Work from home - benefits staff and organisations
Working from home, or telecommuting, offers significant benefits to employers, employees, self-employed individuals and entrepreneurs.
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As more and more people become energy conscious, and as technology and communications continue to improve so rapidly, there seem to be increasing opportunities for working from home. |
In the first instance, of course, it is energy efficient.
The three major areas where energy can be conserved are:
- Vehicle-related materials and resources;
- Highway-related materials and resources; and
- Office-related materials and resources.
A tremendous amount of energy is required to produce transportation equipment such as automobiles, buses, trains and jet aircraft. If telecommuting is promoted, there will be less use of this equipment and less energy will be required for production, maintenance and repair of this equipment.
Once a person arrives at work in a central office location, he or she is an energy consumer, often times magnified many times over what would be required at home.
The office building has heating, cooling and lighting needs, and the materials to build it and maintain it require energy in their production and transportation. In contrast, working from home requires only modest incremental demands on energy for heating, cooling and lighting needs, and makes effective use of existing building space and facilities.
Then there is the whole issue of safety.
To determine the safety and health benefits of telecommuting you simply need to think about all the hazards associated with "unnecessary commutes". Unnecessary commutes are those made to and from a worksite, when the work could just as easily be performed without leaving home. If you could accomplish the same work sitting at a desk in your own home, then it is most likely that your daily trip to your workplace puts you at unnecessary risk.
For employers, some of the main benefits of telecommuting are discussed below.
Cost savings
The main savings are in premises costs, office overheads and labour. Companies adopting telework methods achieve significant reductions in total office occupancy. And then there is the cost of relocations that can be completely cut.
Increased productivity
Significant productivity increases can be obtained typically in the 10% - 40% range. Teleworkers avoid travel time and the interruptions of an office environment. There can be further gain because employees are better motivated because of the greater trust that management places in them, and the greater sense of personal autonomy that they enjoy.
Skills retention
Employees who might otherwise leave can remain in their jobs, for example when the family moves because of a job change by another family member who works in a non-telework company. Employees who take a career break can continue working part time and remain up to date with the business and its methods. Employees who take maternity leave can continue to undertake some tasks and require less retraining when they return to work full time.
Although there are many benefits, the reality is that telecommuting challenges traditional management techniques.
In particular, telecommuting means breaking away from the idea that supervisors have to remain in a central location and manage by observation. The old notion of supervision is a carryover from the early days of industrialisation, when factory managers literally sat up on high benches overlooking their employees, watching their every move.
Working from home, implies managing by watching the results, not by watching the workers. It brings forth issues of employee trust and empowerment - using trust strategically as a powerful tool for getting good results; and using empowerment as a powerful tool for employee growth. And it creates supervisory challenges to keep teleworkers as an integral part of the "office team", even though they're not in the office very often.
Obviously, these are all factors that can be overcome, but they can require adjustments for many managers.