Unions and cost slow down moves to work from home

For all the promotion by BT and the encouragement by management gurus, teleworking is still the exception rather than the norm in Europe, according to research published this month.

More than 85 per cent of organisations with more than 200 employees do not have any employee on a telework contract, says the Cranfield Network for European Human Resource Management, based at the Cranfield School of Management. However, it also finds that in every European country there appears to be at least one organisation in which a substantial proportion of employees are teleworkers.

Teleworking is among the new flexible labour practices advocated by the European Commission on the grounds that it allows labour to be matched more closely with the needs of organisations and employees. By offering flexibility in terms of workplace, it also reduces the cost of commuting.

But the survey reveals levels of teleworking differ substantially among European countries. In Sweden, 30 per cent of organisations employ teleworkers and in two per cent of the country's organisations at least 20 per cent of workers telework.

But, while Norway and Finland are among the other heavy users of teleworkers, it is not purely a north European phenomenon; it is, for instance, not so common in Denmark.

And telework is not more common in the UK than in other European countries - 92 per cent of UK organisations do not employ teleworkers.

It also goes some way towards dispelling the idea that teleworking is confined to the public sector and service businesses. The practice is, for example, also present in manufacturing.

Among the factors that affect the speed at which organisations take up teleworking are companies going through such fundamental changes as mergers or takeovers and relocations.

Conversely, organisations are less likely to introduce teleworking if they have comparatively high staff turnover rates, while there is also evidence that unions have been able to prevent or delay the introduction of such schemes.

Nevertheless, although teleworking remains a marginal activity, it is growing. According to the survey, seven per cent of all European organisations increased their numbers of teleworkers between 1992 and 1995, and only a few reduced the numbers.

Jos van Ommeren is senior researcher at the Cranfield Centre for European Human Resource Management, which is a pan-European network of 20 businesses collaborating in the human resources field and co-ordinated by Cranfield. He said: "In the past, the cost of communications prevented the economic use of teleworking and in many instances it is still one of the major expenses incurred.

"However, these costs are falling rapidly. In future the growth of the use of teleworking will not be constrained by technology or communication costs, but by employers' reluctance to introduce teleworking when they are unable to measure the output of their employees."