Identifying costs

The first task of this analysis was to identify costs that are peculiar to teleworking. That means, on one side, we had to figure out, which costs are caused solely by the fact that you are working. On the other side, we had to pick out those costs that differ in one way or another compared to the costs of a 'traditional' employe. It was already hard to deal with the former problem because of the fact that costs can be hardly assigned to exact one category. For example if you go to work with your car and before going back home you decide to go shopping, the costs for driving the car have to be split and assigned to those two activities. Keeping that problem in mind, we figured out four aspects of work that cause costs of which we think are crucial:

• Transportation
  Costs of running the car, costs for public transport ticket.
• Communication
  Costs for internet access, phone line, installations and taxes.
• Room, Furniture
  Rental costs, opportunity costs when using a private room to work, costs for additional furniture, etc.
• Equipement
  Computer, Modem, Fax and Software.

Costs that are peculiar to the teleworker

The next step was to decide which of the identified costs are relevant to the teleworker. The problem here was that you can expect that most of the costs above (like equipement, taxes for communication, etc.) should be beared by your employer. Instead of providing you a computer at the office, your employer equipes you with a notebook to work with at home. Even if you have to buy the computer yourself, you can expect that your employer will pay for it. After all it is common, that your are beeing equiped with the necessary tools for your work.

So the conclusion of this fact is that most of the costs mentioned above are relevant to the employer and not to the teleworker. On a monetary basis, the different costs e.g. between a desktop computer (for a 'normal' employe) and a notebook (for the teleworker) are interesting to the employer and not to the teleworker.