The information age was supposed to usher in an era of rustic bliss for employees. ROBERT UHLIG examines why the future is not so bright
IMAGINE starting your day not with the ritualistic battle with traffic and public transport, nor in the company of your colleagues' irritating habits, but with a brisk stroll to a rural idyll, with roses around the door, a view of the countryside and only fax machine, computer and modem for company.
This is the seductive vision of a workplace that the teleworking evangelists have been telling us for 25 years will be the norm in the next millennium.
It is a workplace built around the family, that suits employers' needs to cut overheads and grants employees' wishes for a more flexible way to earn a living with a better way of working life. They have suggested a dream way of working that is so attractive that it will change the working lives of millions of people:
In 1986 the former National Economic Development Office estimated over a million Britons would be telecommuting by now.
The Institute for the Future has forecast that 40 per cent of Americans would be teleworkers by 2000.
Last year, the World Bank predicted that over a fifth of all workers in rich countries would be working from home by 2005.
This promised transformation led the Banking and Insurance Finance Union to announce last week the first deal with a finance employer giving guaranteed terms for home workers in line with their office counterparts.
But the reality is somewhat different. Despite repeated attempts by the Department of Trade and Industry, the European Union and others, few employers or employees seem to like the idea of working at home.
A 1993 European study showed the cracks in the idyll with a suggestion that teleworkers can suffer more stress than office-based workers and estimates of the number of Britons working at home vary greatly from 200,000 to BT's 3.7 million.
However, a more realistic figure is that given by TCA, the Telework, Telecottage and Telecentre Association, which puts the figure at 630,000. But 570,000 of these are self-employed and so do not classify as real teleworkers - people who are employed by a company but work from home, connected to colleagues and the office by the toys and tools of the information age.
Despite numerous announcements of teleworking schemes from companies such as the Britannia Building Society, Digital, Allied Dunbar, Lombard North Central, Lloyds Bank, the TSB, and Birmingham and Oxfordshire councils, the number of teleworkers never appears to increase - a fact acknowledged in the TCA's recently published The Teleworking Handbook.
Closer examination of these teleworking projects discloses many are merely "trials" involving a handful of pioneers. The inaccuracies of the projections can in part be explained by changing economic circumstances.
In the late 1980s, office rents were high and companies thought telework would cut costs and attract skilled staff who, in some fields, were in short supply.
In the mid-1990s, the story is different. Office rents have fallen sharply, the computer programmer and financial analyst skills shortages did not materialise, and redundancies during the recession have meant companies have office space to spare.
But economics do not explain the true reason why teleworking has not been a success - we are social animals, it seems, and neither employer nor employee likes the idea that they are "out of the loop" of office news and gossip.
Bosses remain to be convinced that their charges will concentrate on their tasks when there is a distracting tennis court or trout stream nearby. Employees fear being cut off from the office grapevine and miss the stimulation of working in a team.
It takes a certain type of person to be a successful teleworker. Introverted workaholics need not apply - studies have found that those who communicate frequently with their employers, can manage their time efficiently and solve problems independently make the best home workers.
A Europe-wide study conducted by University College Dublin concluded that teleworking would not lead middle-class workers to a rural paradise, but to suburban isolation.
Barbara Doorley, the study's co-ordinator, said teleworking had not provided a solution to rural unemployment because people needed to be within commuting distance of their employer. Rural teleworkers complained that they were passed over for promotion and said they missed the opportunity to trade ideas with colleagues at the photocopier or coffee machine.
"Seventy per cent of teleworkers spent more than half their time working in the office," Mrs Doorley said, adding that many returned to the office because the isolation outweighed the advantages of working from home.
The UCD research provides a warning for organisations such as Birmingham council, which aims to save £50 million on office space by moving 7,000 of its 39,000 staff to working from home or "hot-desking", where workers who are often out of the office share desk spaces.
"Our research found that training people for the change involved in working from home has been completely ignored," said Mrs Doorley. "How, for example, to reduce conflict between work and family."
Alan Denbigh, executive director of the TCA, who commutes from his home near Bath to a log cabin at the end of his garden, said: "Most people think the difficulty is getting going in the morning, but the difficulty is knowing when to stop working.
"I'd be the first to admit that it causes friction between myself and my wife.
"On the other side of the coin, I don't have to put up with office politics and I'm always around to tend to the children, although they do not always appreciate that Daddy is working."
The most obvious benefit of teleworking appears to be environmental. According to Mr Denbigh, the Newbury bypass would not have been needed if more people had been prepared to telecommute. "A French study showed that, if only three per cent of commuters in the Ile de France area worked from home," he said, "it would eliminate all rush-hour traffic congestion on the routes into Paris.
"In Newbury, the problem is similar and many of the companies there are hi-tech, with the know-how to make working remotely from the office a reality."
But because teleworkers are difficult to organise and easy to exploit, telecommuting is unlikely to have widespread appeal to either employer or employee.
And many jobs are simply not suited to teleworking - including anybody who spends more than 15 per cent of their time dealing closely with colleagues.
A more likely outcome is the growth of "satellite back-offices" on out-of-town industrial estates where whole departments of support staff, such as telephone sales and accounts, are relocated in a cheaper location than the corporate headquarters.
This version of teleworking is far removed from the rural high-tech, high-skilled and highly-paid, work-at-home teleworker image. There will not be a mass migration of affluent middle-class professionals to a rustic ideal but a steady trickle of low-paid clerical and support staff to an uncertain freelance future as independent sub-contractors and consultants in the business parks of suburbia.
