Pros and cons of teleworking in the PA

One of the most impactful changes in recent decades in the Public Administration (PA) is the introduction of telework, also known as telecommuting, home work, remote work, or smart work.

Teleworking was initially recognized as an indispensable innovation for dealing with workplace problems, and for addressing new socio-demographic needs: from promoting women’s emancipation to defending parenthood, from attracting Millennials to incentivizing policies for urban mobility and greater environmental sustainability. But at the same time, several critical areas emerged regarding control of teleworkers, the modularity of their tasks, and the absence of boundaries between their personal and professional lives. Moreover, the flexibility that this organizational model allows actually reconfigures the temporal dimension of work, enabling both synchronous and asynchronous activities.

But what is lacking in all this is a measurement of the true impacts of teleworking on the organization, or an evaluation of the relational dynamics between people who telework and those who don’t. In fact, PAs that have adopted teleworking are seeing unexpected consequences. In particular, these include a feeling of loneliness among teleworkers, and a sense of inequality and injustice among employees who don’t have access to teleworking, not by their own choosing but for various other reasons.

To investigate the attitudes of non-teleworkers to their teleworking counterparts (who physically work from a distance, or at least are not always in the office), we recently ran a study. In our investigation, we collected and analyzed a series of data on a large Italian PA, an organization which pioneered teleworking in 2011 and is still offering its employees this option today.

We asked 1,014 non-teleworkers in the organization (around 1/5 of the total) to indicate their preference toward a prospective co-worker by choosing between five categorical attributes: sex (male or female), age (39, 45 or 51), number of children (one or three), teleworking status (non-teleworker or teleworker) and working hours (part time or full time). They had to select only one of each of the options presented. The results of our experiment show a remarkably strong preference among public employees for non-teleworking colleagues. In fact, teleworking proved to be the attribute with the biggest negative coefficient: the odds of being selected as a potential colleague were 58.5% lower for teleworkers as compared to non-teleworkers.

We followed up on these initial findings by analyzing the reasons behind this clear preference in the second stage of our research, based on semi-structured interviews we conducted in the PA, specifically with non-teleworkers.

We should point out that the interviews did not reveal a general anti-teleworking attitude. Instead the introduction of this work arrangement was justified as an unavoidable consequence of technological progress and social changes, and as a legitimate response to personal and family-related needs of workers. That said, according to the interviewees, the contextual conditions leading up to the activation of teleworking gave rise to certain negative effects on teleworkers, their non-teleworking colleagues and the entire workplace collective, i.e. the work environment as a whole, to include both workers who are physically present in the office and those who aren’t.

Reflecting this, a number of interviewees emphasized the trade-off between individual and organizational benefits. The physical absence of teleworkers added to the workload of the people in the office, who had to compensate for their absent colleagues. But contrasting with results from previous studies, this did not seem to be a major concern for many of our subjects. What our findings did confirm, instead, was that the isolation of tasks often resulted in an actual professional isolation, excluding teleworkers from responsibilities but also from personal relationships that are built on physically being in the office together. A further finding, interesting to note, is that this isolation can be permanent. In other words, it can continue even when teleworkers go back to the office, because their colleagues aren’t used to having them around.

The effects of teleworking that the interviewees perceived as far more critical pertained to the collective sphere of the workplace. These effects included lower performance, slower decision-making processes, and poorer quality of services offered to the public, in particular with regard to urgent or unusual procedures or decisions.

In addition to this, physical distance among colleagues hinders informal communication, because in a similar situation it becomes hard to build interpersonal relationships. In this sense, teleworking also seems to limit the development of additional know-how. In fact, this work arrangement reinforces a more static view of organizational learning based on existing individual knowledge, rather than on a dynamic approach based on the shared production of knowledge.

Lastly, many of the participants in our study expressed concern about the shifting work-life balance. Not only people who work from home, but also those who continue to work in the office are afraid that teleworking is eroding the communal experience that is created in the workplace, leaving a work environment that is less vibrant and enriching.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the proliferation of teleworking reached levels never seen before. And teleworking will likely become an essential – albeit modular - organizational element in the foreseeable future in public bureaucracies the world over.

But the disparate effects of teleworking can impoverish the social side of the work experience. This could alter both the work-family balance and the performance of the PA as a whole, with direct repercussions on the services provided to the community. In light of this, it is crucial to focus on the attitude of non-teleworkers toward the introduction of this innovation in the workplace.

Therefore, policy makers and public managers should pay closer attention to the strategies that are conventionally used to mitigate the negative effects of teleworking, concentrating on one hand on enhancing the workplace collective as a whole, and on the other favoring the integration of teleworkers and non-teleworkers. Concrete ways to achieve this include: designing integrated work flows that avoid parceling out tasks to individual workers; and using technologies that facilitate informal communication and foster work environments that encourage personal exchanges among colleagues, regardless of where they work. These suggestions can be useful not only in public administrations but in complex private organizations as well.