Organising Work as Telework - New Possibilities also to Disabled
People?
by Eystein Fossum
The Research Council of Norway has set up a research programme
to demonstrate how information networks can be used in the develop-ment
of Norway as an information society. The programme supports the
building of networks between industrial and governmental actors
in common value chains in such a way that new knowledge about
branches, services, processes and products is gained. In collaboration
with organizations in different business areas there are set up
several projects to demonstrate the possibilities.
One of the projects or group of projects, in this programme has
been the telework and telecommuting project. Until now the main
goal of this has been to develop telework as a good way of organising
work in the Norwegian society.
During this project an idea came up to try out how telework could
help organising work in a good way for disabled and handicapped
people. Two separate projects now follow up this idea. These projects
are co-ordinated with the main telework project. The reason for
this is to get the benefit from using the telework expertise established
and to use parallel models for organising the projects.
The first project will gain experience of using telework in rehabilitation
of disabled people. The plan is to set up a ‘telework room’ in
a rehabilitation hospital. The project will find out which activities
and to which extent patients can benefit from a telework-like
situation, how to organise the collaboration between the patients
employer and the hospital and how to “transfer” the telework situation
to other institutions or the patients’ own home after the hospital
period. The present project is restricted to patients with motor
handicap, which have been employed in a job where they have used
dp-systems before they became disabled. These restrictions are
chosen to limit the scope of the project. In the long term it
is our hope to transfer the experiences from the project patients
with other handicaps and with other job background.
The second project will focus on how telework can give new job
possibilities to people with mental or physical handicap. There
are many reasons for which handicapped people often have job problems.
Some handicaps make it very laborious for the person to get to
an office every day, and therefore a full time job may be impossible
in the long run. Other persons may have some mental handicap as
for example not being able to perform a job in common working
environment with others. These are only two examples of handicaps
that may be obstacles for getting into the work market and where
it might be that telework can be a part of a solution. The project
will try out and gain experience with how telework may be used
as a better way to organise jobs for some groups. The project,
which is in its initial phase, will be organised in close collaboration
with the working market authorities.
Please contact:
Eystein Fossum - Semco AS
Tel: +47 67 10 19 61
E-mail: eystein.fossum@semco.no
