The time-pressure reducing potential of telehomeworking: the Dutch case

Nowadays, people in all walks of life are increasingly pressed for time. This may be engendered by the intensification of paid work, the increase in female labour-market participation resulting in a growing number of workers having substantive family obligations, and people’s higher expectations of personal development and leisureconsumption (see Robinson and Godbey, 1997; Schor, 1992). In the present study we are concerned with how time and time use are experienced and how specific work and household conditions influence feelings of time pressure. We particularly focus on one work condition and its supposed capacity to reduce time pressure, i.e. telehomeworking. Telehomeworking refers to working at or from home during (at least part of) the employees’ contractual working hours, often, but not necessarily, mediated by IT (Felstead et al., 2000). Among the drivers for telehomeworking is its widely perceived potential to help workers cope with the mutual incompatability of paid work and the rest of life, and to reduce related time pressures, which may improve both the functioning of organizations, individual workers and their households. In previous telehomeworking studies, time pressure is often covered under the general heading ‘quality of life’ (France et al., 2002; Vitterso et al., 2003). Like many other work–family arrangements, however, telehomeworking can be double-edged (Mirchandani, 2000). The relationship between telehomeworking and time pressure has been occassionally looked into (Hill et al., 1996) but rarely explicitly, let alone for various telehomeworking categories. The present study, therefore, questions whether telehomeworking can be regarded as a time-pressure reducing strategy, and whether this differs across gender and ‘occassional’, ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ telehomeworkers. Its main objective is to analyse the time-pressure reducing potential of the telehomeworking practice by showing how male and female telehomeworking categories differ with respect to their perceived levels of time pressure from their on-site working equivalents, and how the relationship between employees’ telehomeworking behaviour and time pressure is mediated by factors that relate to work–life balance (WLB). The study uses data from a large-scale Dutch research programme entitled Time Competition: Disturbed Balances and New Options in