The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development has a
long track record in supporting the principles of more flexible
working, producing regular surveys of HR staff about the
incidence of flexible working and guidance on how to deal with
it.
All the same, somehow they've never really got to grips with
what's going on with flexible work and in particular with
telework - or location independent flexible work, as it might
more accurately be called.
Teleworking fact sheet
The CIPD has recently produced a new
Factsheet on Teleworking. While it contains some
useful data, on the whole it reads as if it could have been
written in about 1995.
The Factsheet throws in a few figures from National
Statistics and adds without comment the statisticians' largely
unhelpful definition of a teleworker. It then makes a few
generalisations about the potential benefits of telework, before
going on to talk in broad terms about the management challenges,
eligibility, health and safety and the limits to growth.
All in all, the approach is one of teleworking as
exception or even oddity, and traditional ways of working as the
norm.
Misunderstanding trends and the nature of workplace change
In sharp contrast to the almost contemporaneous report from
the Equal Opportunities Commission, Working Outside the Box,
which bristles with insight into workplace change, the CIPD
approach has little to offer.
There is a certain amount of common sense in some of the
points they make. But the Factsheet seems over-reliant on
some out-dated analysis in another of their reports published
last September
Teleworking Trends and Prospects, launched with a press
release tellingly headed "Don't hype telework as the route to
better work-life balance".
Written by CIPD Chief Economist John Philpott, it's very much
an old-school analysis with a strangely pejorative attitude to
self-employed teleworkers -"white van man" and "jobbing
plumbers". We'll come back to this.
The most serious error in the report is the assumption that,
according to John Philpott:
"expansion in teleworking is likely to
be confined largely to employees engaged in the kinds of
managerial and professional occupations which currently have an
above average incidence of teleworking. By contrast, telework
could remain beyond the reach of the 50% of employees in
occupations with below average incidence of teleworking – admin
and secretarial staff, those providing personal services, sales
and customer services staff, process, plant and machinery
workers, and those undertaking elementary occupations".
At first this sounds like common sense, but again it's a
mid-90s commonplace to say this kind of thing. Clearly the
CIPD as an institution is unaware of the work being carried out
by HR officers these days across the world in helping to develop
virtual call centres, remote data processing solutions, mobile
working for sales staff and providers of personal services, etc,
as well as the impact in small businesses of new forms of
ICT-enabled working.
The key mistake here is assuming that early patterns of
adoption define trends for the future. They do not.
Recent trends show stronger growth in telework/remote work
amongst just the kinds of occupations he lists as being
impractical telework - see for example our case study on the
UK's largest virtual
call centre. Councils across the country, too, are
implementing home-based work for process workers.
The second problem is that, as we always say, remote
working is about tasks, not whole jobs. If you ask
people can they work remotely, their first answer may be "no".
But if you ask "what elements of your job can be performed
remotely" you are likely to get a different answer.
Usually about 1-2 days per week worth of tasks from office
workers.
Of course there are many jobs that have to be done in
particular locations - there are no prizes for stating the
obvious. But technology does make a difference. Even
operating and repairing machinery can now be done remotely, as
can site inspection and monitoring - jobs previously thought to
be irreducibly requiring physical presence.
It's all about working in the best place to get the job done.
And that isn't always the traditional office or factory setting.
The third key problem is in having a value-loaded approach
to the incidence of self-employment and the growth in the
category "working in several places using home as base".
Because many of these more mobile workers are not employees, the
CIPD seems to think they are not worth counting as proper
teleworkers. Just "white van man" with a computer (as if
he does not count!).
We see where this is coming from, and it highlights problems
in both under-counting and over-counting remote workers in the
official statistics. But apart from objecting to the author's
patronising attitude to small businesses, we think that the
analysis misses the point.
Back in the 1990s various gurus and academics became bogged
down in trying to define who or what a teleworker is.
Definitions are not as important as the social and economic
impact of the new forms of working, or how new ways of working
are creating opportunities and transforming traditional
businesses.
Having the capacity to work remotely and work on the move is
having a transforming on small business Britain, as the
recent reports on rural
home-based businesses have shown. People can do things
they previously could not, and reach markets that were hitherto
out of reach. They are altering the way they run
businesses, the way they employ and manage staff, and their
patterns of business and commute travel. This matters at
all kinds of practical and policy levels.
Flexibility verdict
HR staff are at the forefront both of dealing with requests
for flexible working and helping to implement full-blown remote
working/flexible working schemes in organisations.
In this context, it seems that the CIPD needs to do better
than this in providing the right kinds of information, advice
and analysis to support the new forms of 21st century working.
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