Dialing it in: A Missed Opportunity Regarding the Strategic Use of Telework?

We assessed the degree of alignment of organizational strategies with telework using Statistics Canada's 2005 Workplace and Employee Survey data. We consider telework to be 'employee-oriented' when an employee works at home to address his and her family-related or personal wants or needs, and 'employer-oriented' otherwise. We found that employers focusing on innovation were significantly more likely to use both types of telework, with greater emphasis on employee-oriented telework, whereas employers favouring an involvement strategy were somewhat less likely to use either type of telework. We did not find a statistical relationship between a cost containment strategy and telework. Overall, the results suggested that employers are not universally aligning the implementation of the two types of telework with their organizational strategies.