Staff selection

Staff selection is a major issue in many telework initiatives. A reliable and consistent approach to identifying suitable tasks and individuals is required.

A self-administered questionnaire can be a good way of raising issues that intending teleworkers need to think about and assessing how successful they’ll be as a teleworker. It is also a useful tool in assessing preliminary eligibility for telework.

The approach taken in the template questionnaire provided on this website is to ask intending teleworkers to answer a set of multiple-choice questions. The answers are then aggregated to produce a score. If the score is high enough, the employee could be a good teleworker. By aggregating the scores, it is possible to get a fairer and more accurate result as high scores in some areas can compensate for low scores in others. Including too many ‘knock-out’ questions will significantly reduce take up of telework within the organisation and could make gaining benefits harder.

Note: in the template document, target scores have been provided (in italic or blue text). These can be made higher or lower depending on whether your organisation would like to restrict the numbers teleworking (e.g. for an initial pilot) or encourage more people to become involved (e.g. to maximise possible space savings). It is also possible to delete questions that you don’t think are important or to weight answers to specific questions or groups of questions.

A teleworker self-assessment questionnaire might not adequately assess the eligibility of an intending teleworker. For some organisations it is only the first step in a more extensive analysis of teleworkers and their tasks.

This template teleworker self-assessment questionnaire can be edited to match your organisation's requirements..