Here is a brief summary of the 12th International Workshop on Telework in Lillehammer.
Welcome note by Svein Bergnum
Svein started off the 12th international workshop on telework with the joke about teleworkers who travel from all corners of the world to meet face to face in Norway. He also mentioned that there was not as much competition to get the workshop to Lillehammer compared to Winter Olympics in 1994.
First keynote by Karsten Gareis (Empirica.com): The state of eWork in Europe. Whatever happened to telework? Change of names for more or less the same phenomena. EWork, eCollaboration, Telework, etc… Confusion about what we are talking about. There have been major conferences but most of these have discontinued after 2002, there seems to be a lack of interest by European commission. Telework R.I.P? People might still want to work from home, the topic is not off the agenda, for example in a recent article in the Guardian on Second Life, the idea of teleworking is being discussed as if it is a whole new concept.
35% of companies in Europe have technological possibilities for telework, although they don’t all use it.
8 observations (questions) on telework:
1. Work relocation to home environments? Alan Toefler discussed electronic cottage quite sometime ago, according to Toefler work should belong to the home. However, this is done very little, home has not yet emerged as a centre for work, but has become part of a whole range of different work environments. From an employer point of view and especially regarding career development, the home environment is not ideal. Knowledge sharing, tacit knowledge, learning environment, project -and teamwork is difficult to take place on remote locations. Managers prefer to keep a certain level of control.
2. Worker oriented flexibility? Yes, but very selectively. Business strategies pressure to increase productivity and workers have higher demands on job satisfaction. Outcome depends on the bargaining power of workers, demand of home-based telework. Not all workers have this bargaining power thus this part of the employees are not part of the telework pool.
3. Regulated improvements of working conditions? Hardly relevant. Little interest in most EU states. Was due to review in 2006, but nothing happened.
4. Taylorism is dead? No, 39.3 % of work in Germany (1998) is based on a Taylorist way of work. 24.4% of companies apply a post-Taylorist work organization. Call centres are examples of a Neo-Taylorist work environment, different skills are being used, but the majority of the work has features according to the Taylorist principles. Call centres in UK have grown 250% since 1995, 1 million by end of 2007.
5. Less control? No, key importance in times of volatility.
6. Work Life balance? Yes, but not as expected. Boundaries between work and family balance, email and mobile applications have become eroded.
7. Telework substituting for transportation? “Only when looking in isolation. Residential relocation seems to be not an issue, but when turning to the impact of ICT on work…the impacts on travel are unequivocally to generate more” (Patricia Mokhtarian UCLA) In EU transportation since 1995 has increased significantly especially if one thinks that this is the period when ICT has been started to be implemented in the workplace.
8. Technology not an issue any more? Tele-presence application, personally not so easy to use, still not like meeting face-to-face. Video conferencing that “feels” real as not arrived yet, however, improvements are coming up.
The role of research: More focus is needed. Home-based telework as an initiative for knowledge workers:
Work/life balance
Control versus self-responsibility
Virtual collaboration techniques and practices not sufficient.
Re-focus on telecommuting? Response to climate change challenge, incentives and regulations needed. Refocus should be on outcomes, rather than tools.
Stream 1C: Innovative organizational forms in the public sector:
Andrew Gaudes: A framework for constructing effective virtual teams.
Paper for the public healthcare in Canada in looking at utilizing more virtual teams. Research was done on Virtual Team literature, looking mainly at recent literature on the topic.
What are virtual teams: according to Webster and Staples: “a virtual team is a group of individuals that are working together in different locations. They work independently sharing responsibility for their outcomes.” Successful completion of a project, building of team cohesiveness, satisfaction among virtual team members.
Framework: input-process-output model. Second dimension explores virtual teams at each stage with a more systemic association. Looking at a matrix on the input-processes and outputs versus individual, team, leader, organization, project and technology, to show which literature is available.
