Organisational structures become flatter, management becomes more entrepreneurial and results-oriented and more inclined to challenge accepted norms. Electronic networks enable hierarchical forms and relationships to be replaced by cross-enterprise teams. New kinds of teams work across enterprise boundaries, forming so-called virtual organisations. Flexible working, and especially telework, thrives in such environments. In this context, telework can both increase the quality and effectiveness of existing services, as well as provide new and enhanced services, for example by extending their physical outreach through local staff to citizens in remote areas.
Information is always teleworkable.
Know-how can be pooled and shared across networks through teleworking. Individual competence and commitment are optimised by worker empowerment, which includes choices of what work to do in what sequence and where to do it. Of course there are and probably always will be jobs that need the worker to be available at particular times and work in a particular way, but telework is providing a whole spectrum of new opportunities even in such instances. People who use today's technologies to communicate freely and easily with a much wider variety of contacts and across geographical and cultural divides are not willingly constrained to working a traditional office-bound day or to inconvenient, time consuming and expensive travel to an employer's premises. Some will choose to continue in the conventional patterns, but many will adopt the new flexible patterns of telework.