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RSS feedsMany parents wanting to take advantage of new government flexible working regulations to work from home are likely to be thwarted because of the costs associated with the necessary equipment, bandwidth and applications - though advocates insist teleworking could cut companies' expenditure.
DTI spokeswoman Beth Short said the new rules, which come into force on 6 April, may lead to more people working remotely, but warned that some employers would probably use cost as a reason to refuse requests by staff to work from home.
"It's possible that [flexible working practices for parents] could increase the number of UK teleworkers. The larger companies are better placed to do that, but the problems will be to do with costs more than anything else," said Short. "It is not going to be a case of a huge influx of people wanting to work from home, or of companies needing to go out and invest in major communications equipment. Many companies cannot afford to do this."
Nigel Dunn, vice president for northern Europe at Web conferencing firm Genesys Conferencing, said many employers would be reluctant to inform staff of the new rules because they would not want to spend money on new IT equipment and applications to support teleworking. "I don't think enough is being done to make employees fully aware of the new regulations," he said. "One reason for this is the general concern that implementing the new regulations will come at a high financial cost."
In contrast, service providers and network equipment vendors such as BT and Avaya are keen to promote the potential savings for companies willing to allow employees to work from home. BT cites the WorkStyle teleworking scheme available to its own staff, which the carrier estimates has saved it £134m - based on reduced office rental space, company car mileage and other overheads - and has boosted the productivity of its employees by up to 31 percent.
BT is also looking at ways to provide firms with secure home-worker connections into its FrameStream WAN service, giving employees VPN access to each other and to central corporate LANs via dial-up and ISDN lines. "There is an initial connection fee of £1,000 irrespective of whether the firm leases one or 1,000 ports, then a rental charge of £300 per year per port," said Tony Norman, training and development manager for BT Networking solutions.
Voice over IP (VoIP) specialist Avaya said that putting VoIP handsets and IP telephony equipment into the homes of call centre staff could save companies money without losing any of the functionality that a worker would have in the office. "If I'm offering an employee the opportunity to work from home and not to travel into work every day, can I persuade them to take a drop in salary, perhaps not five percent but two percent, and will that have a substantial effect on cost savings?" asked Avaya spokesman Andrew Downing.
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