Barriers to Telework

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Organisational attitudes, culture and structure
3. Human skills, abilities & knowledge
4. Infrastructure availability & cost
5. Hardware and software
6. Employment legislation and contracts
7. Professional codes, regulations and business practices
8. Planning, transport and environment
9. Tax, insurance & other regulations
10. Conclusions
11. Afterword and Next Steps

This paper has been prepared in support of the European Telework Development Initiative, by Ursula Huws (analytica), with F.E.K. Britton (EcoPlan International). We present this as our best analysis of these events and trends, something which we are able to do with confidence since we are both not only long time students of the telework field but also practitioners who for better or worse work with these technologies and constraints every day.

What you have here is thus not a theoretical view. It should not, however, be treated as something which is or really can be final or definitive. It provides a snapshot of a dynamic, fast evolving process taken at one point in time. That said, this report points up a number of real problems, and a few opportunities, to which we hope the Commission, and perhaps our colleagues at the European Telework Development Initiative will choose to give their close attention in the weeks and months ahead. There is, as you will shortly see, quite a bit that needs to be done in order to permit this important new sector of economic activity to take its full and rightful place in what is increasingly an Information Society. And the people and the groups that are out there in the economy trying to do their best with these tools are deserving of this support.

This report summarizes some of the main barriers, legal, social, economic and cultural, holding back the development of teleworking in Europe. While making no attempt to provide an encyclopedic compilation, it concentrates instead on the identification of barriers which in the authors’ view are both posing significant problems and potentially amenable to more informed and active public policy. While it looks at the topic from a global perspective, in its recommendations the report focuses in particular on areas in which the European Commission can make a contribution to breaking down some of the most debilitating of these barriers. In this respect, then, it is an opportunity oriented policy paper. This summary provides a brief overview by chapter of the authors’ main findings and recommendations as set out in detail in the full report.

The report uses a broad definition of teleworking - indeed it treats the term as a portmanteau word signifying the way in which telematics has enabled many kinds of work can be carried out anytime, anywhere, by anyone with access to the right technology and infrastructure and the skills to use them and to communicate effectively over a distance; in other words it covers any form of telematically-enabled delocalisation of information-processing work.

It is our view that the introduction of teleworking forms part of a change which is so profound that it will leave few institutions untouched. However it is not the purpose of this paper to offer a complete blueprint for a new information society. Rather, it is intended to attention focus on factors which:

• appear to offer specific barriers to the introduction of teleworking in the EU under current conditions; and
• appear to be amenable, to some degree, to action by EC policy-makers.

Hierarchical and bureaucratic organisational structures, work-cultures which privilege co-presence, command-based management styles and time-based management all constitute barriers to the adoption and successful implementation of teleworking.

There is a need to develop a network culture in existing organisations; with a greater emphasis on individual empowerment, management by results, continuous learning, flatter hierarchies and the use of telematics not only for communication but also to support collaborative group working for dispersed teams.

The European Commission can play a role not only by improving awareness and encouraging change but also by setting an example in the way it organises its own functions.

Lack of skills and knowledge form another barrier to teleworking. There is a need for:

• Training managers in the management of teleworking;
• Training potential or new teleworkers in both generic skills (such as how to use communications software) and job-specific skills; and
• Providing ongoing training to existing teleworkers (as with office-based staff) to enable them to upgrade their skills
• Training for the colleagues of teleworkers and others who have every dealings with them
• Training to be made available for self-employed teleworkers and those working for small firms.
• Research on the qualities required for successful independent working and how they can best be acquired and encouraged

The Commission can make a positive contribution to removing the barriers posed by inadequate telecommunications infrastructure and excessively high costs by:

