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Introduction
E-working remotely from the main organisational base using communications and computer technology has increased rapidly in recent years across many sectors. A wide variety of terms can be used to describe this phenomenon, for example, teleworking, telecommuting, remote working and more recently “agile working”, and, therefore, statistics worldwide refer to these different terms. In a recent report, covering ten European countries and five non-European countries, 17 per cent of employees were engaged with using mobile technology, information communication technologies (ICTs) and teleworking off site for work (Eurofound and the International Labour Office, 2017). The countries with the highest incidence of ICT usage outside of work included Japan, USA and Sweden. The UK were found to be medium users along with France and Belgium, whilst Germany, Italy and Spain were amongst the lowest (Eurofound and the International Labour Office, 2017).
Research in the USA indicates that 3.7m workers reported working from home at least half of their time and that Fortune 1,000 companies already have mobile workers who spend 50–60 per cent of their time away from their desks (Lister, 2016). A survey conducted by the WorldatWork (2013), a human resources association which undertakes research around employees’ lives particularly in the North American context, showed that 88 per cent of organisations offered remote e-working arrangements, in some form, to their employees. Workforce trends in the USA show an increase of 103 per cent in 2016 since 2005 for remote e-working (Lister, 2016). In the UK over a quarter of the workforce is now accessing work from different locations (Eurofound and the International Labour Office, 2017; Gareis, 2002; Ruiz and Walling, 2005). The Office for National Statistics reported 4.2m home workers in 2014, or 13.9 per cent of those in work, this has increased by 11 per cent since 1998 (Office for National Statistics, 2014). In this paper, the term used to describe e-working will be “remote e-workers” and is described further in the next section.
E-working: definition and background
There are many different terms currently in use to describe e-working, including: “e-worker” (mostly used in the UK), “teleworking” or “teleworker” and “telecommuting” (North American in origin). All of these refer to the ability to work flexibly using remote technology to communicate with the workplace. Latterly,...