Defining Telework: What is it Exactly?

DEFINING TELEWORK: WHAT IS IT EXACTLY? David Lamond, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 9850 8984 Fax: +61 2 9850 9019 email: david.lamond@mq.edu.au Kevin Daniels, Sheffield University, Mappin Street, Sheffield ,S1 4DT, UNITED KINGDOM Tel: +44 114 2223365 Fax: +44 114 2223348 email: K.Daniels@sheffield.ac.uk Peter Standen, Edith Cowan University, Pearson St Churchlands, WA 6018, AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 9 273 8335 Fax: +61 9 273 8754 email: p.standen@cowan.edu.au Introduction Initial widespread interest in teleworking was kindled in the 1970s, when the term “telecommuting” was coined to denote remote working from the office, primarily by way of telephone communication, as a substitute for physical travelling (Nilles, Carlson, Gray & Hanneman, 1976). By the 1980s, teleworking was being described as the “next workplace revolution” (Kelly, 1985), and interest in teleworking has continued to grow among workers, employers, transportation planners, communities, the telecommunications industry, and others (Handy & Mokhtarian, 1996). More recently, we have begun referring to the “virtual organisation”, where telecommunications technology is allowing work to be widely dispersed over space and time (Handy, 1995; Van der Weilen, Taillieu, Poolman, & Van Zuilichem, 1993). The future of teleworking depends on whether employers provide the opportunity to telework and whether workers take advantage of this opportunity. There is, therefore, a need for a common understanding of telework, as a basis for employers and employees to make informed decisions about the value of telework for them and their organisations. The continuing attention paid to teleworking by managers and their employees has been reflected in the literature on the subject. For example, interrogation of the ABI/Inform (UMI, 1996) electronic database reveals that, over the period 1985-1996, nearly 900 articles containing the keywords “teleworking”, “telecommuting” or “homeworking” were published in academic and business journals. However, most of the writing on telework to date has involved prescriptions based heavily on the experience of individuals and does not use existing theory or recent research. At the same time, despite the attention which teleworking has received, there is still no “official” definition of teleworking (IRS, 1996a; Moon & Stanworth, 1997). As a result, discussions on the issue of teleworking tend to cover a variety of different working practices and to overlap into related areas such as homeworking, including where the term is used to refer to unskilled workers receiving piece rates for manual tasks. Indeed, several authors (Anon, 1994; Littlefield, 1996) specifically consider teleworking as a subset of (clerical) homeworking. If, as Jackson (1997:355) suggests, telework has “the potential to transform the very experience and meaning of work”, there is an urgent need to establish an agreed definition of teleworking so that the subject of discussion is clear. This paper examines the range of existing definitions of teleworking and shows how they are neither coincident nor complete. It then proposes a definition of teleworking which takes account of the multidimensional nature of telework. In doing so, it builds on recent attempts to develop a framework for integrating current knowledge and guiding future research and practice (Lamond, Daniels & Standen, 1997; Standen, Daniels & Lamond, 1997). Teleworking: Previous Attempts at Definition With reference to the 900 publications cited on the ABI/Inform electronic database (UMI, 1996), it is perhaps simply a matter of usage, but nonetheless worthy of note, that the term “telecommuting” appears to be almost exclusive to the articles published in the North American media, while “teleworking” appears to be the preferred term in European publications. It is worthy of note because these two words capture the main foci of attention of the various definitions developed to date – location (telecommuting) and process (teleworking; using information and communication technologies). Early attempts at definition focussed on teleworking as a function of location. For example, Grant (1985:25) characterised teleworking as “one kind of remote working, or doing normal work activities while away from one's normal workplace”. Kelly (1985:2) similarly defined telecommuting as simply “working away from the central office”. Regenye (1985:15) was even more specific, referring to telecommuting as an opportunity to “for employees to work out of their homes”. When they examined the effects of telecommuting on quality of working life, Shamir & Salomon (1985:455) defined telecommuting simply as “working at home”. While these definitions represent reasonable attempts to come to grips with a radical new idea, each is deficient. Grant's (1985) definition begs the question, of course, as to what should properly constitute “one's normal workplace”, especially, for example, if that is already the home. Kelly's (1985) definition ignores the reality of dispersed organisational offices other than the “head office”, while Regenye (1985) and Shamir & Salomon (1985) confine teleworkers to a single location. Later, Olsen (1988:77) broadened the definition