Home‐based teleworking and the employment relationship. Managerial challenges and dilemmas
| Pages | 422-437 |
| Date | 01 August 2003 |
| Published date | 01 August 2003 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480310477515 |
| Author | Lynette Harris |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Home-based teleworking and
the employment relationship
Managerial challenges and dilemmas
Lynette Harris
Department of Human Resource Management, Nottingham Business
School, The Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Keywords Teleworking, Employee relations, Trust, Management, Responsibility,
United Kingdom
Abstract As home-based teleworking grows in the UK, more evidence is needed of how working
from home shapes the employment relationship and the implications this may have for those line
managers responsible for a home-based workforce. The reported experiences of a sales team and
their line managers at one large international drinks manufacturing company of teleworking
during its first year of operation revealed the importance of developing understanding of the
complex interface between the domains of work and home life. The findings suggest individual
circumstances require close attention before implementing home-based working with line
managers recalibrating perceptions of the boundaries between home and work for positive
employee relationships to develop within a new paradigm of “home-work” relations.
The home-based working agenda
Technological advances have led to teleworking from home (also referred to as
remote or mobile working) rising on the public policy agenda (Apgar, 1999). It
is a form of temporal flexible working likely to attract increasing attention as
the work/life balance debate intensifies. In the UK, such initiatives have
received encouragement from the present government’s stated commitment to
family-friendly policies (Cully et al., 1998) reflected in recent employment
legislation. While home-based teleworking is still in its infancy, it is identified
as a growing trend (Brocklehurst, 2001) although establishing the extent of its
actual practice is hampered by the lack of a universal definition. For the
purposes of discussion, the UK’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) definition of
teleworkers as “people who do some paid or unpaid work in their own home
and who use both a telephone and computer” will be used in this paper. This
specifically includes those who:
.mainly work from home in their main job;
.work from home in various locations, but home is their base (as in the
reported study).
LFS statistics identify teleworking growing rapidly in the UK and other
European Union (EU) countries, but even more dramatically in the USA
(Hotopp, 2002). The number of UK teleworkers in spring 2001 was reported as
2.2 million (7.4 per cent of the total labour force of whom three-quarters work in
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Personnel Review
Vol. 32 No. 4, 2003
pp. 422-437
qMCB UP Limited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/00483480310477515
the private sector) with an average 13 per cent increase per year since 1997.
While the feminisation of the workforce would seem to be an explanatory factor
in its growth (Felstead et al., 2002, p. 58), currently two-thirds of all teleworkers
are men.
Teleworking is predicted as a likely direction for organisational
development (Pieperl and Baruch, 1997; Chesborough and Teece, 1996). The
Institute of Employment Studies estimates the UK uses only 30 per cent of its
teleworking potential and that new technologies will further increase the
possibilities for home-based working (Huws et al., 2001). Despite the present
and predicted growth in teleworking, the impact of “blurring” the temporal and
spatial boundaries between home and work on the employment relationship
and the challenges it presents for managers with human resource (HR)
management responsibilities is under researched. This paper sets out to
examine this through the experiences of a sales force at one large international
drinks manufacturing company, BC Drinks Ltd who became home-based
teleworkers.
Home-based teleworking at BC Drinks
BC Drinks adopted a policy of home-based teleworking in 1999 which was
implemented the following year for a sales team of 41 staff as a result of the
closure of the company’s northern regional office in the largest of its
geographical areas in the UK. The form of remote working implemented at BC
Drinks was one where the employee’s home had become the contractual place
of work with occasional meetings at a designated premises (Huws, 1996),
although the nature of the sales team’s work involved regular travelling to visit
customers. Home working removed not only a shared office base for the team,
but also the administrative support provided by two clerical staff. The sales
team was entirely male with the exception of two recent female recruits, one of
whom was married. Three-quarters of the team were below 45 years of age
with young families and the average length of service with the company was
seven years although one-third had ten years’ service or more.
Although studies have reported that teleworking on a part-time basis
produces the best outcomes for both parties in the employment relationship
(Baruch, 2001), at BC Drinks partial home working was not offered as an
option. The employer-led initiative was an “all or nothing” situation and
essentially irreversible once the regional office was removed. While possible
problems of isolation, self-discipline and motivation were expected by the
company’s management, the difficulties reported by employees as a result of
work being relocated into the domestic domain were not dominated by those
anticipated by the employer. Based on the responses of the sales team and their
line managers, this paper examines the experience of a group of employees
faced with adjusting to what Daly (1996, p. 149) describes as a “new set of
temporal demands”. It particularly explores:
Home-based
teleworking
423
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