• Continuing to support the extension and upgrading of the telecommunications infrastructure in disadvantaged regions of Europe
• Supporting the continuing liberalisation of the telecommunications sector in the EU
• Continuing to support the development of common standards
• Ensuring that the needs of rural and disadvantaged areas are fully taken into account in the development and implementation of universal service requirements and that these requirements extend beyond fixed voice telephony to include broadband and cellular networks
• Encouraging telecommunications suppliers in the EU to offer cost packages which help to support teleworking and minimise the relative cost disadvantage to teleworkers situated in remote, rural or disadvantaged areas
• Exploring the possibility of offering subsidised telecommunications services to the unemployed and/or those setting up new enterprises, as a means of job creation, in order to kick-start teleworking in areas with high unemployment

In some cases, a lack of suitable hardware and/or software creates a barrier to teleworking. There is a need for:

• Hardware and software adapted for the needs of people with disabilities (for whom teleworking represents a major employment opportunity)
• Software availability in minority languages, and programs to support translation to and from such languages
• Software to support co-operative, interactive group-working in ways which are more subtle than the - mainly somewhat crude - groupware currently on the market. Dg xiii is already funding research and demonstrator projects in this area. This could usefully be extended and developed further

Because the legislation changes markedly from one EU member state to another, it is difficult to generalise with confidence about the extent to which its terms constitute an actual barrier to teleworking. In general, we can conclude that it is usually not the legislation per se which constitutes the barrier, since it rarely explicitly forbids homeworking or flexible working. Rather, the barrier arises from the (often legitimate) fears of workers that they will be disadvantaged by losing some of the protection which is available to on-site workers if they become teleworkers.

There is a strong case to be made for introducing some minimal level of legal protection for low-skilled telehomeworkers who work exclusively from home for a single employer. However this should be framed with reference to 'homeworking' not 'teleworking'. Insofar as they work from home, teleworkers would automatically be covered by any such regulations, but it could not then be used to restrict the development of other, more socially positive, forms of teleworking.

With this one exception, a more constructive approach in the short to medium term would be to clarify, and if necessary amend, existing regulations to ensure that they do not inadvertently disadvantage teleworkers. This might include:

• ensuring that health and safety legislation applies appropriately to all employees regardless of where they work
• clarifying the rules which determine whether a worker is to be defined as an employee or as self-employed and ensuring that these rules are consistently applied regardless of the place of work (in relation to tax, employment protection and entitlement to unemployment, invalidity, pension and other social benefits)
• ensuring that equal pay and sex and race discrimination legislation applies regardless of the place of work
• ensuring that minimum wage legislation includes formulae for translating time-based wage rates into rates which can be applied when workers are paid by results
• removal of the legal barriers to working from home which exist for civil servants in some member states.
• harmonisation across the EU of regulations determining which national law should apply in the case of cross-border teleworking

In the longer term, a major review of the tax/benefit system in each member state should be carried out with the object of making it more appropriate to the needs of a flexible workforce.

7. Professional codes, regulations. Business practices

In some countries and sectors, professional codes, regulations and business practices place obstacles in the way of teleworking. These include

• rules requiring written confirmation of verbal agreements.
• rules requiring personal signatures on documents.
• late payment practices.
• intellectual property issues.
• security issues.

Some of these could usefully be addressed by Europe-wide regulatory changes. In most cases, however, the most appropriate action would be a review of their existing practices by professional associations themselves.

The design and planning of housing and cities does not accommodate teleworking comfortably in many cases and sometimes constitutes a major barrier. There is a need to increase awareness of teleworking amongst architects, planners and transport providers and encourage the development of creative solutions to such problems.

Tax regulations, whether these refer to income taxes, value-added taxes, local property taxes or other forms of taxation, are extremely complex and vary considerably between member states. Often, they do not just cause difficulties at a local level; they also potential create differences between EU regions, placing barriers in the way of cross-border teleworking.

The Commission could play a useful catalytic role both in persuading member states to simplify their regulations and produce clear information to employers and teleworkers, and in working towards a harmonisation of such regulations across the EU.

