Shopping online was identified early on as one reason behind the spread of broadband. Now, teleworking is catching up fast as a major driver of broadband take up in the UK.
Teleworking, remote working or working from home, whatever your preferred term, is, according to recent research in Europe, firmly established. Not only that, it is growing steadily and especially important for freelancers and small businesses run from home.
The European Union’s BISER research programme looked at telework in the EU as a whole in 2005. It concluded that 22.1 per cent of self-employed people did at least some telework at home, compared to 6.5 per cent of people with an employment contract. For mobile teleworkers, the figures were much closer, 6.4 per cent of self-employed people doing at least some mobile telework, versus 4.4 per cent of employed workers.
Typically, teleworking means the use of telecommunications to work remotely from the workplace or office. Normally, this includes people using the internet to connect to the office network or access webmail from home. It also includes mobile personnel such as sales teams who use mobile telephones, Blackberries and WiFi laptops to stay in touch.
But whilst many workers do telework in this way, there are other important user groups who telework. These are freelancers, self-employed people with no employees working for them, and home SMEs, running a business from home with employees.
People in both of these groups have control over their working arrangements, and many are cost-sensitive. Quality of life issues can also be important. For example, teleworking can give the option of living in a lower-cost area that is beyond commuting distance from centres of employment.
The European findings have now been confirmed by a separate survey carried out by web analysis company, Point Topic who interviewed a representative sample of internet and broadband users in the UK.
They found that almost 3.8 million people in the UK were using the internet to work from home. Of these, 1.9 million were freelancers, 0.3 million were home SMEs and 1.6 million were teleworkers, i.e. employees of companies using the internet to work from home for at least part of their working week.
Freelancers and SMEs are more likely to have broadband, whilst employees are more likely to make do with dial-up, according to Point Topic’s Broadband User Survey.
Both Point Topic and the European research found that twice as many men compared to women work from home, dispelling the myth that home-working is a phenomenon favoured in the main by women with children.
