Company incentives and tools for promoting telecommuting : a study based on employees' preferences.

Like most other metropolitan areas in Europe and the rest of the world, the Stockholm region is experiencing increasing traffic related problems, with a more densely occupied road network each year. Since advanced information technology is widely spread in society, and a large share of the workforce is engaged in information processing, telecommuting has the potential to work as a traffic-managing tool. However, in society at large this work form is still not as widely spread as anticipated. This paper uses a case study from a business district called Nacka Strand outside Stockholm, where the factors which influence the employees' willingness, or ability, to adopt telecommuting were investigated. It is expected that the choice to telecommute largely depends on the attitude or lack of promotion and support from labor management. By focusing on the employees' preferences, constraints and choices with respect to telecommuting, it is emphasized on how companies could promote telecommuting and what they would gain from it. The objective is to find instruments to promote telecommuting from a company level. Examples of such variables affecting the rate of telecommuting are e.g. company sponsored computer equipment at home, broadband or modem connection to the internet, top-down attitudes towards telecommuting within the company, and monetary incentives if helping the company to obtain economical savings from reduced office areas where telecommuters use foldaway desktops instead of private office rooms. The empirical data consists of questionnaires from 460 Ericsson employees in the business district of Nacka Strand outside Stockholm. The response rate is 55%. The survey focuses on revealed preferences towards telecommuting among the employees and contains their perceptions of the main incentives and obstacles towards telecommuting. The survey also includes a "stated preference game" in order to estimate the employees' valuation of their office rooms in comparison to flexible office areas. For the covering abstract see ITRD E126595.