The issues raised by teleworking cut across many of the traditional divisions, both in academic disciplines and in policy responsibility. They include, for instance, transport issues, environmental issues, taxation issues, regional development issues, equal opprtunities issues, employment legislation issues, social policy issues, and issues of international trade. In order to be tackled effectively, they require a holistic approach, in which policy-makers from these very different areas come together in a spirit of creative problem-solving. They also require changes in practice, in ways of doing things, including not least on the part of agencies and organisations in the public sector, most of which have been very slow on the uptake with these new technologies and ways of doing things.

By a strange irony, because it is almost exclusively involved with the processing of information, and because it covers such a hugely dispersed geographical area, with a commitment to subsidiarity, the Commission is itself an ideal candidate for teleworking. It is, perhaps, only when an internal teleworking culture has taken hold within the Commission itself that it will be in a position fully to appreciate some of the problems we have outlined above, and to develop innovative solutions to them.

Moreover, it is our firm belief that once this new level of ‘cultural awareness’ has been fully achieved, the Commission is going properly equipped to emerge as a major force on the European scene to help accelerate developments in this new and exciting field of economic activity, as well as to shape it in ways that are going to improve not only overall economic efficiency and competitivity but also – and certainly no less important – social equity. This last is particularly important, bearing in mind that telework, like virtually all new technologies, is potentially highly asymmetrical in its impacts, offering its considerable advantages to those who are already, as it happens, most favored: the individuals, groups and regions with the economic and educational advantages that combine to give them early access to all new technologies and organizational developments. The Commission can in this way undertake to ensure that these developments favor all across Europe, including those regions and groups who otherwise risk to be left out.

Finally, we would like to make the point that the Commission, if it now takes this important step of "leading by example" in the area of telework (perhaps its most important single contribution) is going to provide a much-needed model that could have major impacts on government practices across Europe, which for the most part are lagging considerably behind the leading edge of private sector practice, and at considerable cost for all involved. The authors of this report intend to observe closely these developments in the months and several years ahead, because this is not a window of opportunity that is going to stay open indefinitely.

The authors view this report as but one step in what we hope will evolve into a considerably larger and more inclusive process. While it has looked at barriers to teleworking from the particular vantage of the European Commission in these closing months of 1997, there is, we recognise, a great deal more to the challenge than just that.

The Commission is however only one among many actors concerned, and while it has an opportunity for leadership on an international scale, the telework revolution is going to take place with or without such leadership. Moreover, practices and barriers in the sector are kaleidoscopic and fast changing, differing wildly not only from place to place and institution to institution, but also from month to month and person to person. For all these reasons, it cannot be expected of even the most competent of observers to capture anything more than a partial snapshot whose validity is inevitably time-bound and incomplete.

Happily there is a mechanism already in place that can help the Commission – if it decides to seize this leadership opportunity -- to build on, refine and improve the various ideas and recommendations that are set out in these pages in the fully dynamic manner which we feel to be appropriate to the challenges. This is the European Telework Development Initiative (which as the reader may have noted is the sponsor of the present thinkpiece).

With this in mind, we would like to set out here a few closing thoughts about a process which we believe could now usefully build on and extend the work that has at least been begun in these pages. First however we would like to comment briefly on the process by which this report itself has been produced, and then share with you some of the critical comments and reactions that we received to earlier drafts of these materials. With these building blocks in hand, we will close out this final section with several suggestions for follow-up and next steps.

As is fitting for our topic, the present report was prepared through a process of telework that spanned a number of collaborators and no less than half a dozen countries. The two authors exchanged ideas and text at various times while working on related advisory assignments in various locations in Britain, France, India and the United States, for a client of course located in Brussels, all the time with the continuing help of a project manager in Denmark. Communications over this period took place at various times via normal voice telephone, fax, email, computer-to-computer data links, and high speed ISDN lines. Over the several months that the report took to get done we faced at least one major equipment breakdowns, as well as several diligent searches for a working phone line in rural India in the hope of emailing some portions of the working draft, and then rather long wait times for a dial tone. We moreover had the benefit of comments from colleagues in Spain, France, Britain and the United States, some of which came in via voice and videoconference and others through the Net, as well as the more conventional means.

