LRD guides and handbook April 2021

Negotiating the new homeworking landscape - a guide for union reps

Chapter 1

1. What is remote working?

[ch 1: page 5]

Remote working is usually used to describe work that is carried out from a location that is not the office so this could be either from home or another location. However, since the lockdown of March 2020, the term has increasingly been used interchangeably with homeworking.

The term telework is occasionally used in this booklet and refers to office workers who do their normal work from home using a computer.

For the purposes of this booklet both the terms homeworking and remote working will be used to describe someone who:

• is working full-time at home making occasional trips to the workplace for meetings, or using home as a base and working off-site meeting customers, or going on site visits (sometimes known as mobile working);

• divides their time between their home and the workplace, for example, working three days in the office and two days at home; or

• homeworks on an ad-hoc basis, perhaps to complete a project or because they are recovering from an illness.