Building telework capability in the new business era for SMEs, using spherical fuzzy AHP methodology for prioritizing the actions

Abstract Working types are one of the main issues affected by the turbulences in today’s business life and should be handled carefully. Telework is developing in the shadow of information and communication technologies and has become a necessary capability for companies to adapt to today’s business conditions. This study determined the importance of the factors in the telework structure with the analytic hierarchy process method. This multi-criteria decision-making method uses fuzzy numbers, which is rare in the telework literature. The results of this study in the context of SMEs show that the factors related to the work attributes significantly impact the telework capability structure. Adoption of telework by senior management as a business strategy is the factor with the highest impact, with some factors related to the culture being other factors with high impact. The fact that technological infrastructure factors did not show the expected effect was a surprising result.