We might add for the record that at no time during this process have any of us actually met physically together. The entire process, from initial project scoping to handing over of the final closely reviewed report, has been carried out entirely by electronic means (as will, hopefully, swift final payment to the authors). And while this is, incidentally, the main method of work of both authors over the last decade or so, we felt that it was useful to bring this up here as a reminder that telework is not only a matter of ‘distance study’ and theory but also of daily practice.

Over the course of the project and as part of the dynamic review process, we received a continuing steam of critical comments setting out observations, ideas and recommendations, many of which relevant to the telework field but not all of which, for various reasons, the present report was able to do full justice to. In some cases, we had to set aside certain ideas because they appeared to us to have more to do with supporting telework, as opposed to being barriers per se. And while we did this with some regret, because we believe strongly that the Commission has an important support function in this fast emerging field of activity, we felt that it was important not to dilute the focus of our inquiry. In a number of other cases the barriers mentioned were not, in the authors' view at least, of sufficient priority for the Commission to warrant special mention at this point, though many of these certainly merit attention in other contexts.

To give you an idea of the variety and richness of the feedback received, here are a few direct citations, which we share with you at this point as an indication of our belief that the most creative use of this short report will be not as a once and for all encyclopaedic listing of every barrier that ever got in the way of teleworking, but as an initial thinkpiece which can now be used to spark debate, focus attention, and, it is to be hoped, generate some new approaches to the issues before us. With this in view, we invite you to consider the following selected comments which we have received from colleagues in the last weeks:

• Telework changes not only the where and when of work but also the what and how, e.g. the way existing work is done is changed and new types of work are created and old types destroyed. In other words, we are not just doing the same things in different places and at different times, but also doing them in new ways and doing new things because of telework.
  
• Under your section on organisational attitudes, culture and structure, it would also have been useful to have your thoughts on:
  
• The middle, as opposed to top, management problem
• The role of down-sizing, outsourcing, virtual organisations, etc., driven by changes in the market and how ICTs are enabling them to respond to these
• Delegation of responsibility
• Cultural differences within Europe to do with organisation, management, etc.
  

• Apart from management not knowing how to cope with the challenge of telework (and often being threatened by it) perhaps the biggest barrier is management's failure to appreciate the business case for telework, i.e. how it will benefit their company (productivity, efficiency, flexibility, cutting costs, wider labour market, etc., etc.)
  
• Any views or comments on what many people regard as a crucial barrier, i.e. lack of flexibility in the labour market? This depends of course on precisely what things are covered by this, but it is often said by some -- and disputed by others -- that flexible labour markets equate with a high incidence of teleworking. We suppose what is meant here is things like freedom of employers to hire and fire, to set working conditions, wages, etc., the ability of employees to organisation, the role of trade unions, the status and comprehensiveness of collective bargaining, etc., etc. (Telework, amongst other things, is more likely to be driven by the move to a post welfare state culture than by a flexible labour market defined in terms of lax or absent laws, rules and regulations, although these latter things undoubtedly have an impact.).
  
• We must be sure not to stray from the issue of BARRIERS. It is not, as we see it, the job of this paper to say what's wonderful about teleworking. The issues you raise about the welfare state are very complex -- perhaps too complex to go into in depth here. The main reason being that the structure of the different European systems are so different that something which would offer a solution in one country (e.g. individualisation of benefits, on the Nordic model, would make life much better for teleworkers in the UK and Ireland) would actually make things worse in another (individualisation of benefits would heavily penalise women in the informal economy in the Mediterranean countries where being treated as part of the (mainly agricultural) family unit acknowledges some of their unpaid labour & gives them rights to pensions and things. For rather different reasons, it would also bring huge problems in Germany and Holland). Thus there's a danger of being glib here, which we would very much like to avoid.
  
