I read another interesting book over the holidays -- Undress for Success, about working from and at home. This topic has been of interest for awhile, given the potential environmental benefits due to the 50 million people in the U.S. the authors -- wife and husband team Kate Lister and Tom Harnish -- claim perform work that could be done from home. About 19 million already perform mostly home-based work in the U.S., according to the authors. My colleague Justin Horner wrote a paper about this, estimating that telework currently saves about 10 million barrels of fuel annually. As an added benefit, this option not only offers fuel savings over time, it can be part of a national "rapid response" in case fuel prices spike should, say, Iran do something rash.
According to a 2007 survey by CDW-G, two-thirds of Americans want to telework, which is not surprising since U.S. DOT estimates the average worker spends a total of four years commuting over a lifetime of work!
IBM is most notable as a large company using this practice to improve its bottom line. About 40 percent of its employees telecommute, saving the company billions of dollars due to reduced office space and the costs that it incurs (e.g., heating, cooling, electricity, telecommunications). And for an employer, beyond the obvious cost savings, the authors point out that shifting to telecommuting also helps emphasize results form work. While there are drawbacks to working in isolation -- you can't bounce ideas off colleagues readily, for example -- it also helps maintain focus on producing items (for example, blog entries!).
The final chapter also points to ways that public policy can remedy the fact that we are lagging behind European and Asian countries in terms of broadband connectivity, which in the current fiscal climate makes little sense (the authors quote a state of Vermont analysis that contrasted the $4-million-per-mile cost of a road to the $20,000-per-mile cost of broadband). This should be part of a robust infrastructure investment agenda for the nation, as President Obama has rightly noted.
Some states -- Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maryland, Oregon, Texas, Virginia and Washington -- have programs to promote telework, according to the authors. However, along with a national infrastructure investment plan, there are steps the federal government should take too. There are already laws on the books boosting telecommuting by the nation's largest workforce (the feds). However, state taxation policy can be changed by Congress to remove a barrier to work that crosses state lines.
So is telecommuting right for you? It's definitely worth a look.