What are working from home and teleworking?

Find out about the pros and cons of a new way of working. Are these options you could consider?

Generally speaking, teleworking is where some or all of the work you do for someone else is carried out in your home. Advances in technology have meant that many jobs that, up until now, were tied to office buildings, can just as easily (sometimes more easily) be undertaken by people working from their own home offices. British Telecom reckons that there are about two million people working at home and that more than a quarter of them are teleworkers.

Although there’s no official definition of ‘teleworking’, it’s usually agreed that it means using modern technology to help you work from home.

No set patterns define the teleworking arrangement between employer and employees. Circumstances vary, depending on the nature of the job and the functions of the company. What is clear is that, if it is properly thought through, teleworking can benefit workers and employers alike, and even have a positive social effect.

Benefits for employers

  • Savings on office space
  • Improved productivity – some surveys suggest that people working from home are up to 30 per cent more efficient than their office-based colleagues
  • Retaining trained staff who might have had to leave because of a change in their circumstances, for example, if their partner had to move because of their job or if one of their family needs to be looked after for a period of time

Benefits for employees

  • Less time spent commuting, so less stress and more time available for other activities
  • Possibility to arrange work to suit individual working patterns or life choices
  • Flexibility to cope with sudden emergencies

Social benefits

  • Teleworking means fewer commuters, so fewer cars on the road, so less traffic and less pollution
  • People who work from home are in a better position to join in with local activities and so help build community networks

When BT offered its workers the chance to do at least some of their work from home not long ago, 3,500 thousand people volunteered within a month. Other companies have experienced similar levels of interest including local councils such as Oxfordshire and banks such as NatWest.

But there can be drawbacks to teleworking:

Potential problems for employers

  • Monitoring work flow
  • Assessing progress of individuals within the company
  • Cost of providing and maintaining the equipment the employee needs at home

Potential problems for employees

  • Creating a suitable, distraction-free space at home
  • Loss of camaraderie and stimulation of contact with other workers
  • Learning how to manage time effectively by saying ‘No’ to interruptions

Potential pitfalls can be avoided if employers and employees carefully consider what they want from a teleworking arrangement and how to set it up effectively. For example, many people spend one or more days in the office in the course of a working week. This gives both sides the opportunity to communicate, evaluate progress and spend some time socialising and developing working relationships.

A number of trade unions have negotiated working from home schemes with employers and have produced useful guidelines for their members. If you are a member it might be worth contacting your union because they will be able to advise you on complicated matters, such as health and safety. This is a complicated issue. If you are working from home as an employee, for example, then your company has to make sure that your home meets health and safety rules. This is not just a question of checking electricity supplies, it means making sure that desks and chairs are ergonomically efficient as well.

Both sides must consider what equipment will be necessary for home working and agree who is to provide what. If there are other people in your house, you should discuss the consequences of working from home with them. (You don’t want to make such a big change in your working life only to discover that it causes stress at home that outweighs all the advantages of flexibility and of not commuting.)

Employers and home workers should also be aware of issues such as insurance. If a company supplies equipment, then it usually takes on the responsibility for insuring it – it is cheaper for a company to add a laptop computer to its general insurance police than for an individual to insure one privately. You should always let your own insurance company know that you have started to work from home – sometimes this might gain you a discount on your household insurance as burglars will less likely to break in during day time.

Find out how to put forward your case to work from home.

Further information