• What about more explicit reference to the relative levels of understanding, take up and use of the relevant technologies (ICTs and their basic applications): (a) in Europe as compared with other regions with whom we compete for trade and therefore jobs - the USA is well ahead of Europe in this respect and Japan and some other countries are overtaking us, and (b) across Europe, for example in Greece and Portugal as compared with Scandinavia, to cite the extremes?
  
• Although you have quite rightly drawn attention to some of the underlying causes of relatively low take up, from a telework perspective it is true that people who understand and use the technologie are more likely to take kindly to the idea of teleworking than people for whom the technologies are a mystery, so low relative take up is itself a barrier not just a symptom of the underlying causes. Indeed its plausible to suggest a Catch 22 at work here - for example in a country where the technology is widely in use, there is political and popular understanding of the need for a progressive and liberal regulatory environment, while in a country where ICTs are not yet in popular everyday use there is little interest in the nuances of regulations about them.
  
• The same holds true for employment law - attitudes are more conservative in, say, Spain than in the UK. More liberal attitudes have led to more teleworking etc but more attention to teleworking etc has reinforced the trend to more liberal attitudes. Liberal employment approaches may have led to higher employment or higher employment may have engendered more liberal attitudes!
  
• Then too there are differences of national/regional cultures and environments that may be worth pointing out:
• National or even local cultures and norms are important alongside organisational culture. Indeed it is possible to see (for example) organisation culture as at least in part reflecting the background culture of the society in which the organisation is placed. Anyone who has worked in a large multinational (whether IT or oil or whatever) will confirm that (for example) IBM France behaves differently from IBM Germany behaves differently from IBM UK behaves differently from IBM USA. Europe seeks to retain cultural differentiation so this is an important real factor not just an issue to be addressed.
• The local economic situation plays a key role in attitudes to telework. In London telework may be a matter of preferences, company costs and travel- avoidance; in Spain it's a matter of "do I have more chance of getting a job this way than by applying to local employers". Therefore the barriers vary according to both the current state of the economy locally and local expectations of how that will change.
• Geographic location can also be important across Europe. In Greece where the sun shines and the olives grow and the fish jump out of the sea, the basic cost of living is lower and attitudes to work are generally rather relaxed. In Northern Sweden one needs warm clothing, central heating, solidly built houses, snow tyres, and a high income to buy even the basics of life. If a computer or a telecom connection were the same prices in Greece and in Sweden, they would look much more expensive to the Greek and less expensive to the Swede; moreover Greece has 20% of its people still working in agriculture. Sweden only 3 per cent.
  So we do need some further reflection of these country/regional differences to make it clear that barriers to telework will and should look different in different parts of Europe, so that local and regional actors should have different priorities in mind in addressing them.
• As to restrictive practices, within certain professions, trades, regions, etc., it seems to us that this could take several forms:

  1)Keeping people out of doing work they may be eminently qualified or competent to do as teleworkers;
  

  2) Obstructing individuals within certain trades/professions for expanding or shifting their task set as teleworkers, e.g. because of demarcation issues;
  

  3) The artificial preservation of professions/trades from change and/or the establishment of new professions/trades which could arise from teleworking. Teleworking enables individuals to cross professional/trade boundaries (as well as geographic ones), thereby changing the market place for jobs and employment, so such restrictive practices could be a barrier to telework.

• The present section on professional codes etc, proposes more research on matters such as written agreements, signatures etc. Actually there is plenty of research on this; what is missing is the legally viable framework. For example only one country (Germany) has introduced any legal arrangements for recognition of digital signatures, although the technology and mechanisms are well understood. The same goes for IPR and security. I'd suggest the barriers here are very strongly to do with public policy and legislation rather then research and technology. In general, the ETD perspective is that while there is infinite scope for research, a very high proportion of the issues are in fact understood and research should be accompanied by action rather than delays in action being justified on the grounds that not enough is known!
  
