In recent months I’ve become a fan of Alexander Kjerulf’s blog Chief Happiness Officer, which focuses on how to make the work place a more enjoyable venue to spend half your waking hours.
He recently blogged about the Top 5 Reasons to Let Employees Telecommute, and I’m a bit disappointed that he neglected to discuss the environmental and bottom line impacts of telecommuting as well. Kjerulf focused on the feel good aspects of telecommuting — better home and work relationships all around, productivity, freedom and responsibility.
Business being business, it’s important to highlight the economic benefits of telecommuting. Last summer, Ted Samson published a great article at Infoworld entitled, “Giving telecommuting the green light,” which covered some great cost savings of telecommuting.
For instance, there is increasing media coverage of the American dependence on fossil fuels. Samson reports that
According to the 2005/2006 National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS), we could save about 1.35 billion gallons of fuel if everyone who was able to telecommute did so just 1.6 days per week. That calculation is based on a driving average of 20 miles per day, getting 21 miles per gallon.
On an average week, I can sit in traffic for 30 minutes to and from work. So for every day I telecommute that’s an hour of my life I get back, and over the course of a year hundreds of dollars at the gas pump that I’m saved.
At the end of the day most companies care about the bottom line. Thus Samson points out that
“Your organization could save one office for every three teleworkers (that’s about $2,000 per teleworker per year, or $200,000 per 100 teleworkers),” according to the Canadian Telework Assocation(CTA). . .
AT&T reports savings of $3,000 per office, for approximately $550 million, by eliminating or consolidating office space; about 25 percent of IBM’s 320,000 workers worldwide telecommute, saving Big Blue some $700 million in real estate costs, according to the CTA.
Even with the expense of setting up telecommuting situations, companies still come out on top because of their use of less physical space, which in turn means less technology plugged into a wall socket and lower utility bills. Note: this money saving is also good for the environment; regardless of how plugged in you are at home,you would be unlikely to use as much energy in a residential space as you would in a like sized business one.
Telecommuting, kind to the environment and a tool to keep your sanity.
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