By Julian Bajkowski

The Gillard government has kicked off a major industry and publicity push to sell the productivity dividends of teleworking to business, the public sector and the electorate as it seeks to drive home the tangible benefits of the National Broadband Network.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Monday signed the Commonwealth up to the goal of having at least 12 per cent of its public service employees regularly “teleworking” by 2020, a relatively modest target that is could be achieved well ahead of time.

Regarded as an executive luxury until recently, the capacity for employees and contractors to remotely connect into their workplace systems has now become a key focus for employers, spurred on by the falling cost and increased power of newer computing systems.

One imperative to investment in teleworking technology is the lowered barrier to entry for employers. This means that they can harvest big productivity gains and cut costs like travel, accommodation and excess office capacity by connecting workers by digital rather than physical means.

In blunt economic terms, it means that the relative price of investment in employee teleworking capacity is now lower than it has ever been.

However as demand for services, like remote connectivity into data intensive workplace systems and video conferencing, increases the speed and capacity of older broadband services emerges as a key constraint – a problem that the government maintains justifies its investment in the fibre-optic powered National Broadband Network.

“The government’s investment in the National Broadband Network will give more employees and employers the confidence to engage in telework by delivering reliable, affordable high-speed broadband to all Australian homes and businesses,” the Prime Minister said.

The government is also citing research from Colmar Brunton and Deloitte Access Economics, which estimates the lift that teleworking can deliver to Australian gross domestic product (GDP) at $3.2 billion while creating up to 25,000 new jobs, 10,000 of which would be in regional Australia.

The same research also found that 74 per cent of people “with family or carer responsibilities who are not in the labour force would take up telework if it was available to them.”

Those findings tie neatly into employer concerns over the retention of long-term staff, particularly women who often leave the workforce early because of the difficulties in maintaining more conservative modes of employment that lean towards office-based, five-day -week jobs.

However employers and industry now appear keen as mustard to be seen to be endorsing Monday’s Telework Congress in Melbourne alongside the PM.

The Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox, Medibank Private personnel chief  Ilona Charles and IP Australia’s acting director of employee performance Chris Menadue all delivered presentations alongside Communications Minister Stephen Conroy Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten at the event.

Equally keen to promote the telework concept are technology vendors who are competing to snap up a lucrative new market where spending is shifted from office leases to connectivity services.

In a fortuitous coincidence of dates, networking and mobility specialist Citrix has reckoned that “by 2020 organisations are set to reduce office space by almost a fifth (17 percent).”

While it is understood that in Australia that figure is predicted to be closer to 15 per cent, Citrix estimates that “the workplace of the future will provide just seven desks for every ten office workers, with each person accessing the corporate IT network from an average of six different computing devices.”

Citrix says that ratio falls to as low as low a desks for just six out of ten workers in locations like Singapore where office space commands a high premium.

Technology cohort Cisco was not about to be outdone on the telework research front, with the company’s general manager of government and policy, Tim Fawcett, saying his research indicated that for every two hours saved from a commute, staff give one back to their employer.

The commuting scenario was driven home by Ms Gillard who said that many people now make “long journeys to get to their workplace” and offered a surprisingly conservative estimate of Sydney’s notorious commuting times that are caused by choked roads and overcrowded trains.

“To give you just a few quick statistics on that if you were travelling in Hobart or in Sydney: in Hobart you can easily lose a week of the year just in your commute; in Sydney you can lose 12 days of your year in the commute,” Ms Gillard said.

Government News’ own calculations (based on a kitchenette straw poll) found that a 45 minuteas each-way journey (which is an arguably typical travel time for many commuters in Sydney) adds up to 8 hours a week: the equivalent of a day’s work, or 48 days a year based on a 5-day-a-week job with four weeks annual leave.