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Barriers to the introduction of teleworking

Despite businesses having the most to gain from teleworking, the Sensis® Business Index found that only four per cent of those SMEs that did not currently have employees teleworking were intending to introduce teleworking to their business. Businesses in the Australian Capital Territory were most likely to be intending to introduce teleworking, as were businesses in the finance and insurance sector.

Of those businesses that were intending to introduce teleworking, 58 per cent were intending to introduce it within the next year, with 23 per cent intending to introduce it the following year, and 20 per cent intending to introduce it over the next two years.

As was the case with individuals, the main barrier to businesses not introducing teleworking was a belief that it was not suitable for their type of work. This response was provided by 76 per cent of businesses that did not have employees teleworking on average.

It is interesting to look at this barrier particularly by industry sector. For every sector this was overwhelmingly reported as the main barrier preventing the introduction of teleworking. However, businesses in the accommodation, café and restaurant sector, the building and construction sector, the health and community services sector and the retail sector were more likely than average to have given the type of work as a barrier.

Whilst the type of work in some businesses does not lend itself as readily to teleworking as is the case in others, it can be seen that businesses within all of these sectors were able to introduce teleworking to some extent. For example, in the accommodation, cafes and restaurant sector businesses that did incorporate teleworking reported the preparation of financial statements and bookkeeping as the main tasks their employees performed while teleworking. In the building and construction sector the main tasks performed while teleworking were communications and emailing and quoting. Whilst performing quoting by teleworking was not unique to the building and construction sector, no other sector reported this task to the extent of this sector. For businesses in the health and community services sector, administrative tasks were the most commonly performed tasks, and in the retail sector servicing customers was most likely to be mentioned. So while some sectors were more likely than others to report barriers, examples existed in all sectors to provide evidence that at least some tasks could be performed by teleworking employees, even if the entire job was not suitable.

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• Document ID: 33091 |
• Last modified: 5 February 2008, 3:27pm