Many employees and employers are hesitant to jump in the telecommuting pool. They don’t have confidence in broadband supplied by the people that provide cable tv. Many workers are also concerned about mixing workplace and home.

There is a good solution to both of these fears. Home telecommuting is only one option for telecommuters. Another option is to work from a remote office. Remote Office Centers lease office space, phone systems and network access to workers from different companies in shared facilities that can be located anywhere. This is just one more option for workers looking to cut out long, wasteful daily commutes. The main goal is to get more people off the road. It is infinitely more efficient to work from a location down the street rather than spend an hour commuting each way every day.

This question of how to get more companies doing it is really one of organizational behavior and change management. As a marketing manager of unified communications and collaboration technologies in my prior position, we always touted the financial and environmental benefits of deploying technologies that make remote collaboration possible for telecommuters. I found that typically the managerial resistance could NOT be broken down with financial and environmental arguments alone. As long as the CEO says, “I just need to look out the window and see my employees’ cars in the parking lot,” (or other lame equivalent that demonstrate they’re need to control/oversee trumps anything else) a company just won’t do it. Sad but true.

Furthermore, organizational productivity in a face-to-face environment may face a larger detraction when a highly productive member goes home to work compared to staying in the office and being somewhat less productive because she is serving as a role model and being distracted by helping others. The boss may think this is the case.

At the end of the day, organizational arrangements including the geographic location of workers are the responsibility of organizational managers, not legislators “forcing larger corporations to comply [with a telecommuting requirement] for at 10-20% work time.”

Furthermore, there are a fair number of organizational employees who would rather work in an office next to other people, not stay at home with the [dog, live-in invalid mother-in-law, neighbor constantly firing up the chainsaw, squalid undersized but affordable flat, etc, etc.]

I’d challenge that statement; is a single building that houses 1,000 people really less efficient than 1,000 people heating/cooling and lighting 1,000 homes? I’d have to doubt that. Also, bear in mind that say 300 people work from home, that 1,000 person office will consume more or less the same energy with 700 people in it as 1,000, so you’re adding energy consumption for the 300 who are now consuming energy at home.

The question here is whether heating/cooling and lighting a home that would otherwise be empty during the day uses less energy than that used to commute. In the UK, and statistics will be available for other countries too, average household emissions are greater than that household’s car emissions, so a much more detailed analysis than is suggested by this article and the NSF/Telework Exchange data it is based upon would be required to determine the impact of increased household occupancy. As a committed environmentalist I advocate sound measures for emissions reduction, but in this instance it will depend very much on the profile of the employer and its workforce and so for some it will be very worthwhile and others it may be marginal or could produce greater emissions, and reductions should be sought elsewhere, e.g. car share schemes, cycle-to-work facilities.

As a 1-in-10 day work-at-home guy I’d fully endorse the health benefits from a work/life balance point of view, however, not to mention out-of-pocket cost savings which probably save me £500 a year in travel and meals.

Can we really afford to create more pollution and oil dependency???

I use to think we were the leaders of innovation but the US governents snooze-enthusiasm over this matter has left me wondering if we won’t be left in a cloudy dust of pollution and the stale smell of following new more innovative world powers taking the lead.

COME ON LET’S WAKE UP!