Telecommuting: Why Working from Home Just Makes Sense
October 3, 2007 By Matthew Paulson
There’s a segment of the population that could be very productive and helpful to society, but are unable to due to the constraints in their life. These people are single parents, disabled individuals, individuals who live in very rural areas and other people that just can’t make it to work every day through no fault of their own. Many people want to work; they just don’t have the opportunity to do so. These people are perfect candidates for positions that would allow them to work from their homes, but many companies are still dragging their heels when it comes to telecommuting. When we look at the issue in depth, we realize that telecommuting just makes sense for everyone involved.
First and foremost, it makes a lot of sense from a business perspective. For each less employee you have at a location, that’s one less employee you have to provide an office and a parking space for. The business also saves the water and electricity used by that employee as well. Having one employee working at home won’t make much of a different, but if a company were to allow a couple of hundred people to work at home, they could save an entire office building’s worth of expenses.
Recent studies also indicate that individuals who work from home are also much happier and much more productive. The Wall Street Journal conducted a study of 10,000 workers and found that job satisfaction and company loyalty were much higher among telecommuters than regular office workers.
When employees work from home, they have a lot of added flexibility in their schedule. Sometimes employees have to leave the company because of schedule constraints and other obligations and then the company has to pay all the cost of recruiting and training a new employee. There’s a good chance that many employees could keep their jobs if they were allowed to work from home instead of having to quit, which would also save the company a substantial amount of money.
Many employers are still suspicious of letting people work from home because they think that in order for people to be efficient and do the work they are supposed to, they have to be monitored. This is true for some people, and they wouldn’t be well suited for a work at home job, but there are just as many people who are productive by their nature and will produce a lot regardless of where their work location is at. There’s no reason that these types of people can’t work very effectively from home.
There are some positions where working from home is infeasible, such as in manufacturing, but there are a lot of positions that could be done from home just fine, and it would save companies a substantial amount of money and give their employees much needed flexibility.
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October 4th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Hmmm… I would love to be able to work from home, but at the same time I wonder if I’m that kind of person who is productive without supervision. On one hand, I’d like to say I’m “differently” productive (i.e. I take lots of breaks, multi-task, and am able to work over a longer period of time as a result), but I haven’t had the chance to really prove myself… my company rarely allows us to telecommute for more than a day at a stretch.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:24 am
About ninety percent of my job can be done online. And in fact, I was telecommuting officially one day a week and often extending that to two or even three days. The university where I work is a 30- to 40-minute drive-&-hike from my house–if I avoid the rush hour; during rush hour, the commute can reach two hours. it consumes more than an eighth of a tank of gas in the minivan I must use, and disabled parking, which I no longer can afford on what the university is now paying me, is around $800; next year it goes to almost $900.
Our dean recently announced that NO ONE henceforth will be allowed to telecommute. Why? Because people whose jobs don’t lend themselves to remote working were envious and complained. Since he couldn’t explain why a person who can do most of the job online should be allowed to work remotely while another person whose job is to meet the public should have to work on campus, he decided that everyone will have to drive in to the campus, every day, five days a week.
This is at the same university that hands out free bus passes (two hours going from my house; two hours ten minutes returning), begs people to carpool, jacks up the parking fees to try to force people out of their cars, and as a matter of policy encourages telecommuting.
Makes sense, eh?
October 5th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Of course if I could work from home it would be awesome. I work a Systems Administrator/Help Desk for my company, and everything I do is over the phone, through email, and through remote desktop support. There’s no need for me to be at work, or at least 8 - 5 Mon-Fri.