of telework to incorporate the process element: organizational work performed outside of the normal organizational confines of space and time, augmented by computer and communications technology. This definition was, in turn, extended by Gray, Hodson & Gordon (1993), who proposed that [t]eleworking is a flexible way of working which covers a wide range of work activities, all of which entail working remotely for an employer, or from a traditional place of work, for a significant proportion of work time. Teleworking may be on either a full-time or part-time basis. The work often involves electronic processing of information, and always involves using telecommunications to keep the remote employer and employee in contact with each other. The important feature of both these definitions is now the explicit provision that telework is supported by information and communications technologies (ICT). In this regard, the Gray et al (1993) definition is more inclusive, in that it incorporates remote work that is supported by telecommunications, whether this is simply a telephone or a more sophisticated arrangement including faxes, modem links and email. One of the most recent definitions is that of Moon & Stanworth (1997:338-339) who recognise the complex nature of teleworking and so define it broadly as a form of ‘flexible’ work which involves distance work, remote work or telecommuting which is dependent upon the use of information and communication technologies. A variation on this theme is proffered by de Haro Garcia (1997:346), for whom teleworking is a flexible form of organisation of the work that consists of the performance of the professional activity, without the physical presence of the worker in the company during a substantial part of the occupational time. He notes in this regard that the defining features of the work comprise the use of information and communication technologies and the work being carried out at a distance (de Haro Garcia, 1997:346). Others have defined teleworking even more broadly, for example Huws, Korte & Robinson (1990) include homeworkers who use couriers to transmit work to and from the office. An even wider definition would include all forms of work done off-site for an employer, including outworkers who manufacture clothing or jewellery at home, and clerical workers who use the mail or personal delivery to transmit work. Further, in many occupations, workers have traditionally done work at home in an unofficial and largely unseen role. This paper separates telework from these other forms of off-site work where they are not enabled or supported by telecommunications technology. Meanwhile, there has been growing recognition that telework cannot be studied along a single dimension (Van der Wielen and Taillieu, 1995). Trodd (1994) has added such a sense of dimensionality to the concept of telework, referring simultaneously to several forms of teleworking - individual teleworking, corporate teleworking, executive teleworking, and contract teleworking - and to the various locations from which a teleworker may operate - the home, the satellite/office, the shared access telecentre, the telecottage, the production centre and mobile teleworking. One might work as an individual (say, as a consultant) and operate by way of teleworking or as a contract teleworker (telephone sales) and be located at home or a telecentre. Equally, the locations for the individual and contract teleworkers could be reversed. At the same time, the empirical evidence indicates that telework practice varies widely between countries (IRS, 1996a; 1996d) and even between companies in the same country (IRS, 1996c). Further, teleworkers may not be the homogeneous group commentators often describe (Crossan & Burton, 1993). It is then necessary to develop a classification of the various forms or styles of teleworking. Classifying Telework One group of authors (Andriessen, 1991; Gray et al 1993; Huws, 1994a-b) has proffered a classification of telework in broad terms as · Home based telework where work duties are carried out at home. This work can involve high-skilled (eg. computer programming) or low-skilled (eg basic clerical work) tasks. · Teleworking from remote offices where work is done at offices that are remote from the main office - at “satellite offices” (controlled by the employer); at telecentres (information technology and work space is provided for a given community and employers are asked to rent space for their employees); or at telecottages (where training is provided for users, and attempts are made to attract employment for self-employed teleworkers). · Mobile telework: where work is done by people who sometimes work away from their normal working base (either a traditional office, a satellite office, or at home) and whose work usually involves travel and/or spending time on customers' premises (eg sales and consulting). The IRS Survey of teleworking in Europe (IRS 1996a-d) utilised a somewhat similar typology: · Home-based teleworking - where staff who would otherwise be based in an office use computers and other forms of technology to work from home on a regular basis for a significant part of their working time. · Nomadic teleworking - where employees (eg engineers and sales staff) who are not normally based