10 Reasons Why Telecommuting Is Good for Business

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Storagepipe. Storagepipe offers a line of online backup services which allow companies to manage the protection of many mobile laptops from a single centralized administrator account. This is perfect for organizations whose employees travel or telecommute.

Every 9-5 worker has fantasized about living a life of leisure where they can just travel the world on their own time. And every business executive is struggling with the challenge of attracting, retaining and incentivising quality employees.

Well, telecommuting might be the perfect option for satisfying the needs of both employers and employees.

Here are some of the key benefits of telecommuting:

1. Telecommuting is great for the environment since it has the potential to take millions of cars off the road during those stressful gas-guzzling rush-hour drives. Not even electric cars can beat telecommuting when it comes to energy efficiency.
2. It’s not uncommon for employees to spend 15% or more of their income on transportation. By allowing employees to work from home, you can offer them more disposable income without raising their salaries.
3. Employees that work from home have more free time to maintain balanced personal lives. This removes work stress and leads to higher productivity.
4. North-American culture is famous for its lack of vacation time opportunities. When you allow employees to telecommute, they can travel for leisure without missing a day of work.
5. Today’s new Digital Native generation prefers online chat and collaboration to boardroom meetings. This style of communication leads to shorter, more productive meetings.
6. Whether you like it or not, employees are already using telecommuting technology in their daily work. It’s now very common for employees to carry laptops, do work from their iPhones using Software-as-a-Service applications, and talk on the phone using VOIP. In many cases, letting them work from home would require no special hardware or software.
7. With the traditional hiring model, you could only hire people within driving distance. But with telecommuting, you have access to a virtually unlimited talent pool. Why hire the best in Cleveland if you can hire the best in America?
8. With telecommuting, you can serve customers better by having employees distributed evenly throughout the country or even internationally.
9. When you rely on Software-as-a-Service technology to empower your telecommuting, you can ask your employees to supply their own laptop instead of buying one for them. This will also save you money since you don’t have to pay for office space, furniture or office supplies.
10. Working in this way allows companies to be more flexible in adapting to change. This is an important strategic capability when it comes to seizing new market opportunities before competitors beat you to it.

These are just a few of the many rewards that come from telecommuting. But there are also precautions that your company should take before you start permitting employees to telecommute.

Whatever you do, make sure to protect your data! Ensure that all remote hard drives are properly backed up using an online backup service which lets you protect, monitor, and manage all of your corporate data from a single management portal.

As you can see, the business benefits for telecommuting are substantial for both workers and executives. This is partly why we’re seeing more companies moving their datacenters to “the cloud” while relying more heavily on remotely hosted SaaS software.