Winning from Home Part One: Employees Benefit

They say that home is where the heart is, and thanks to easily accessible remote networking tools, home can also be where your work is! One evidence of just how much employees love working from home comes from a recent survey of office workers where 25% admitted that they would take a reduction in salary if it meant they could work from home.

It may seem weird that many people on your staff that have such great attitudes about being at work would be so enthusiastic about the opportunity to work from home (even to the point where they're sacrificing salary to make it happen). However, when you consider how much working from home benefits an employee, then you can see that it's about much more than pajamas and the lack of pants.

Winning with Commuting Expenses
The obvious win for employees comes from the savings associated with commuting. Let's face it, owning a vehicle is a major expense that eats up a big portion of a paycheck. Consider this brief list of expenses associated with car ownership:

• Car payments.
• Ever increasing gas prices.
• Insurance and licensing.
• Vehicle maintenance expenses.
• Oversized fuzzy dice.

For a car owner, lowering or limiting these big expenses would be equivalent to getting a significant pay raise. Additionally, for employees that only use their car to drive to and from work, working from home gives them the option to sell their car outright, giving their bank account a significant boost. The 25% of employees that would readily take a salary cut for the opportunity to work from home are likely tired of spending money on their car. For these employees, they've done the math and figured out that they would still come out on top working from home, even if it means a deduction in salary.

Winning with Commuting Time
In almost every office there are a handful of employees that don't own a car, but even they can benefit from working from home! Whether you do or don't own a car, you have to find a way to get to work. Carpooling, walking, biking, and public transportation are all valid commuting options for employees not burdened with the expenses of car ownership, but commuting eats up a resource that's more precious than even money, time.

It's estimated that the average commute to work in the United States is more than 25 minutes each way. For the average employee, this adds up to almost an hour spent every work day transporting oneself to and from work. That may not sound too bad, some people may even enjoy the scenery, but when you take into consideration the five day work week over the course of a year, then that one little hour turns into more than 10 full days! For many employees in the United States, 10 days is more days than what they're allotted for vacation! An employee that works from home and gets back a little more than a week of their life every year may be more than happy to voluntarily reduce their salary in order to work from home.

Winning with Stress Avoidance
Commuting is stressful in the worst possible way. The aggravation of dealing with traffic (which leads to road rage), and the risk of not if, but when, you'll get into a fender bender, make the stress experienced from commuting actually hazardous for one's health. Stress slowly takes off years from a person's life, and working from home in the comfort of one's pajamas is definitely less stressful than fighting traffic, and therefore will add years to a person's lifespan.

When it comes to working from home, employees win in a big way, but employers also benefit from working from home too. We will look at winning from home from the employer's perspective in our next blog article. It may be a big change in your company culture to implement working from home for your employees, but thanks to remote technology available from Directive, transitioning your business to have remote capabilities is easy! With communication solutions like VoIP and mobile devices, an employee can do more than work from home, they can also remote into work from anywhere, like the beach! Give us a call today at 607.433.2200 to learn what it takes to set up your business with remote technology.