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Benefits of working from home
Benefits of Working from Home
What are the benefits of working from home? Remote work has many advantages for employees such as no daily commute, a much better work life balance, lower costs, lower carbon footprint on the environment, better work productivity and overall, more flexibility.
- 1. Better Work life-balance
**Following a year of working from home for office based jobs, companies are now realising that employees are just as focused and productive working at home as they are in the office. ** For some companies this has even meant that they are now moving out of their offices and are become remote working companies.
- 2. No Commute
Do you hate your commute? You are not alone. For many people the worst part of their working day is the journey into work and the journey back home. This is something that is unavoidable with regular jobs and something we have assumed until recently is a necessity of having a job. The internet has provided many more options for working online now and that makes the concept of remote working more desirable.
- 3. Lower Costs
Want a pay rise? Working from home will allow you to save money that you would have spent in the office. That lunch you have in the canteen, those drinks after work, the tickets that you buy for transportation or the petrol that you put into the car to get to work all add up. On a 5 day a week commute to work this will be substantial. Working from home means that you are effectively getting a mini pay rise as you no need to battle your way into work. Which for most people is a costly and stressful business.
This incredible inefficiency in our working lives means that around 2 hours are wasted for each employee commuting into work every day. If these commuting hours were reinvested into remote working then employees would only need to work a 4 day week as they would save 8 hours from commuting per week.
- 4. Reduce your Carbon Footprint and save the Environment
There is always a lot of talk about saving the planet reducing our carbon footprints and living cleaner, greener lives. But the connection between working from home and the environmental impact is rarely made. According to the NYPost , over 75% of office workers said that their commute to work is something that they felt guilty about when it came to the impact on the environment.
In the UK the environmental impact of commuting into work means 3 million tonnes of carbon could be cut if
“Homeworking has a clear impact on employee commuting. By working from home two days a week for a year, an average UK employee can save 390 kg CO2e, 50 hours commuting time and £45012 including travel costs (modelling based on DECC/Defra emission factors and travel survey data).13,14”
- 5. Increased Productivity
With no commute employees are finding that working from home enables them to be more productive than when they are in the office. Working from home means less interruptions from colleagues, reduced office politics and genearlly a quieter working space. It is clear that when working from home is deployed correctly it can cause a boost in employee performance.
- 6. More flexibility
The key advantage of working from home is that it will provide you with more flexibility. Need to do the washing in your lunch break? No problem.
Small household tasks that would have been completed after you had commuted back from home can now be done during the “commute time” when working from home which means you will be less tired at the end of the day and can enjoy what you want to do in the evening rather than having a seemingly endless list of tasks that you need to complete before the weekend.
Working from home also means that you get more flexibility in what you eat for lunch. If you are a home cook or a batch cooker then this will mean that you can save money that you would have spent on eating out. Working from Home eliminates the cost of necessary take away food when you are out and about and means that you don’t have to spend so much time in expensive Gyms as you are eating heathier than you were in your old office life.
Case Study: BT’s Homeworking Project
BT have trialled Homeworking since the 90s. In one of their projects they analysed the benefits and trade-offs of working from home. The project discovered that the annual saving for 1.4 tonnes CO2e. (Around a 14% reduction per person). The homeworking project in BT saved 14,000 tonnes of CO2e over 12 months. Homeworking enabled BT to close some of their offices spaces meaning they saved £60m annually.
Source: www2.bt.com/static/i/media/pdf/flex_working_wp_07.pdf