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  • What we mean by ways2work
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  • Reduce costs, improve resource efficiency
  • Reduce absence, improve productivity
  • Reduce carbon emissions, improve your reputation
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  • Re-thinking commuting
  • Re-thinking business travel
  • Measuring and monitoring carbon impacts
  • Creating your ways2work plan
  • Creating a healthy workplace
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• Re-thinking commuting
  • Commuting basics
  • What we could do differently
  • Reducing commuting through ICT
    • Terms people use for teleworking: Glossary
    • Benefits of teleworking
    • Suitable organisations
    • Suitable persons
    • Issues to be overcome
    • Where can telework be carried out?
    • Essential steps to creating teleworking
    • Unintended consequences of teleworking?
• Re-thinking business travel
• Measuring and monitoring carbon impacts
• Creating your ways2work plan
• Creating a healthy workplace

Reducing commuting through ICT

Just as we are predominantly commuting by car at peak times, we are also generally working in fixed locations and commuting to and from those locations daily. So reducing car use and commuting off peak can have very positive impacts – and so too can reducing commuting itself.

This can be done through flexible and home working policies supported by appropriate technology and can mean anything from occasional home working right through to permanent home working.

The term for working at home through ICT is teleworking. The essence of teleworking is that someone works mainly at home (or with home as a base) and uses information and communication tools (ICT) to carry out that work. On days they telework, they do not commute to their office. There are a number of terms similar to teleworking which we describe here: for example telecommuting, working at home, mobile working, flexible working and remote working.

A Department for Transport 2008 survey of the extent of working at home in the UK showed that:

• 3% of workers surveyed always worked from home,
• A further 7% worked from home at least once a week rather than going to their normal workplace,
• A further 11% worked from home at least once a month or less often rather than going to their normal workplace.
• 78% never worked from home.
   

80% of this sample used ICT when working at home and the working population of Great Britain is about 30 million. So in 2008 there were about 720,000 full-time teleworkers in the country, and a further 1,680,000 who teleworked at least once a week.
 

With the strident growth in technology and social networking advances of the past decade, we don’t have to go about our work as we’ve done in the past. There is great opportunity to change and to benefit as businesses, individuals and wider communities alike. Not to mention the environmental benefits.

This is what ways2work is all about – reducing the impacts of how we work and travel in relation to that work for triple bottom line benefits.
 

Creating your ways2work action plan
Ready to implement travel and work planning into your organisation? See how in...