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Huge growth in working from home According to the UK Labour Force Survey, there are 2.2 million teleworkers in the UK - about 7.4% of the workforce. This is people who work at home at least one day per week. Teleworkers are defined as people who work in their own home and who use both a computer and a telephone for their work. This includes people who: mainly work from home in their main job - "teleworker homeworkers" work in various locations but use their home as a base - "home-based teleworkers" don't usually work at home but do so for at least one day per week - "occasional teleworkers". The number has been steadily increasing at an average 13% per year since 1997. The average annual growth rate for all employees is 1.6%. It is worth noting that the LFS definition of teleworking is limited to those who include work at home for a significant amount of time. There are other kinds of telework or "e-work" besides the home-oriented varieties: telecentre-based, mobile (but not using home as a base), location-flexible telework (using for example, client sites to work from) - and so forth. Jobs and sectors The uptake of teleworking in the private and public sectors almost exactly reflects the split in the wider workforce between the sectors. 74% of all teleworkers are in the private sector, 26% in the public sector. This means that in the past few years there has been a remarkable catch-up in the public sector, as initial uptake was almost exclusively in the private sector, with the self-employed particularly well represented. The self-employed still form a significant proportion of teleworkers: 43%, as against 11% of the workforce as a whole. Taken together, this means that private sector employees are under-represented in the total numbers of teleworkers. Perhaps the private sector is not as innovative in introducing new ways of working as it likes to think. On the other hand, it is probable that the majority of the self-employed teleworkers -freelancers and e-lancers - are working for private sector employers as contractors. Managers and professionals still predominate amongst teleworkers - almost two thirds of the total. This is especially so amongst occasional teleworkers, where 91% fall into the first 3 occupational groups - managers (37%), professionals (37%), and associate professional and technical occupations (17%). There could be a hidden message in here, often remarked in workplace surveys: managers see working from home as a privilege of rank, and don't trust their staff in general to telework. Administrative and secretarial work is only relatively common amongst full-time homeworkers (24% of total) - most of these are women. Skilled trades occupations amongst teleworkers are predominantly found amongst those who travel around using home as a base, making up 27% of this category. Sales and customer service have perhaps surprisingly low uptake - around 2% of the total. We know of a number of good examples of home-based/home-working sales staff, but it seems few organisations are going down this route. They make up only 3% of the home-based teleworker category, which one might think would be an ideal solution for sales personnel having to cover a wide geographical area. But over half of existing home-based teleworkers are self-employed, so this may be another area where private sector employers are not grasping the nettle and setting up their employees to work at the most effective location. The Government's figures also break down the total across industrial sectors, but generally these are not very illuminating. The sector with the greatest uptake of teleworking is "real estate, renting and business activities" (24%) followed by construction (14%), manufacturing (11%) and education (11%). But to some extent the significant factor is that the majority are managers and professionals, and that across all sectors these are the people leading the way into teleworking. Within these sectors, however, the nature of the front-line or hands-on work will determine the limits of future uptake. Source: flexibility.co.uk