Here's an interesting short paper (not including survey visual data) by Jasper Lim. Lim would be interested in any feedback and comments, and for further information, please send to Jasper Lim at: h.n.lim@tbm.tudelft.nl
"In recent years, there have been increase teleworking practices by employees, from teleworking part-time from homes, client offices, starbuck cafes, or even during travelling from one place to another. Teleworking is now being offered increasingly to employees of business organizations in The Netherlands. So, we may expect a big bang of “teleworkmania” in the coming years?
Not exactly, the reasons will become apparent in the next paragraphs. The benefits of teleworking are enormous and are well documented by many researchers. From the benefits of increase work concentration, work efficiency, travel time reduction, attending to domestic chores and many more. Teleworking could also be just simply “nice” and “handy” for some employees. It gives employees a feeling of independence and the opportunity to “release” themselves from the traditional 9-to-5 jobs.
In theory, telework allows employees to work anytime-anywhere with the assistance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for communication and travel substitution. However, this freedom and may be restricted by two factors. Firstly, employees, particularly field employees (e.g. salesmen, consultants) have to attend to “client maintenance”. This means that they have to meet clients face-to-face. As one interviewee puts it “It’s very important to visit the clients in person. Personal contacts cannot be replaced by any other form of communication. In business, it’s important to create trust and the best way to do that is through face-to-face meetings”. Secondly, social contacts with colleagues are important, particularly for employees with managing or coordinating roles. It allows them to communicate with the team more effectively in-person than via email or msn messaging. Furthermore, it’s the best way to enhance cohesiveness with colleagues and also to “catch-up” with office politics.
The consequences of telework-freedom and the restrictions impose by the above factors lead to somewhat interesting developments to business travel behaviour. Firstly, it leads to changes of the business travel chain. For instance, business travelers can now prepare materials from home and depart to visit customers directly without visiting the office. Secondly, it leads to traffic-anticipation travel planning behaviour by employees. For example, to avoid been caught in traffic congestions, appointments are planned during non-peak rush hours (e.g. after 10 o’clock). This allows business travellers to work partially from home before going to work or visit clients. The employers seem to support this. As can be seen in Figure A, the majority of employers cited avoiding business appointments during peak rush hours as a good measure, followed by the use of virtual meeting tools and the extension of road networks (Lim 2004).
Figure A: Employer preference on how to solve traffic congestion (not included here)
As expected, majority of the employers were not in favour of the idea of introducing road pricing (e.g. kilometer pricing or congestion pricing).
The third consequence to travel behaviour may not be apparent at this point of time due to the fact that broadband wireless internet is not available everywhere except for sporadic Wi-Fi spots at cafes, hotels and airport. One particular interesting proposition was to have wireless internet on trains for business travellers. A survey conducted by Zhang (2005) on NS (Dutch National Railway) train business travellers suggested that having wireless internet service (WIS) on trains would improve travel efficiency and increase work productivity of business travellers during train travel. This means that value of travel time could change may have to be re-evaluated in the near future. Having internet on trains may even stimulate the use of public transport given the fact that car drivers could only perform limited tasks in their cars.
To conclude, there are still barriers with regards to the concept of working anytime-anywhere. Employees are still “bounded” by traditional social and business ethics. However, telework is slowly changing the way business travellers conduct their work and travel activities, particularly, time losses attributed to traffic congestions could be reduced by intelligent use of telework options and adaptation to the travel chain."
References
Lim, H.N. (2004), W.A.T.T. Survey report, company and public versions, Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, April 2004.
Zhang, M. (2005), An E-journey for business travellers on trains. Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Master Thesis.
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