Is it working? Working from home at Statoil, Norway

Statoil a.s., Den norske stats oljeselskap, made home PCs, private ISDN connections and Internet access freely available to virtually all of its about 18[punctuation space]000 employees worldwide in 1997. The goal of this unprecedented initiative was to improve information technology (IT) skills of Statoil employees in preparation for competition in the emerging knowledge economy. Statoil management taught that availability of PCs at home could create a natural learning environment for employees to acquire IT skills during their leisure time. Although the initiative has resulted in improvement of employee IT skills, as predicted, it has also brought about many emergent outcomes including a rapidly growing working from home practice at Statoil. This practice, in turn, has surfaced the need to rethink organizing principles and human resource policies at Statoil. In this paper, the authors describe evolution and outcomes of Statoil's working from home initiative. Combining insights from Statoil's initiative and the broader virtual work literature, they argue that working from home is an essential part of the knowledge strategy of firms. They propose a framework that conceptualizes working from home strategy in terms of administrative efficiency and knowledge effectiveness at individual and team or task unit levels. They summarize managerial and technical challenges brought about by each strategy.