STU/67th Council/16/016
12 July 2016

Dear colleagues,

Many thanks to the 641 of you who replied to our survey on teleworking.

You will find here the results of the survey.

Please be assured that the main conclusions below, which we have drawn so far from your answers, will be included in our comments to HRM and hopefully taken into account in the new policy for teleworking and the Human Resource Strategy 2017-2022.

• The majority of staff members do not have a good understanding of what teleworking means exactly but see it as granting more flexibility ;
• Teleworking should be foreseen as one part of a broader set of flexible working arrangements (FWA) that should be explored by HRM on the medium/long term, e.g. flexitime etc.
• The actors in the process of granting teleworking arrangements should not be limited to the supervisor and the staff member. The involvement of HRM seems to be indispensable to ensure that the same criteria/conditions are applied throughout the Organization when granting teleworking to staff members. The involvement of KMI could be considered as necessary to ensure that IT security and access concerns are addressed before teleworking arrangements are approved;
• The supervisors should be trained and coached by HRM to make sure that they are fully aware of the rules governing teleworking arrangements, that they possess the necessary managerial skills to manage staff on teleworking, and also on how to deal with more complicated cases;
• More flexibility should be provided in the options for teleworking , i.e. not only 1-5 days per week, but it could be 1 day every 2 weeks for example;
• Efficient & streamlined mechanisms should be introduced to allow for objective control , both by the supervisors and HRM (on demand), of the tasks carried out by the staff member during teleworking;
• There is a very strong need for the institutionalization of a limited quota of absence to be used during public transport strikes , where the staff member would be willing to work from home and which of course cannot be considered as regular teleworking.

We also encourage you to read the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) report on Flexible Working Arrangements in the United Nations Organizations, available here, which brings a lot of clarifications to your questions raised in the survey, e.g. what is teleworking and what is not, what could be the other options of flexible working arrangements, what are usually the obligations of staff members benefitting from FWAs, etc.

We remain at your disposal should you have additional comments or questions on this very important subject and please come and see us on Fridays from 12:30 to 2:30 pm on the 7th floor to discuss about staff matters.

Best regards,

The STU Council.