News on 18 September 2000

In a week when people's ability to travel freely was curtailed by both demonstrations on Britain's roads and fuel shortages, one of the core messages of the Telework 2000 conference had even greater impact.

Thursday's transport debate focused on the effect teleworking has on traffic. Kitty de Bruin from the Telework Netherlands Forum, said case studies show telework does lead to less rush hour traffic, but stressed that this is not a selling point to businesses. She therefore wants to implement a new tax system, with companies who use teleworking paying less tax.

Tim Green, MD of Shell Bitumen, said the UK has the worst roads and congestion as well as the longest commuting times. However, he does not believe building more roads would solve the problem because of the increase in teleworking, but contradicted himself by saying that tunnels could be the answer, leaving the country free of roads.

It was a common belief that teleworking reduces peoples’ need to travel. Edna Murphy from New Work Solutions, Cambridge, agreed, although she pointed out that this new way of working does not apply to every job and questioned how much of a difference it would make to transport.
A case study carried out at IBM by New Work Solutions, revealed that video conferencing saved the company £0.5m a year and the reduced office space had an impact on energy consumption. A theoretical case study for Cambridge City Council, indicated that a third of the staff could work remotely and commuting was the biggest saving. "It is now down to the Government how much will change", Murphy said.

A teleworker himself, motoring journalist Mike Rutherford, said people must be offered choices, but personally felt that productivity is better in one's home, leaving out the need to commute. He said teleworking does not need to be expensive but would save companies both money and time. A believer in teleworking, he did however say: "If teleworking was truly a success, then I think this room would be empty today."

The previous day, Chris Yapp, ICL Fellow Lifelong Learning, spoke on managing change and transition. With the loss of its Chief Executive, an abandoned floatation and an aborted property outsourcing initiative, one might think that ICL were not the best people to be telling us how to manage change! As Yapp said, with feeling: "It's not a good time to be in charge of anything other than a think-tank. You have to look as if you know where you're going and how to measure progress."

Chris Yapp

He spoke about the adoption of new information technology and the overturning of many assumptions. For example '3rd agers' were much more comfortable with new technology than most people had predicted. The structure of the economy was changing to the point where 200 employees now constitutes a large company. "The taxation of work in a virtual world is a challenge for governments."

Yapp admitted that technology companies had over-sold and undelivered: "Information technology improves scope and reach but there is no evidence that IT improves organisational effectiveness."

Contrasting the UK with the rest of Europe he said that engineers were undervalued. In the past we had tended to improve performance by training – that would no longer be enough: "We need better educated not better trained staff – educated to think rather than simply trained to do."

John Weston, John Pilling and Steve Willis of Sulzer Infra explained how a pan-European 'distributed organisation' shared knowledge and inculcated corporate culture and a sense of belonging. The company has 60 locations across Europe, manages 163 sites and has 70% of its staff on client premises.

John Weston	John Pilling

According to Weston, those working in the UK can easily misunderstand the geography and scale of Europe. Diversity characterises Europe but culture not language is the issue, he said: "We are rapidly bringing in many new people which tends to dilute our processes and our culture. If they were all in an office it would be easier to re-inforce corporate culture, we have to find other ways." These include bringing together people in teams, plenty of social events and the development of an intranet which won an internal Sulzer corporation award for innovation.

"Location cannot be a limiting factor on our organisation," said John Pilling who described Sulzer's use of a virtual private network (VPN) and the internet to improve the flow of information and the management of communications. The VPN gave access to the corporate network equivalent to point-to-point provision, said Pilling. Security was vital, he added and responsibility for it should not be abdicated to technicians.

In a multi-channel world, said Pilling, even corporate intranets must compete for prime-time viewing. The key was to deliver content which staff want to read as well as information they must have to do their job.

Telework 2000 was sponsored by BT, the DTI, EC, Teleworking Association, HP Invent, ICL, Nortel Networks, Siemens, Steelcase and Sulzer. Next year's Telework event will be in Helsinki – for more details visit www.telework2001.fi

Jessica Jarlvi & Richard Byatt