Part 1 - General principles of home office and telework

First of all, it is important to mention the difference between telework, remote working and home office. In a recent study, the Employment Committee of the European Parliament refers to “telework and ICT-based mobile work (TICTM)”[1]. Home office is also called “WFH / working from home” by institutions like the International Labour Organisation[2]. For the purpose of this paper we can refer to the definitions used by the study of the Employment Committee of the European Parliament mentioned above:

• Remote working: occurs when work is fully or partially carried out outside the normal place of work, not necessarily from home

• Telework: generally restricted to employees and entails the use of information technology and digital devices

• Home office/WFH: takes place fully or partly within the worker's own home, can be performed by both dependent and independent workers

Given the mobile nature of journalism, both telework and WFH aspects are taken into consideration here, with a priority to the home office as an organised and daily alternative to a fixed “newsroom office”.

Fig 1. – Home office, telework and remote work Source: “COVID-19: Guidance for labour statistics data collection”, Geneva, ILO, 2020, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---stat/documents/publication/wcms_747075.pdf

[1] “The impact of teleworking and digital work on workers and society”, 2021 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2021/662904/IPOL_STU(2021)662904_EN.pdf [2] “An employers' guide on working from home in response to the outbreak of COVID-19” Geneva, ILO, 2020: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_dialogue/---act_emp/documents/publication/wcms_745024.pdf