in an office for all of their working day use computers and other telecommunications devices to maintain contact with their base. · Ad hoc teleworking - where office-based staff use computers and telecommunications to allow them to work from home under certain well defined circumstances (including all types of staff who work from home occasionally, as well as “special case” out-of-hours or standby staff equipped with computers and/or mobile phones for remote access from home when on standby). Each of these sets of classifications adds to our understanding of the different forms of telework, particularly in terms of the experience of teleworkers and the way they are managed, but they are at best partial in so far as they still focus only on location - where the telework is carried out - and/or on the nature of the employment relationship. They also lend themselves to a binary notion of telework - one either does it or one does not - and tend to ignore the fact that while telework can be exclusively of one type, it can also consist of any combination of these styles and traditional office based work. It has been suggested that the most prevalent forms of telework are home based and mobile telework (Gray et al, 1993), with only a small fraction of all teleworkers in North America, Europe and Australia using remote offices (Gillespie et al, 1995; IRS, 1996d). It has also been argued that it is reasonable to assume the majority of teleworkers do not spend all of their working time engaged solely in one form of telework (Gray et al, 1993). Therefore, to determine a given individual's telework style, it is necessary to determine not only what form(s) of (tele)work - traditional office based work, home based telework, remote office based work or mobile work - are utilised, but also the amount time spent in each. In this regard, we reject the approaches of Korte, Kordey and Robinson (1994) and Huws (1994a), who define teleworkers according to whether they spend a minimum period, of one day per week or half the working week respectively, engaged in telework. Both approaches reinforce the binary notion of telework, rather than enabling one to determine the extent to which an individual engages in teleworking activity. Teleworking: A multidimensional definition Beyond location and ICT usage, we argue further that, to address adequately the organisational behaviour issues raised by telework, it is necessary to develop a more fine grained typology involving several additional dimensions. One that has received attention in the literature is whether telework jobs are classified as “professional, managerial or technical”, or as “clerical, manufacturing or semi-skilled” jobs (Olsen, 1989). These are called Type A and Type B jobs respectively by Leidner (1988). There are at least three differences between Type A and Type B jobs which may effect organisational behaviour phenomena. Type A jobs are commonly knowledge-intensive, have outputs which are not easily measured and, by virtue of the education and experience required to get them, involve greater autonomy over work conditions. Type B telework, on the other hand, frequently involves work that is less knowledge-intense and more routine, outputs that are more easily measured, and bring less autonomy. While these three dimensions do not necessarily correlate perfectly, we will conflate them for the present analysis. Two other important dimensions which have not previously been considered explicitly, involve the degree of intra-organisational contact required by teleworkers, and the degree of external contact with clients and other parties. The former can be defined in terms of the nature of the employment relationship (employee/consultant) and the degree of “embeddedness” within the organisation (eg, level of responsibility and necessary contact with other members of the organisation), while the latter is defined simply in terms of how much contact the individuals have with persons/organisations external to the organisations for whom they are working. Finally, it is likely that the extent of non-office work compared to office work is likely to impact strongly on the challenges faced by teleworkers and their managers. We consider it more appropriate then, to examine teleworking, not just as a structure or function defined primarily in terms of where work is done or what equipment is used, but as a process that involves a series of dimensions: ICT Usage - extent of use of information and communications technology (ICT) home/mobile computer, fax, modem, phone, mobile phone, use of WWW sites (cf Gray et al, 1993) Knowledge intensity - extent of knowledge required, ease of output measures and autonomy of work (cf Leidner, 1988; Olsen, 1989) Intra-organisational Contact - extent (range and intensity) of intra-organisational contact (cf Gillespie et al,1995) Extra-organisational Contact - extent (range and intensity) of extra-organisational contact (cf Gray et al, 1993) Location - the amount of time spent in the different locations: traditional office, home, remote office/telecottage, nomadic (cf Gray et al, 1993; Gillespie et al, 1995). This dimensional typology we are moving toward (summarised in Table 1 together with exemplar jobs) allows us to say with some confidence that: · teleworking