home-based teleworking) applied only to teleworkers and
not to other employees
·
a loss
of power on the part of the immediate management resulting from the time and
volume of work being checked directly by the computer
·
inequality
in the area of personal consideration and treatment between office-based employees
and teleworkers
·
the
disappearance of work distribution, consulting and co-ordination functions
exercised by the immediate management and a calling into question of the latter
·
the
possibility of easily transferring computerised work from one site to another
(a consequence of the break-up of the work group)in order, for example, to
counter the impact of a strike at a particular site.
The
implementation of an organisation based on teleworking is frequently
accompanied by objective-based individual management. In this scenario, each
teleworker has to attain a specified result and is given a certain freedom of
choice as to work tools and work pace. This tends to instil a greater degree of
professionalism in the teleworker. However, autonomy governed by set objectives
can also have two types of adverse effect:
·
it can
endow the employee with a strong identity in the company, which can lead
to ever-increasing demands, personal
stress (his whole being is propelled towards the image he wishes to give of
himself in the company) and conflict within the family circle (in the case of
home-based teleworking)
·
or it
can bring about a change in the professionalisation of the activity concerned
which, in turn, gives rise to a change in the status of the teleworker, who
sometimes opts for changing his status from that of employee to that of
self-employed worker on sub-contract to his former employer.
In the
final analysis, if no caution is exercised, there is a danger that greater
autonomy could have a series of negative effects ranging between two extremes:
job alienation and insecure employment.
Here follow
some examples of specific problems encountered in salaried home-based
teleworking:
·
lack
of space: as a place for setting up their office, a great many teleworkers opt
for living areas not furnished for the purpose, which can give rise to conflict
with domestic demands and raise doubt as to data security
·
risk
of social isolation: mainly felt among less qualified teleworkers
·
duration
of work: the effective time put in by home-based teleworkers often exceeds the
legal limit
·
less
security of employment than for office-based employees
·
risk
of this category of worker being totally deprived of union representation.
There are
other problems of more direct concern to independent workers. Qualified
professionals in many cases, these teleworkers are happy with their
independence and the feeling of freedom conferred on them by their professional
status, but they are confronted with the risk of social isolation and they have
to face the issue of uncertain revenues. They also complain of the slowness of
payment and the unpredictability of work with periods of inactivity following
periods of intense stress caused by the need to respect deadlines that are set
as short as possible.
"Mobile" teleworkers are mainly people whose weekly working time often exceeds 60 hours.
Their
functions give mobile teleworkers social contact with their customers and work
colleagues and they escape the isolation and boredom syndrome that hits many
home-based teleworkers. Unlike these, however, they are generally unable to
enjoy the possibility of adapting their working hours to suit domestic
constraints.
Mobile
teleworkers constitute the group most frequently confronted with the problem of
"tele-presence". These workers are very soon equipped with a cell
phone of other means of enabling them to be reached at any hour of the day or
night wherever they happen to be. Many companies have no hesitation in
demanding a degree of availability that would have been inconceivable just ten
years ago – whenever the call arrives, they must be able to make themselves
immediately available to the company.
Institutional protagonists of teleworking often
put forward as proof the fact that teleworking at home or close to the home
helps to reduce traffic jams in urban areas and traffic-related pollution. The
Norwegian Institute for Transport Economics recently assessed the impact of
teleworking on road traffic in 2010 in two of the country's biggest cities, Oslo and Bergen.
Its survey revealed a comparatively minor
impact: a reduction of between 3% and 6% in urban car traffic. Despite its low
level, this reduction could nevertheless be of considerable help in reducing
traffic jams and the associated pollution during peak hours. But there are some
traffic engineers who are sceptical on this point; they claim that home-based
teleworkers will then make more local trips, thus reducing the expected
benefits accordingly.
The growth of teleworking in its various forms
may lead to a dual shift. Firstly, within the firm itself, where a shift
towards a poly-cellular organisation can be observed. Secondly, outside the
firm there can be a shift towards countries where the activities can easily be
relocated. For example, Swissair has relocated the encoding of its accounts to
Bombay in India, several Paris-based firms have relocated their computer
maintenance services to Bangalore, while the encoding of French case law is now
carried out in China. Some trade unions fear that the relocation of
information-related services may contribute to an increase in unemployment and
job insecurity in countries that outsource these services. They believe that
offshore relocation of intangible activities could cause increasing social
damage and would be more difficult to control than industrial relocation.
There are many futurologists who equate the
Information Society with new ways of living and working together. But it
appears Utopian and dangerous to make a twenty-year prediction. There may be
reason to consider that technological choices concerning communication networks
and services are techno-structural choices but any attempt at technological
determinism must be excluded. For example, it has been found that while the
development of railways over the past century accompanied a decentralisation
movement in Germany, at the same time in France, it instead accentuated the
centralisation trend.
With the development of communication systems
and the accompanying organisational changes, the traditional line drawn between
work and other human activities is becoming increasingly indistinct. Factors
such as these can both endow the individual with a degree of autonomy in his
work that Taylorism had deprived him of and perpetuate or lend strength to
certain forms of exploitation or social exclusion.
Some economists and sociologists fear that
large-scale development of teleworking will have harmful effects.
Firms could be strongly tempted to adopt a
total flexibility model that would tend favourably towards excessive
liberalism, resulting in deregulation of the labour market with a danger of:
·
a
reduction in salary-based employment and an increase in task-based remuneration
·
a loss
of the company's social integration function: durable models implying strong
links between employee and employer would be replaced by multiple links (with
several employers), geographical
dispersion and instability of revenues
·
a
reduction in consumption due to a lower degree of activity on the part of
teleworkers, giving rise to a recessional spiral
·
the
creation of inequality between the more productive personnel, well integrated
into information and knowledge networks, and others edged out because they are
behind in the use of new technologies.
Aware of the inescapable character of the
development of teleworking, they recommend that a framework be drawn up for
regulating the societal teleworking model.
The general
spread of work based on the tight flow principle and the effect of a breakdown
in systems whose vulnerability has often been revealed a posteriori raise fundamental questions as to technological
dangers. For, as emphasised by sociologist Paul Virilio [VIR 96], every
technology carries its own degree of negativeness, its own specific risks. Over
and above the teleworking problem alone, Paul Virilio points out that the
Internet carries an "integral accident" risk. While it has hitherto
been possible to say that an accident occurred at a given place and at a given
time, in the case of the Internet the place would be the world and the accident
would occur at the same time among all its networked entities. At the beginning
of this new millennium, the Internet is undeniably a means of communication par
excellence, but as a tool synonymous with freedom it is becoming increasingly
uncontrollable [VIR 96].