Telecommuting - Potential Benefits

Potential Benefits

Telecommuting offers benefits to communities, employers, and employees.

For communities, telecommuting may offer fuller employment (by increasing the employability of circumstantially marginalized groups such as work at home parents and caregivers, the disabled, retirees, and people living in remote areas), reducing traffic congestion and traffic accidents, relieving pressure on transportation infrastructure, reducing greenhouse gases, reducing energy use, improving disaster preparedness, and reducing vulnerability to terrorism.

For companies, telecommuting expands the talent pool, reduces the spread of illness, reduces costs including real-estate footprint, increases productivity, reduces their carbon footprint and energy usage, offers a means of complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), reduces turnover and absenteeism, improves employee morale, enhances continuity-of-operations strategies, improves their ability to handle business across multiple time zones, and augments their cultural adaptability. Full-time telework can save companies approximately $20,000 per employee.

Telecommuting individuals, or more specifically those in work from home arrangements, may find that it improves work-life balance, reduces their carbon footprint and fuel usage, frees up the equivalent of 15 to 25 workdays a year—time they would have otherwise spent commuting, and saves between $4,000 and $21,000 per year in travel and work-related costs (not including daycare). When gas prices average $3.00 per gallon, the average full-time employee who commutes 5 days per week spends $138.80 per month on gasoline. If 53% of white-collar employees could telework 2 days a week, they could collectively save 9.7 billion US gallons (37,000,000 m3) of gas and $38.2 billion a year.

Half-time telecommuting by those with compatible jobs (40%) and a desire to do so (79%) would save companies, communities, and employees over $650 billion a year—the result of increased productivity, reduced office expense, lower absenteeism and turnover, reduced travel, less road repairs, less gas consumption, and other savings.

In general, telecommuting benefits society in multiple ways, including economic, environmental, and personal aspects. The wide application of ICTs provides increasing benefits for employees, especially ones with physical disabilities, and leads to a more energy-saving society without adversely impacting economic growth.