Background information and country coverage

ECaTT is a major research project with support from the ACTS and ESPRIT Programme of the European Commission carried out by an international consortium led by empirica, Bonn. It was set up to produce a solid statistical foundation for the assessment of telework, other new ways of working and electronic commerce. A number of surveys covering both the general population as well as decision makers in companies in 10 European countries have been conducted in the first half of 1999.

Plans are for the surveys to be repeated in annual or bi-annual intervals to add a dynamic dimension, then extended to include all EU member states, the USA, Japan and hopefully other countries.

Country coverage of the ECaTT project surveys 1999

Types of Telework

• work from home (instead of commuting to a central workplace) for at least one full working day per week
• use a personal computer in the course of their work
• use telecommunications links (phone/ fax/ e-mail) to communicate with their colleagues/ supervisor during work at home
• are either in salaried employment or self-employed in which case their main working place is on the contractor's premises

Individuals who are teleworking from home more than 90% of their overall working time are referred to as permanent teleworkers, while those working from home less than 90% of their overall working time, but more than one full day per week, are referred to as alternating teleworkers.

Mobile teleworkers are those who

• work at least 10 hours per week away from home and from main place of work, e.g. on business trips, in the field, travelling or on customer's premises;
• use online computer connections when doing so.

• who are self-employed or effectively self-employed (e.g. persons employed by own company or employed by organisation they have considerable managing power over)
• whose main place of work is at home or they claim not to have a main place of work
• who use advanced ICT for communicating with clients and/or (other) business partners

Supplementary teleworkers in our definition are those who would fit into the home-based category described above but for the fact that they spend less than one full day teleworking from home per week. The term implies that this work tends to occur in addition to the regular working time which is spent at the central establishment site. Supplementary teleworkers could also be described as "occasional" teleworkers.

General Population Survey:

The survey was based on a representative random sample of the population in Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Italy, France, Spain and Denmark. The survey was carried out in February and March 1999 by Infratest Burke, Emnid (Taylor Nelson Sofres Group) and their partner agencies. Interviews were carried out on the telephone using computer-aided telephone interviewing techniques. Around 1,000 people aged 15 and above were to be interviewed in the larger countries, 500 in the smaller ones. The overall number of respondents in Europe is 7,700, as the exact figures for the countries included in the survey show:

Decision Maker Survey

This survey was based on a random sample of establishments in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, stratified by establishment size (number of employees) and industry. Quotas of establishments weighted by size were set to ensure the results are not dominated by small units but properly reflect the situation of workers in larger enterprises.The fieldwork took place in April and May 1999. The samples were either drawn from special establishment master samples maintained by the survey institutes or from other available frames, as follows:

The survey was carried out by Infratest Burke using computer-aided telephone interviewing. 500 decision makers are to be interviewed in the larger countries, 300 in the smaller ones. The respondents were chosen to be the head of the DP department, senior professionals in the DP department (in large organisations) or the managing director, general manager or proprietor (in small organisations). The questions were worded to elicit working practice in the respondent's own establishment, rather than in his company overall. This method decision was based on the assessment that, particularly in large multi-site organisations, there would be no single respondent able to give reliable detailed information about working practice across the whole company.

The overall number of enterprises to be surveyed will be 4,000 with target figures as follows:

Note that because of the size-weighted sampling employed, reference in reported results such as "50% of all establishments in country A" are properly interpreted to mean "establishments accounting for 50% of all employees in country A".