The Impact of Teleworking on Organisations and Human Resources

1 Introduction Today, organisations and enterprises are currently facing fundamental changes such as rapidly changing markets, global competition, dynamic modifications in the economical and political environment, introduction of information technology, and worldwide availability of information. Consequently, enterprises have started to reengineer their internal structures by decreasing the size of organisational units, increasing the local autonomy, decentralisation, networking, and cooperation in decision making. In nowadays organisations, there is an increasing demand for cooperation and learning that arises from the trend towards global markets and the rapid development of new knowledge skills required by workers. New organisational forms, such as virtual organisations, are being developed to address the needs for more flexible and effective production processes and services in the global economy. A virtual organisation may be defined as an organisation without walls in which complementary resources of cooperating entities are left in place but are integrated to support a particular group endeavour, regardless of the geographically locations of people or resources. Virtual organisations include virtual laboratories [KMW96], virtual office processing systems, virtual environment for design and virtual manufacturing companies, virtual classrooms and virtual environments for training. New developments at the level of hardware, distributed operating systems and distributed databases have provided the means for developing the necessary infrastructure of virtual organisations. In fact, as information technology, Intranet and Internets will become more and more an integral part of any organisation, the difference between traditional and virtual organisations will be blurred. It seems therefore that one of the keys of success in developing virtual organisations is the capacity of collaborative remote work trough computer networks, the possibility to access distributed data and knowledge trough the same networks, and the possibility of the members of a virtual organisations (both individuals and parts of the organisation) to be actively supported by NIT (New Information Technologies) tools in the learning on-demand process. Several important characteristics can be identified for such emerging distributed organisations: effective cooperation and communication between different parts of the organisation to achieve common and individual goals, efficient storage, retrieval and utilisation of previous experiences, adaptation to the environment, and learning at individual, group and organisational level. To be able to achieve such characteristics in an organisation, new organisational concepts and NIT tools are and will have to be developed. Based on recent work of organisational researchers, the new concepts of organisational intelligence and learning organisation have emerged. They will be briefly presented …