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The Rt. Hon. Patricia HewittEuropean Telework 2000 'New Ways of Working' Conference |
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Sheila, thank you very much indeed, and perhaps I can add my welcome to that of the Prime Minister and Andrew Miller to all of you here for Teleworking 2000. I am delighted to be here, as some of you will know. This whole subject of teleworking, and more broadly of more flexible employment, is a subject very close to my heart and many years ago when I was at the Institute for Public Policy Research I authored a book called About Time - The Revolution in Work and Family Life, which began to analyse the transformation in the organisation of working time, that is a central theme in all of our economies as we move from the industrial to the knowledge economy. A year ago Tony Blair and I were in Cambridge when we were launching the campaign to make the UK the best place in the world for electronic commerce. One of the businesses whom we met on that occasion demonstrates very powerfully how the Internet, how the revolution in information and communications technology that we have already been hearing about this morning, is transforming the way in which organisations and individuals work. So I thought I would start by saying a little about that organisation. Cambridge Electronics is an extraordinary hi-tech company that specialises in advanced electronics prototypes. About 18 months before Tony Blair and I met them, they had finished the lease on their office. They had decided that all of them would work remotely from home, wherever they wanted to work. And so they got rid of the office, cancelled the lease, took the rent out of the budget line. They weren't absolutely certain that this new way of working was really going to work for them, so they took the precaution of putting all the furniture in store, just in case. The staff, all the associates of Cambridge Electronics now work remotely; all powerful, Internet enabled laptops. Every client of the company, and most of them are in the USA, has a secure, dedicated website, and all the work that is done for that client, including all the administration, all the timesheets, all the quotations, all that stuff, is all done by the staff, on that secure website. So it is a completely web-enabled, remote working company. Since then, about six months in fact before we met them, they decided to sell the furniture as well, it has worked so well. And the Managing Director gave me one lovely example of how it had transformed his life. He said: "You know, a lot of these software programmers, these software engineers, they like to work in their own time; you know they're not bureaucrats, they're not organisational people", and he said: "When we had an office we thought we sort of had to be there at nine in the morning it was hopeless" because this guy, this particularly gifted programmer, never turned up at nine in the morning, didn't like to work in the mornings, so the Managing Director was constantly hassling him, because he wasn't keeping to the proper time. He said: "Now we all work remotely, I don't care when he works. If he wants to sleep all morning and start work at six in the evening and work through the night, it's not my problem. So long as the work is there on the website, when it needs to be, I don't care when he puts it up.". So they have got a much more effective way of working, they've got a way of working, that is much more attuned to needs of their individual staff members, they've got this completely transparent relationship with their clients and indeed of those west-coast companies in the USA, whom they are working for, were so impressed and indeed astonished by the way that Cambridge Electronics were working, they said they're actually getting more information, they know more about what Cambridge Electronics is doing for them than they know what their own staff are doing in the office in Silicon Valley. And of course, they have got much lower overheads as well. That's a pretty radical example of an entire organisation, based on the web, e-working as an organisation. For a lot of us teleworking is much more modest, it's just part of the way we work, it's some hours of a particular evening and weekend. But either way, it is growing, and as Peter was illustrating it is growing particularly fast in the Scandinavian and of the other Northern economies of the European Union. But I was very struck to be told, when I was thinking about this conference, that nearly eight out of ten UK companies don't actually allow their staff to telework. And I think we need to understand the nature of the barriers there. In some cases, of course, the nature of the job itself, in others the need for very close, constant communication and the desire, very often, of the staff themselves for that communication to be face to face with other colleagues and, of course, with the customers as well. In other cases the barriers have to do with infrastructure, whether it is the problem of remote access to offices, to office systems, the problems of equipping staff with the necessary IT, the problem of infrastructure at the home and people simply not having the space in which to work. But in other cases, it is simply bureaucratic inertia and simply not having thought about it. And, of course, even in sectors of the economy and even in organisations, like for instance manufacturing companies, where teleworking, in it's most radical sense, is not appropriate for employees, who are working as part of a large factory, with highly sophisticated, complex machinery that has got to be located in a specialist environment. Even there, in those organisations we are seeing e-working in a different way, as those companies create round the clock, round the world, teams of engineers and software designers who are using remote working, using the