Telecommuting: Benefits of telecommuting from a business perspective

Telecommuting
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Telecommuting
Introduction
Telecommuting has become the latest model of networking that has been embraced in the current employment sector. Through telecommuting, workers are no longer needed to appear in person in their places of work to perform duties that they can do at the comfort of their homes behind computers or smartphones. Besides just minimizing the influx of workers in workplaces, the trend has also come with greater advantages, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, where social distancing has become a new norm. Several studies have also indicated that telecommuters experience flexibility in balancing between family and work. Also, telecommuting has minimized environmental impacts caused by human mobility of commuting to and from workplaces. Therefore, this paper examines telecommuting's benefits from a business perspective and the employees' point of view. These benefits include workplace productivity, worker satisfaction, family-work balance, and cost management in organizations.
Benefits of telecommuting from a business perspective
Some of the benefits that organizations enjoy as a result of telecommuting include having access to a wider global reach. With telecommuting, business organizations get easy accessibility to a pool of more professionals, and as a result, they get to have more options to choose from according to their preferences (Caillier, 2012). This is exactly the opposite of the traditional form of work where institutions have to look for professional personnel from a small group of individuals they can physically access. With telecommuting, a business gets to look for the specific person they need without worrying about their geographical locations.
Secondly, through telecommuting, organizations also find it easy to retain their best employees who, for one reason or another, may want to relocate or change their work schedules. Therefore, by embracing telecommuting, organizations are enabled to retain and hold on to their best employees. The latter have a proper understanding of the company's brand as they can work from home and during their preferred time of the day (O'Leary, 2013). This can be made possible even if employees relocate to a faraway location from the company offices. This is a greater benefit to the organization who, in the previous period, had to let go of some of their best employees, thus hindering the organization's productivity or continuity as they are forced to seek new recruitments.
Finally, telecommuting has also helped organizations in cutting the cost of sustainability. With most employees working from home, organizations minimize the resources used to run an office set up. For instance, an organization is likely to do away with office furniture procurement as they become useless when employees work from home. As a result, the company saves some of its finances that could have been used in the purchase. Therefore, the finances can be channeled for other development purposes within the organizations (Davis, Shevchuk & Strebkov, 2014).
Benefits of telecommuting to employees
According to Owl Lab (2019), a report on the state of remote work, 81% of Americans prefer to work from home. Other studies have also suggested that employees who work from home tend to be happier and more motivated than the infrequent employees who report at workplaces in person daily. Therefore, it is convincible to argue that telecommuting is a key motivator to workers from these observations. As a result of being highly motivated and happy, the productivity of employees working from home also gets to increases. Generally, the surveys' observations indicate that both the employees and organizations benefit from telecommuting as they get motivated and feel happy. In contrast, organizations benefit from increased employer productivity.
A better work-life balance is another benefit that employees get to enjoy as a result of telecommuting. When working from home, most people always focus more on a task at hand and are always free from distractions, as is usual when working in an office setting (Fonner & Roloff, 2010). The avoidance of distractions from colleagues when working from home implies that telecommuting employees are likely to complete their tasks in measurable blocks of time hence have extra time to focus on other things, including family life. Therefore, by spending the extra time on family matters, telecommuting employees achieve a perfect balance between work and life, which they can hardly achieve when reporting to physical work stations. Therefore, it is convincible to argue that telecommuting employees usually enjoy a perfect work-life experience with such an observation.
Increased flexibility is another benefit that employees are likely to enjoy whenever they decide to work from home. With the freedom to choose when to handle tasks, employees' productivity is likely to increase since they are most likely to knock on tasks during their own time to be more productive. For instance, some people are more productive during the wee hours of the morning while others are more productive during the late-night hours. Therefore, by not visiting the office, employees become more flexible with their timing in that they are likely to schedule their working hours to coincide with the times that they are more productive. Because of this, teleworkers are 77% m...