is a process which involves a bundle of practices; · there is no one form of teleworking and, as a corollary, there is no one best way of teleworking; · teleworking is best thought of as a multidimensional phenomenon, its character varying along five dimensions - ICT usage, Knowledge intensity, Intra-organisational contact, Extra-organisational contact, and Location. These 5 dimensions have recently been used as a basis of describing and making predictions about teleworking in different organisational contexts (cf Lamond, Daniels & Standen, 1997; Standen, Daniels & Lamond, 1997). Although we present a typology here, for analytic purposes we would consider that each of the dimensions is better understood as a continuum. For example, it is not just that one has external contacts or not but the extent to which they exist and, indeed, the extent to which they achieve a level of primacy in the individual's day-to-day work. TABLE 1. Types of teleworking and sample jobs. HIGH KNOWLEDGE INTENSITY (TYPE A) Intra-Organisational Contact High Low External Contact External Contact High Low High Low Home-based Sales Managers Accountant/ Programmer Lawyer IS Developer/Architect Remote office Sales Managers Programmer Lawyer IS Developer Nomadic Sales Managers Internal consultants Community nurse IS Developer LOW KNOWLEDGE INTENSITY (TYPE B) Intra-Organisational Contact Low High External Contact External Contact High Low High Low Home-based Customer Enquiries Secretarial/Clerical Phone Sales Clerical/Data Entry Remote office Customer Enquiries Secretarial/Clerical Phone Sales Clerical/Data Entry Nomadic Service Persons Secretarial/Clerical Sales Representative Clerical/Data Entry Who are the Teleworkers? We have argued to this point that teleworking as an activity has previously been considered too simplistically. We now turn to the definition of the teleworker which, we maintain, is also in need of re-examination. It might be argued that teleworkers should be simply defined as “people who engage in telework”, and the reader referred to the definition of telework above. While such a definition runs the risk of being labelled merely tautological, a more precise definition of teleworkers may be unnecessarily confining. For example, the IRS survey of teleworking in Europe (IRS, 1996a-d) utilised a definition of teleworkers as individuals who: · have employee status within their companies or organisations; · spend at least 50% of their working time teleworking away from their employers' main premises; and · need to use a computer or word processor and a telecommunications link to their employers in order to telework. While each of these points seems reasonable and consistent with other research categories, they are, nonetheless, narrow and partial. Unless specifically provided for in the definition, “employee status” excludes those individuals who work for organisations as contractors or consultants. Similarly, the requirement for 50% of working time excludes those who engage in “ad hoc” or even “nomadic” teleworking, while the need to use a computer or word processor and a telecommunications link would exclude those (eg field representatives and service personnel) whose prime method of office contact is remote telecommunication but whose actual work does not require computer technology. Each of the characteristics used in the IRS definition would appear to introduce an artificial distinction between different “types”. In the circumstances, we would argue it is more appropriate to focus on the process of telework and its various categories or dimensions as a basis for delineating various groups of teleworkers. The categorisation reflected in Table 1 would appear to be reasonable in this regard. Conclusion As we noted in our introduction, the future of teleworking depends on whether employers provide the opportunity to telework and whether workers take advantage of this opportunity. To realise the full benefits of telework there must be a dialogue between teleworkers, those that manage teleworkers, and researchers. In this paper, we have focused our efforts on contributing to the clarity of that dialogue through the development of a definition of telework and teleworking that more properly takes account of its complex, multidimensional nature . We have examined the previous efforts at defining telework and concluded that they are narrow and partial and identified the areas that need to be incorporated in a more comprehensive delineation. Agreement around the definition proffered in this paper will enable researchers and practitioners to move forward in our efforts to take full advantage of the technological changes that we have been witness to in recent years. References Andriessen, JHE (1991). Mediated communication and new organizational forms. In C.L Cooper and IT Robertson (eds), International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Chichester: Wiley. Anonymous (1994) Homeworking agreement. European Industrial Relations Review, 249, 12-13. Crossan, G and Burton, PF (1993) Teleworking stereotypes: A case study. Journal of Information Science Principles & Practice, 19(5), 349-362. de Haro Garcia, JM (1997) Implications of telework for selection and training of personnel. 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