Barry David Moore — November 21, 2019 Six out of ten employers identify cost savings as a major benefit of telecommuting, but there are many huge benefits for companies that implement flexible home working environments.
1. Lower Employee Salary Costs
Believe it or not, those people offered a flexible working contract see immediate value and benefits of up to 20% of their taxable income. The cost of a car, road tax, gasoline is a significant cost to any commuter.
Add to that a typical 2 hours per day is saved on the commute, which equates to 10 hours per week. Considering we are awake for 112 hours per week and we spend 40 hours of those 112 hours at work, a saving of 10 hours per week, is a reduction of 25% of our effort of working and a 9% improvement in the time we have in our waking life.
A teleworking survey of 1500 IT professionals revealed that 37% would take a pay cut of 10% if they could work full-time remotely.
These benefits are huge. Any prospective employee would be willing to consider a 10% lower salary on a job offer for the opportunity to work remotely and save nearly 10% of there waking life and additionally reduce overhead transportation costs.
2. Proven Greater Productivity
Many large corporations have reported that teleworking or remote working has increased the productivity of employees by up to 40% according to research who data mined over 4000 telecommuting academic research papers. The following points in this section cover the contributing factors to this productivity improvement.
3. Fewer Distractions
Being part of the office means, socializing, coffee breaks, team lunches and water-cooler moments. While these things are part of the human social experience they actually add little to the business of productivity.
Most people go for their social breaks with the same people, so it is not a matter of arguing that being in the same office adds a level of networking that increases employees’ ability to get things done across teams or organizations, this is simply not the case.
Remote workers simply do not have these distractions, therefore, more of their energy is put into actual work and actual beneficial relationship building to achieve a given task or goal.
4. Improved Networking
As someone who has worked remotely for Silicon Valley giants for the past 18 years, 13 years of which have been a mix of remote work and traveling to offices around the world I can share how networking in geographically distributed remote teams works.
If you need to find a contact who can help you achieve a task or you need to build a cross-organizational team with people with the right skill set you need to reach out to the right person.
This is where the organization chart comes in. Do you need someone responsible for real estate, do you need someone from datacenter, finance or human resources? You simply reach out to the leader of the organization via instant messaging, email or a quick phone call and they give you a name. If you are stuck for where to go you ask your boss, chances are they will know the organizational structure better than you. Over time your network will grow and you will know who to call to get a result. Deep personal relationships are not required.
Office-based workers do not operate like this, they are confined to the walls they are within, they have not learned the ability to pick up the phone and talk to strangers in other countries to get things done.
5. Remote Workers Work More Hours (for free)
I know this from experience, but research at Sun Microsystems Inc. proves the point. Remote workers tend to give back to the company close to 60% of the commute time they saved. AT&T also reported that their telecommuters worked on average 5 hours more per week than their office-based counterparts.
Think about it, the people you trust to work unsupervised remotely are the type of workers that have proven they can do the job and deliver on their goals wherever they work. A motivated employee will get up in the morning, but will they wait until they would normally arrive at work after the commute to start work? No, they will start work immediately, they want to get ahead of the game. Do not mistake people working from home with a lack of ambition there is zero correlation there.
Original article published here: 26 Proven Advantages of Telecommuting For Employers
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