Internet and other electronic networks to work far more efficiently then was ever possible in the past. Looking at even those barriers, it seems to me we should be able, pretty rapidly, to get at least a third of our workforce here in the United Kingdom teleworking for at least for part of the time. It wouldn't meet the huge demand there is for teleworking that we've just heard about, but it would go a long way towards doing it. This Monday, this week, the Prime Minister and I launched UK On-Line. We reported on the progress we've made since last year and we set out the campaign we're going to put in place over the next year. And we have indeed made some extraordinary progress here in the United Kingdom. We have got now one in three people on-line, connected to the Internet from home. Now that's still behind the USA but I have to say that means we are pulling ahead of the other major economies of the European Union. A year ago, about four Internet years ago I ought to say, the biggest problem that Andrew, and a number of other people were bringing to me was the cost of Internet access. The fact that we don't have un-metered phone calls here they way they do in the United States. Since then, thanks to an intensely competitive telecommunications market and to some tough regulation, we have seen prices fall very fast indeed, and for off-peak access (weekend and evenings), very relevant to a lot of us, teleworking part of the time, we now have in the United Kingdom the cheapest Internet access costs in the world. Not just the European Union, in the world. For peak-hour costs, and, of course, if you are working from home all of the time, or most of the time that's what really matters, there we're still just below the OECD average, although indeed since that benchmark survey was done, we've seen costs continue to fall by 30 or 40 per cent; they've got to come down further. The next thing we are doing is to try to spread broadband, so that more and more people in home, but also in telecentres and small businesses, have access to the very high speed broadband networks that will make access to the Internet for work and everything else so much easier. ADSL, now being rolled out very fast in the United Kingdom, broadband, fixed wireless access, for which we have just announced a new auction or radio spectrum, hugely important in reaching parts of the country and indeed a number of smaller businesses and workplaces at home, where ADSL is unlikely to be connected. And then coming up behind that, third generation mobile telephony, where we held the world's first auction, where we are one of the world leaders and where, I think, in the European Union we are 18 months or two years ahead of the United States, we can create an infrastructure that will not simply support teleworking at home, but will support on the move and will give us a huge leap forward in the exploitation of the Internet, for work, for learning and for leisure. And I shall be working with all our regional development agencies through this autumn, to ensure that in every part of the country we have got a strategy and a public-private partnership to extend that broadband access right across the country. Of course, expanding the infrastructure as we are doing will help to expand the workforce. Peter's already talked about the need to bring in more women to the workforce, right across the European Union and even here in the United Kingdom, where we have got a high proportion of women in employment, we're still anticipating that most of the growth in employment in the labour force, over the next ten years, will come from women. And we are seeing women and men who want to care for their own children, particularly when they are very young, without completely giving up paid work, or moving into the rather narrow range of jobs that are still available part-time. Teleworking has got a really important role to play there, just as it has in helping many of the people with disabilities or long-standing illness who for various reasons may find it very difficult to travel to work, but who again, with the right connectivity and infrastructure at home, can take paid work and fit it to suit their needs. And then many other people who simply prefer to work at home to have that additional flexibility. We're seeing in the United Kingdom a very fast growth in our employment rate, in the total labour force, indeed more than a million more people in employment than there were three years ago. But the effective exploitation of the potential of teleworking will help that labour force grow even faster, thus in turn underpinning a higher rate of sustainable and low inflation growth. The technology, the infrastructure, has got to be right to make that happen but, of course, it is the social issues, it is the people issues, that are really at the heart of teleworking, and getting them right is what will make the difference between teleworking continuing to be, certainly for the UK, rather a minority occupation or becoming something that is much, much more common. We look for instance at the whole issue of work-family balance more broadly, work-life balance. I remember back in the early 1970s the fledgling FI group, that some of you will know, it is the major IT service companies in the United Kingdom now, it started, its founder, and extraordinary person called Steve Shirley. Steve Shirley is in fact a woman, who found in the early 1970s, that when she wrote to companies seeking positions in IT, she generally didn't get an interview, got a bit fed up with this and started signing her letters with Steve Shirley, rather than her real name and surprise, surprise, got rather a lot of interviews and would walk in, find the person interviewing her say: "Oh, we thought you were a man" and she got a bid fed up of this and decided to start her own company, taking advantage of all those women, who in the early 1970s with excellent