Telework

Telework, also known as work from home or mobile working, has attracted renewed attention due to the deployment of technologies that make it feasible to work wherever possible. Reduction in transportation time and work/family balance are among the interests put forward to explain the interest in telework. The attraction is particularly important in countries confronted with time-consuming travels to work and urban congestion, which often translate into work/family balancing problems. It appears to be more developed in the Anglophone world (United States, United Kingdom, Canada) and the Nordic countries, while southern Europe seems to lag behind.

Telework can cover various realities, and this explains why it is difficult to evaluate the exact scope or extent of telework in various countries or firms. Indeed, in some research, telework refers to work from home, which can be close to piecework, but in some research, telework only includes the modern forms of work at home, based on the use of information and communication technology (ICT).

C. Sullivan proposes that telework be defined according to the nature of the relevant work schemes as they are governed by transportation, ICTs, the work place, the extent or portion of distance work, and the applicable terms and conditions. The home working category is a work program generally associated with self-employed workers, piecework employees (e.g., seamstresses), or salespeople operating from their home (telemarketing). The latter belong to home working and not so much to remote working or salaried telework.

For a number of researchers, especially Europeans, telework includes work in delocalized business centers or satellite offices manned by personnel of the same company, which is sometimes referred to as mobile work or e-work. Others also include mobile work carried out anywhere outside the office (salespersons, technicians, etc.), and TeleCenters, TeleTowns, and TeleCottages (telecommuting) where employees are gathered to serve different employers. Some even consider that sales personnel and representatives are teleworkers because they are most often at clients’ premises and sometimes work from their home, but mostly because there is not an office or desk for them at their employer's location. A special issue of the journal New Technology, Work and Employment (volume 18) devoted to telework highlighted the fact that it is difficult to find a single definition. From this general point of view, it [Page 872]is possible to distinguish three forms of telework: work at home, work in clients’ offices, and work in business centers or satellite offices.

The time dimension can also serve to differentiate various types of teleworkers, since the number of days spent out of the office leads to identifying full-time home workers and part-time or occasional home workers, the latter only working a few hours or a few days a week from home. Although men doing telework are usually professionals and managers doing a few hours at home each day or week, full-time teleworkers tend to be women, and this can translate into job segmentation and inequalities in work.

Official data on teleworkers involved in formal telework programs seem quite low: between 5 and 7 percent of the labor force in Canada and between 2 and 15 percent in other countries, again depending on the definition. The interest of individuals in telework is much higher, since some 29 percent of respondents in a Canadian survey indicated that they would be interested in teleworking and thought it was possible to do so in their specific job. Also, data indicate that a higher percentage of teleworkers work from home on an occasional and informal basis, with the percentage being as high as 20 percent. Thus, the definitions and modes of telework are quite varied. The broader the definition, the higher the number of teleworkers in a given country or region.

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