• In this regard it will be useful to distinguish between enabling or clarifying action and controlling action. Usually there is no research _required_ prior to enabling or clarifying legislation or regulation, but there may well be a case to avoid <controlling legislation or regulation> too early.
• For example, we should urge clarification on the legal etc. position of teleworkers and self-employed people, but we should avoid rushing into regulations that would place boundaries around what a teleworker or a self-employed person is allowed to do.
• Equally we should reinforce the view that where an employer determines the working environment (if for example working at home is a basis for recruitment as it is in many sales positions) then the employer has definite responsibilities regarding what support, equipment etc is provided.
• But where (for example) a prospective employee says <I will only take this job if you let me work at home three days a week> then it would be perverse in the extreme to make the employer responsible for making sure the employee behaves in particular ways while working at home.

We are not suggesting these examples be used, just trying to illustrate the point that there are many aspects of <barriers> that are nothing to do with the law and with public policy and we need to make this clear.

• Although the Commission is the recipient of the formal deliverable, we need to be clear that it is not the only actor who can/will influence these barriers and in some cases is not the main actor. The point of analysing the barriers is to point to what actions need to be taken by whom. The Commission is nowadays the lead actor in employment law, but not (for example) in areas such as employment training, education, local development planning/controls, hardware and software design, pricing and distribution.
  
• There is a case for saying that telework only takes off when a post-welfare state culture starts to permeate in a society. Such a culture is not the absence of a welfare state but one in which the traditional notion of a welfare state, based on rights, cradle-to-grave support from the state, centralisation, equality and standardisation, is replaced by a more dynamic welfare state culture (post welfare state?) based just as much on responsibility (especially individual responsibility), opportunities, acceptance of differences and some inequalities, decentralisation, etc.

Next Steps

If the above shows anything, it has to be that this is a process which has now been engaged but which is far from being completed with this one report. It also, we think, points up the importance of the barriers issues, as well as beginning to give us some further insights as to what the Commission and other concerned institutions in both the public and private sectors might now begin to consider for remedial and other actions.

The process of barrier identification and removal is something which we would like to suggest is best viewed not as a burden or accusation, but as an opportunity. It is also one that, if it is to be fully realised must be both inclusive and carried out in a timely manner. As the report makes clear, these are opportunities which need to be seized in a much tighter time frame than most of the traditional research approaches are accustomed to address. With this in view, we would now like to propose the following follow up process.

As an immediate next step, we propose that a small brainstorming session now be organised, perhaps in Brussels and certainly in the weeks directly ahead, which will bring together the report’s authors, several key people from the ETD and a small core group of people from the Commission who are in a position to make and implement concrete near term follow-up in terms of actual barrier identification and renewal, both within the Commission itself and more broadly within its ambit (i.e., within at least a sample of on-going European projects, perhaps within the European Parliament, etc.).

This group may wish to consider the advisability of setting up some sort of Barriers Task Force, to operate as a consultative and advisory on a continuing basis for say two or three years at least, possibly but not necessarily within the context of the ETD itself. And certainly there can be no doubt that much the greater part of the actual work of such a task force will best be carried out by state of the art application of telework technologies, because it is clear to our minds that the only valid source of practical guidance in this important area of technology and enterprise has to be from practitioners who work with these technologies, warts and all, on a day to day basis.

Among the tools at its disposal will of course be the Internet and the World Wide Web as means for gathering both suggestions and comments from many places on a continuing basis, bearing in mind that the construction and management of such a site will require both time and talent. Likewise, we would like to see extensive use of the full range of group work technologies (videoconferencing, whiteboarding, high sped data exchanges) on a daily basis within not only the Task Force but as many of its working partners and sources as possible. These are powerful tools which are presently providing an enormous edge to those firms in the private sector who have understood their potential. We see no good reason that these same technologies, routines, and this same sense of high urgency should not now be harnessed for the purposes of this undertaking, which we regard of at least as high priority as the products and services to which the private sector is giving its attention.

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