Deployment of Telework in European Public Administrations

Part Three: Comparisons and Conclusions
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In 50% of our cases it was the senior management, often in combination with programmatic
decisions of political bodies, who gave the initial impulse for the introduction. Other initiators
were ‘individual staff members’ (8 out of 22), persons in charge of internal communication (5)
and computer technologies (4). In most of the planned pilots participation is on the one hand
voluntary, on the other hand the organisation restricts the number of participants. Internal
documentation and additional remarks on our questionnaires indicate that in a first, enthusiastic
phase of trials the number of volunteers has in several cases been higher than that foreseen by the
management. Selective criteria as far as they are made explicit (which is the rare exception) are
not coherent throughout our sample and vary among organisations. The decision-making of the
management often considers ‘objective’ factors like the distance between the premises and the
home-office, seniority of staff members, or ‘inter-subjective’ factors like the personality of
volunteers for the pilot.