منافع و موانع دورکاری: تفاوت درک مدیران منابع انسانی با توجه به استراتژی عملیات شرکت

Telework as an integration of Information and Telecommunication Technologies with Human Resources management, means a new job organisation paradigm for companies working in the New Economy. However there are very few empirical studies that have analysed the perception differences of telework benefits and barriers in industrial and service companies. This paper contributes with empirical data to the relationship between the use of telework techniques and the implementation of this new work organisation with the company's operations strategy. The paper uses data from Spanish companies to test the relationship between innovation, employee training, and other production strategy performance parameters with the feasibility of telework adoption.

Telework is an alternative way to organise work that integrates two sources of competitive advantage: the own company's Human Resources and the new Information and Telecommunication Technologies. Although there is no agreement in literature about telework definition and its different meanings — telecommuting, remote working, homeworking — some common features allow us to consider telework as the complete or partial use of Information and Telecommunication Technologies to enable workers to get access to their labour activities from different and remote locations. In some studies, telework is viewed as encompassing a variety of intraorganisational functions (e.g. telecommuting, mobile work, and virtual corporation) and interorganisational relations (e.g. electronic data interchange and interorganisational team-based working). Perceived this way, the management of telework shares activities with the management of technology (information systems), the management of innovation (organisational change), and the management of knowledge (technology flows).

The empirical results of this paper showed that telework adoption in the surveyed companies was related to some variables that may have an influence on the company's production strategy. For example, those companies with employee training programmes perceived lower barriers to telework adoption. The variance of telework barriers was better explained by technological factors than by Human Resources factors. Additionally, telework feasibility was found primarily in companies that had more percentage of tasks that could be teleworked and in companies that used more Information and Communication Technologies.