qualifications and skills were at home with their children, unable to stay in their paid jobs. And out of that she created an organisation, based really on the twin motives of exploiting the potential for teleworking even on the infrastructure that was available in the 70s and exploiting that untapped workforce of women at home. Hugely successful organisation. Yesterday, in the train coming back from Newcastle, I bumped into a couple of BT staff who happened to be working on the new UK On-Line Government portal, the Internet portal project, who said that both of them are full time teleworkers. And of course, BT, one of our sponsors here today, is one of the leading organisations in the United Kingdom exploiting teleworking. And one of the chaps I was talking to, said: "Of course, the wonderful thing about remote working is that it lets me get time with my children; I have two young children, it makes the work-family balance so much easier". Then he went on to say: "Of course can be a bit of a problem, you know, 7 o'clock in the evening, I decide to just check the e-mails, come midnight the wife's knocking on the door saying;time to go to bed". And that I think illustrates not just the problem that we are getting overloaded with the e-mails, the voicemail and all the other communications systems we're connected to, it illustrates something more fundamental, that what teleworking, what the Internet and the convergence of information and communications does, is to blur the boundaries between work and home. And if you do have your e-mail, your voicemail, your mobile connectivity, you've got remote access to your firm's entire knowledge base and all your colleagues and your clients. In other words if you can work any time and anywhere, and if there is always work to be done and there always is, then why shouldn't you be working all the time. And the challenge there, and it is one of the reasons why for many staff teleworking isn't in practice all that it's cracked up to be, the challenge there is that each of us who has the potential, has the possibility of teleworking, has to set their own boundaries. We have to decide when we're going to work and when we are going to be free for our family, our friends, our learning, our leisure and all the other things we want to do in our lives. So we've got a challenge there how we organise our own time, just as we have a challenge of how we organise our own space at home, because work isn't simply spilling into our family time, it is spilling into our family rooms and our living rooms. And no doubt one of the reasons why teleworking hasn't grown as fast as all those predictions were telling us 20 years ago in this country, is that unlike Sweden, for instance, and Australia, British homes generally don't have that additional room, that den-cum-home office-cum-family room that can so conveniently be adapted for remote working and indeed remote learning. So there are really challenges there and we need to be realistic about how we enable organisations and individuals to overcome them. Let me end by reflecting what our Government can do and is doing to help promote the growth of teleworking, to help exploit the extraordinary potential it does have. We must first of all set an example in our own departments. The Department for Education and Employment has been doing that for some time, with a significant number of staff working remotely. DTI has just put in place, I am glad to say, the remote access systems to our new internal Intranet. And of course we are going through all the usual teething problems of that. I took possession of my new remote access enabled laptop a couple of weeks ago and asked the techie chap who was giving it to me - he said he'd recently had his - and I said: "How's it going, did it work?" and he said: "Yes, it did, for the first six hours!" and again we need to be realistic about the limits and frustrations of the new technology which is still at quite an early stage. And a lot of it has not been designed to be people friendly, and if you are working at home and you have to be your own IT Director and helpdesk. That's another hassle, another barrier in the way of efficient and enjoyable teleworking and I am glad to say that my colleague David Sainsbury, the Minister for Science, will shortly be announcing a new joint research programme involving two of the research councils and the DTI itself, looking at the human factors in the design of information and communications technology, building upon some of the work that has already been done in industry and in the universities, looking at how we make the new technologies much more people friendly. We'll certainly be having a look at the enormously interesting report that the Rowntree Foundation has published today, Living at Work, and considering whether we do need to make changes in the regulation and the tax environment, to enable a fair treatment of those who are working from home alongside those working from the office or the factory. And finally, I'm glad to say, to mark this immensely important conference we're publishing this morning, the second edition of Working Anywhere, which is the DTI guide to employers and to individuals on how they can best explore and exploit telework. So let me end by congratulating you, Sheila and all your colleagues on organising this conference. I am delighted to see so many delegates from so many organisations and countries here today. I wish you the very best of success at this conference and I look forward to working with you in the future as we seek to exploit the potential of these new technologies for the benefit of all our people right across Europe. Thank you. |
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Other speeches by The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt
(the following are available from the archive) |
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