Le télétravail

Teleworking - working at a distance from your customers, bosses and client using telephones, faxes and computer to keep in touch - hasn't grown as substantially as predicted a decade ago. The Institute for the future in the US was forecasting that 40 percent of American employees would be teleworkers by the year 2000.

however, the increased availability and lower cost of tele-technology suitable for use in the home along with the explosion in e-mail and the Internet, are contributing to ever-increasing shift in workplace focus. So much so that two years ago, the European Commission in Brussels placed the adoption of telework at the top of the Bangemann Report's list of actions to make Europe more competitive, setting a target of ten million teleworkers in Europe by the end of the decade.

whether that target is realistic, attainable, or even desirable remains to be seen. Nor is it clear that employers are yet comfortable with the concept.

A E.U. - funded $850,000 , three-years research project spanning six European countries questions whether teleworking will in fact be a panacea for rural unemployment. It concludes that teleworking is more likely to remain an urban phenomenon : a way for large companies to cut office rentals rather than a driving force for rural revival.

many early teleworkers, the University College Dublin study suggests, gave up because isolation and poor relationships with management and colleagues outweighed the perceived positive factors of teleworking. Rural teleworkers complained of isolation and being passed over for promotion.

TELEWORKING WILL REMAIN, therefore Barbara Dooley of the UCD says mostly where jobs were iin large cities. "it's a way to reduce commuting time and cut office rent bills. In Paris, Madrid and The Hague, municipal authorities are examining teleworking as a possible solution to traffic gridlock."

[...] Doorley says: " our research found that training people for the change involved in working from home has been completely ignored. How, for example, to reduce conflict between work and family?

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