It's no secret that employees love working from home. In fact, in a recent survey, 25% of employees admitted that they would accept a reduction in salary for the opportunity to work from home. This statistic may sound odd, but it makes perfect sense when you understand how much money working from home saves both employees and employers alike.
Employees Save
For employees, one of the biggest working-from-home savings is from the expenses associated with commuting to work. Making it to and from the office eats up a lot of money out of an employee's paycheck. Owning a vehicle is a major expense and gas prices seem to only go up. Depending on where one lives, the opportunity to work from home may allow for an employee to save money by allowing them drive their car less, and working from home may even give an employee a good reason to sell their car.
For the employees that don't own vehicles and instead carpool or take public transportation, even they will save from working from home because they too lose a lot of precious time commuting to work. The average commute in the United States is more than 25 minutes each way. This can be rounded up to almost a hour trip per day to get to and from work. Take into consideration the five day work week, and the average employee is looking at 10 full days of their life lost each year driving to and from work. Add to this the life-shortening stress that comes from dealing with traffic, and the risk of getting into a car accident, you can see why so many employees would gladly take a pay cut for the chance to work from home. Working from home essentially gives employees 10 days of their lives back every year!
Employers Save
There are many expenses associated with running a business. By far, one of the biggest expenses is office space. Any business that's growing feels the pressure of this expense when it comes time to onboard additional staff and they're facing limitations with their current facility. In times like this, you have to make a choice. Do you begin putting new desks in broom closets and have lines form around the bathroom, or do you spring for a bigger and more expensive office space? Thanks to remote technology allowing employees to work from home, the world can be your new office and you can save money by equipping your employees to work remotely.
Aside from saving money from renting an office space, an employer will also see savings when it comes to running an office. Less workers in the office means less electricity is consumed, less coffee and toilet paper is used, less trash is produced, and several other day-to-day operating expenses are lowered.
One of the biggest operating expenses a business can save from having employees work from home is from not having to purchase workstations. In a lot of work-from-home scenarios, employees are required to provide their own computers, and given their enthusiasm for getting 10 days of their life back, employees are often happy to use their own PC for work purposes. This is especially true if it means getting the opportunity to work while wearing sweat pants! Plus, if an employee runs into a problem with their PC at home, Business Solutions & Software Group can remote into their PC and take care of the issue.
Working from Home: Everybody Wins!
One of the biggest appeals of working from home for both employees and employers is that productivity increases. Let's face it, working in the office is full of unnecessary distractions. One cannot get a refill from the water cooler without having to divulge details about their weekend, or answer the age-old question, "who do you think is going to win the big game?" Then there's the distraction of having to work within earshot of other employees using the phone, and let's not forget about the social dynamics of finding out "who is mad at who?" Working from home cuts out all of these distractions and allows an employee to better focus on the task at hand. In fact, a 2008 study by CompTIA Research found that 67% of businesses that allow their employees to work from home saw an increase in productivity.
Thanks to easy-to-implement technology like cloud computing and desktop virtualization; it's easy to equip your business with remote access capabilities so that your team can work from home. Business Solutions & Software Group can help you with this, and we can even introduce you to great communication solutions like VoIP that makes video and teleconferencing easy so that you can stay connected with your workforce while staying in control. Give us a call today at (954) 575-3992 to learn what it takes to improve employee morale and set up your business with remote technology.
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