Telecommuting Benefits

Telecommuting refers to working from home or a location of one’s choice using latest technology tools like mobile, phone and internet. This is a method highly suitable for home office location, virtual teams and jobs that can be done without any physical co-location. This is highly preferred for people with constraints on travel due to location proximity, costs, and personal situation like health, managing family, and kids. This approach provides flexibility to employees and small business owners to perform business activity without coming to office physically. The workers who use this facility are called telecommuters, no mad commuters or web commuters.

The telecommuting is to set to increase 33% for technology jobs and 65% for public sector jobs. Occasional telecommuters accounted to 17.8 million.

How it works?

This varies across companies and industries. This is more prominent in technology and communications industries where IT systems and technology can enable people to work remotely without any physical presence. Also it is a policy within the organization to allow or disallow telecommuting. This requires extensive trust on people and managing them with clear goals and measurements. Many organizations find it challenging to implement especially larger groups which require constant interactions over face to face. The organizations which encourage telecommuting are more open and flexible in nature. Their policies are usually employee centric and create a sense of ownership by offering flexibility on telecommuting. There is no fixed mechanism of defining a telecommuting policy as it has varied adoption across industries.

It operates on the following ways:

1. Clearly defining goals and measurements among manager and employee.
2. Identify and carve out work that reduces dependency of physical access among employees, like standalone contribution.
3. Develop trust and virtual team work among team members to operate with each other in a seamless fashion.
4. Constant feedback and discussion with the virtual team member on measurements of the objectives.
5. Creative team interaction approach (like tele presence, video conference) to make them feel like to be part of the team.

Key advantages:

1. Offers flexibility to employees to choose where they need to work from and deliver the business results.
2. Drives employee satisfaction on the needed hour like managing family, kids, disabilities and commuting long distances every day.
3. Instills ownership and motivation through virtual team working model.
4. Saves physical facility cost per employee for the organization. The savings are up to $20,000 per year per employee.
5. Reduces attrition and staff turnover rate due to re-location reasons.
6. Saves environment by lesser traffic, energy saving at work and green house emissions
7. Potential saving of $650 billion overall if 40% of compatible jobs adopt to telecommuting approach
8. This is proven to be one of the best models for operating virtual teams across geographies.
9. Highly suited for home based businesses like network and multi level marketing methods.

In summary, telecommuting is one of the best ways of working in a virtual team to accomplish business objectives. It is considered as a modern way of working among knowledge workers. The adoption rates vary between organization and industries. It requires maturity and understanding from employee and manager to work in a manner which drives results.