Abstract
This study explores how changing conditions for home-based telework affect the quality of life and social sustainability of workers in terms of time pressure and time use control in everyday life. Changing conditions concern the spread of telework to new types of jobs of a more routine character, involving new practices of unregulated work and anytime smartphone access. Empirically, we draw on survey data from a sample of 456 home-based teleworkers employed by six governmental agencies in Sweden. Results indicate that subjective time pressure is not associated with job type in terms of distinguishing between bounded case work and more independent analytical work. Time pressure is intensified by family-related factors, telework performed outside of working hours, and part-time work, and is moderated by the private use of smartphones. We find no significant associations between subjective time use control, job qualifications, and teleworking practice. Family situation and having small children at home reduce time use control. Also, high levels of smartphone use for work-related purposes are associated with reduced control.
Highlights
The conditions for home-based telework are changing drastically in many industries, offices, and homes
RQ1 concerns whether there are differences in teleworking practices, teleworking motives, and smartphone usage depending on worker qualification and job type, in relation to the basic distinction between case workers and analytical workers
Results confirm that remote work is increasingly common among civil servants with comparatively routine and standardized work tasks previously tightly tied to the regular workplace but becoming digitalized and possible to carry out from the home
Summary
The conditions for home-based telework are changing drastically in many industries, offices, and homes. Virtual offices, and smart devices in principle enable employees in the service sector—information workers broadly conceived—to be accessible and to perform work anywhere and anytime [3] These intertwined changes raise questions about whether many of the often anticipated outcomes of telework are transforming. A second tendency considered is that telework is increasingly expanding into free time, i.e., being performed outside regular working hours, in the evening, on weekends, and on holidays, competing with private life This is facilitated by the work-expanding trend of ongoing digitalization, as more and more employees (together with their work tasks and contacts) are perpetually accessible online via mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs). We pay particular attention to the latest in the line of work-extending technologies—the smartphone
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