Case grows for teleworking

Firms can no longer cite technical or financial reasons for not supporting teleworking practices, and the main barrier to allowing staff to work from home is the difficulty of monitoring their output, according to recent research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Evidence also suggests that home workers with broadband connections to company networks are more productive than those with dial-up links.

"Companies may have good reasons not to adopt remote working, but technology, productivity and costs aren't among them. These are smokescreen objections," said Andrew Palmer, senior editor at the EIU.

The unit surveyed 237 senior executives from 17 industries across Europe, Asia and the US. The findings indicate that 80 percent of companies will have employees working remotely by 2005, up from 54 percent today. Potential cost savings were cited by 70 percent as the main benefit of remote working, followed by increased productivity (64%). Fifty-six percent said that the difficulty of monitoring staff output was the biggest obstacle to teleworking.

But suspicions that staff are wasting time at home are unjustified in many cases, and can be eradicated with effective analysis of individual jobs and the implementation of defined output assessment rules with set targets and deadlines for specific tasks.

"There are many concerns about how manageable employees are when you put them in a home environment, but in many cases, managers don't work in the same office as their workers anyway," said Kevin Harvey, a UK country manager at AT&T. He added that to protect data the main concern should be for physical security rather than network protection.

Harvey said staff who use dial-up rather than broadband links are likely to be less productive - which may be bad news for staff in many areas of the UK where broadband services are still unavailable.

"It is a lot easier to support teleworkers with broadband than those with dial-up. That's not to say workers with dial-up cannot work from home, but the productivity gains are not as great," said Harvey.

AT&T said 17 percent of its own staff are regular teleworkers, and 40 percent occasionally work from home, resulting in savings of about $150m per year from reduced property rentals, lower staff turnover and productivity gains. The company said it provides teleworkers with equipment and helpdesk support, pays their connection costs and puts money towards the cost of home power and heating bills.

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