06 September 2006
“Hi – I’m on the train”. The clichéd response to a mobile phone call has become the constant bane of commuters. Most subsequent overheard conversations are littered with trivial domestic concerns. But the mobile worker using some form of information and communications technology (ICT) is also increasingly visible – phone in hand, Blackberry or laptop computer networked for action.
These wired wanderers – nowadays populating cafés and restaurants as well as public transport – are commonly portrayed as exemplars of a new kind of ICT enhanced nomadic workforce. The inference is that they are rarely found in the office but instead toil away on the move, only occasionally touching base with colleagues face to face across an impersonal hot desk. Yet many are likely to be as office bound as their pre-ICT forebears and simply dealing with a variety of business matters while travelling to and from work or meetings.
Official statistics shed little light on how many of us are truly mobile workers as opposed to mere working commuters. However, more is known about so-called ‘teleworking’. This is undertaken by a semi-nomadic subset of ICT dependent workers who work mainly from home, or are based at home though often on the move, or who are primarily office based but work at home from time to time
Such is the perceived greater prevalence of teleworkers that an entire literature has emerged charting the plusses and minuses of their situation. And purveyors of computer and telecommunications gadgetry highlight the advantages of teleworking for productivity and work life balance, while cautioning employers to ensure that teleworkers are not pressurised into being always on call, answering email from home late into the night and or at weekends.
The most recent high profile initiative is Work Wise UK – launched in May this year. Under the banner ‘working smarter: living better’ a coalition of business groups, charities, trade unionists and IT specialists will, for the next three years, campaign for the widespread adoption of mobile working and wired working from home as part of a broader strategy of promoting flexible working. For example, Friday 5th May was designated National Work from Home Day.
According to the sponsors of Work Wise UK “adopting this modern approach to working lives will increase business productivity and competitiveness, reduce transport congestion and pollution, improve health, assist disadvantaged groups, and harmonise our work and family commitment.” But while these are clearly important issues worthy of serious consideration, it is necessary to put teleworking in perspective. Though the phenomenon may be growing, and is likely to grow further in the future, it is far from as widespread as popularly perceived. As this Work Audit highlights, whatever the merits of a so-called ‘21st century way of working, advocates of teleworking have a long way to go in turning their aim into everyday reality for the majority of workers.
1 How many teleworkers?
Three key developments have convinced many commentators that teleworking is starting to take off.
Firstly, not only are ever more workers ICT literate but also the spread of broadband and affordable digital technology has boosted the potential for effective home based or mobile working by improving the accessible range and effectiveness of communications devices and portable computers. Three quarters of UK adults now own a mobile phone, the proportion rising to around 90 per cent for adults aged under 50. Almost two-thirds of households own a home computer. Around half of households are connected to the Internet, with broadband becoming ever more popular and currently accounting for 70 per cent of all connections.
Secondly, employers have shown growing interest in providing staff with flexible working options, perhaps spurred on in part by regulations introduced in 2003 placing a statutory duty on employers to seriously consider requests from parents with young children or disabled children to work flexibly. Although, according to the most recent Workplace Employment Relations Survey, working from home is not the most common form of flexible working, being offered to non-managerial employees in only 28 per cent of workplaces in 2004, this proportion had increased from just 16 per cent in 1998.
Third, and most eye-catching, is a rise of more than 150 per cent between 1997 and 2005 in the number of people classified as teleworkers by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS defines teleworkers – as identified by the Labour Force Survey (LFS) – as ‘people who work mainly in their own home or mainly in different places using home as a base, who use both a telephone and a computer to carry out their work at home’ (Ruiz and Walling, 2005).
What tends to get less attention, however, is the relatively low incidence of teleworking. On the ONS definition there were, at spring 2005, just under 2.4 million teleworkers in the UK - roughly 8 per cent of all people in employment. This is admittedly double the proportion in 1997 (the first year for which comparable statistics are available) but still quite small given all the hype surrounding the phenomenon (table 1).
Teleworkers now comprise more than three quarters of all 3 million people classified as homeworkers in the LFS (2 million of whom say that could not work at home, or use home as a base for work, without using both a phone and a computer). The significance of ICT improvements is evident in the fact that all the increase in teleworking during the period to 2005 is accounted for by teleworkers who work mainly in different places using home as a base – thereby adding to the mobile workforce
It can be argued that the ONS definition is too strict in that it excludes people who telework from time to time. The ONS reckons that relaxing the definition to include people who do not mainly telework but were doing so at the time of the spring 2005 LFS would add about 1 million to the measured total. This would raise the proportion of teleworkers to around 12 per cent of people in employment.
It might also be argued that one should relax the ONS definition still further to include people who never mainly telework but nonetheless do so regularly on a partial basis, say one day a week. Unfortunately, it is not easy to distinguish people in this situation from those who occasionally work at home but don’t rely on ICT to do so and/or from those who do a bit of work at home but outside of standard office hours, say those who check their email in the evening or at weekends. A TUC analysis of the spring 2005 LFS for Work Wise UK finds that around 5.5 million people answer yes to the question ‘do you ever do any work from home?’, which should identify all those who make some use of ICT for work related reasons whether during or outside their standard working hours. This would suggest that perhaps up to 20 per cent of people in employment might conceivably be classed as teleworkers.
However, any such loose definition would be best treated with caution, especially if used to imply that teleworking is becoming the norm to such an extent that more employers and staff should inevitably give it a go. Very casual teleworking is presumably unlikely to convey as many potential advantages in terms of productivity, work life balance and reduced travel related pollution etc. while still giving rise to at least as many if not more potential disadvantages. For example, whatever the difficulties employers face in managing regular teleworkers these can be compounded if workers swop the office for home or some other temporary place of work on an irregular basis. And casual teleworkers without a clear routine which delineates work from life are possibly those most prone to the perils of workaholism.
The same applies to workers in call centres, either working in the UK at a location some distance from a corporate headquarters or ‘offshored’ to another country. Call centre workers are sometimes included in broad defitions of teleworking – thereby greatly expanding the measured number of teleworkers - since ICT is essential to the activities they undertake. Yet while people working in call centres are clearly amongst the most intensive users of ICT in seems inappropriate to classify them differently from the bulk of office based staff who also increasingly use ICT in their jobs.
2 Who teleworks?
Aside from the relatively small number of people teleworking, the most salient fact about teleworkers is that they are predominantly self-employed (table 2). Only around 1 in 3 teleworkers is an employee while only 4 per cent of employees are teleworkers. And the rate of increase in teleworking since the late 1990s has been faster for the self-employed. The fact that this occurred during a period when growth in self-employment was slow in turn suggests that some of the increase in teleworking is simply due to more self-employed people making greater use of ICT.
The preponderance of self-employed teleworkers also helps explain their other characteristics. More than two-thirds are men, mostly in their forties and fifties, three quarters of whom are working full-time. Almost 9 in 10 are in managerial and professional or skilled trade occupations – i.e. doing the kinds of jobs often undertaken by self-employed contractors. By contrast, few teleworkers are engaged in personal service occupations, sales and customer services and manufacturing related occupations.
Similarly, the greatest concentration of teleworkers is found in construction (23 per cent) followed by agriculture (16 per cent) and business, finance and insurance (15 per cent). A typical teleworker is more likely to be a mature male, white van driving, self-employed jobbing plumber or bricklayer than, as commonly portrayed, a techno savvy post-modern style worker who looks to have just stepped off the set of The Matrix.
3 How far might teleworking grow?
Some advocates of greater use of flexible working contend that in future, with enough support and encouragement from employers, far larger numbers of workers than at present might be able to telework. In support of this it is common to cite examples such as BT which supports 6,000 home based teleworkers – though given the nature of the business concerned it is less often pointed out that BT represents a laudable but far from representative case study of employer practice. Moreover, many of the widely cited examples of teleworking involve employers in business sectors that have a commercial vested interest in promoting various forms of ICT software and kit.
Advocates in turn argue that government might do more to promote flexible working by, for example, offering tax breaks to employers who provide staff with telework facilities.
Indeed, the banner of flexible working has recently been raised in political discourse by the leader of the Conservative Party, the Rt Hon David Cameron MP, who in so doing criticised the Government for indicating that in future personal use of a company provided computer in the home might be classified as a taxable benefit. According to Mr Cameron ‘this will affect workers who have a company laptop in their homes and it will increase red tape for business. This is surely the wrong way to go. We ought to be encouraging people to work from home if it suits them’ (Cameron, 2006).
Maybe so – but just how many people might be both willing and able to do so? The answer could be quite a few if one adopts a very loose definition of telework though, as discussed above, this would hardly signal a major revolution in flexible working if more people simply worked from home on an occasional basis, and might even give rise to problems for both employers and staff in managing work life balance. However, over and above this the nature of certain jobs in the economy is itself likely to set a structural limit to the amount of core teleworking that can be undertaken.
Self employment is clearly the type of work most easily conducive to teleworking since the choice to do so rests primarily with the individual involved. However, only 1 in 8 UK workers are self-employed – the proportion having been relatively constant since the end of the 1980s - and more than two-fifths of these already telework which limits the scope for further expansion. Continued rapid growth in teleworking is therefore most likely come from employees, especially amongst the two thirds of workers employed in the five industrial sectors where the incidence of teleworking is currently below – and in some cases well below - the national average of 8 per cent (energy and water, manufacturing, distribution, hotels and restaurants, transport and communications, and public administration, education and health, table 3).
Yet while this suggests considerable potential scope for further expansion in telework, the actual scope is likely to be confined largely to employees engaged in the kinds of managerial and professional occupations which currently have an above average incidence of teleworking. By contrast telework could remain beyond the reach of the 50 per cent of employees in occupations with below average incidence of teleworking – admin and secretarial staff, those providing personal services, sales and customer services staff, process, plant and machinery workers, and those undertaking elementary occupations. Although it is not inconceivable that more people could perform jobs like these as teleworkers most involve work which is either necessarily central office or factory based or directly customer or client focused.
In reality therefore, although teleworking is set to keep growing, the rate of expansion is unlikely to remain as rapid as in recent years, which may frustrate those campaigning for more wired working from home. The likelihood is that any major breakthrough on flexible working is for most people likely to take the form of reduced hours, flexi-time or changes in shift patterns – all good for work life balance but largely developments in fairly mundane approaches to managing working time rather than a step in the direction of a brave new world of work. Whatever the immediate future holds, a society filled with legions of home based workers free of the stress of the daily commute still seems a long way off.
References
Rt Hon David Cameron MP ‘Improving society’s sense of well being is challenge of our time’. Speech to the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference, Hertfordshire, 2006.
Ruiz, Y and Walling, A ‘Home-based working using communication technologies’. Labour Market Trends, October 2005. Office for National Statistics.
TUC ‘Homeworking – statistics from the Labour Force Survey (spring 2005). Briefing note for Work Wise UK, May 2006.
Work Wise UK – www.workwiseuk.org
Written by John Philpott, CIPD Chief Economist.
This feature originally appeared in Impact, in August 2006.