Working from home could save jobs

. . .and people's personalities

Three hours a day in traffic makes for a cranky woman! I should know, I'm that woman.

Funny thing happened as I started to write this post this morning. A friend of mine sent me a message and wanted to know why we had to go back to work. I feel his pain.


If businesses wanted to save money then why not allow for folks to work from home. Isn’t that why technology folks built the routers, cable modems, wireless access points, VPNa, and even the Internet? So folks could do their jobs remotely and have access to more information than what is in a book or a document or in an internal application.

Think of the overhead cost that would be saved if each person worked from home just one day a week. Or, to put it in black and white figures or draw you a picture, try this on for size.

Let’s say the average overhead cost for an employee is $27 per day (not including salary and benefits). In some case this will be high, but in many cases this number will be low. If an employee worked from home just one day a week for 50 weeks (two weeks off for vacation) then the net overhead savings is $1350 per employee/per year.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the average number of employees in a company is 25. Multiply 25 times $1350 and we have a savings of $33,700. Just for letting each employee work from home one day a week. Imagine what a larger company of say 500 employees could save. That’s a whopping total of $675,000.

Holy cow! That’s like almost a million dollars. Well, close enough.

Take the average salary of an employee being $50,000 and divide that into $675,000. That’s a total of 13.5 employees that a company would not have to let go in tough times. Like now. All for simply letting a person leverage the technological tools that some very smart people created and made available to us. And most of us have these tools readily available at our fingertips because we have them at home for our own enjoyment.

Let’s take this a step further.

How many of you cannot stand your commute? Me, I get a little irritated at wasting 3 hours of my day in a car instead of doing something I enjoy…like writing. In 3 hours I could write a good 1000 to 2000 words.

With the cost of gas averaging $3.75, why not save a little extra money and the environment?

Let’s say the average person drives 30 miles each way to work, which wouldn’t be bad if you didn’t have to contend with traffic. That commute will average about 4 gallons of gasoline, which right now would equate to $15 per day. Take that $15 and multiply it by the 50 days we now get to work from home and that’s a savings for us of $750 per year. Not to mention the savings on the wear and tear of your car as well as your frazzled nerves. Can you imagine what you can do with an extra $750 in your pocket each year?

Since the government and politicians haven’t figured this one out maybe we can help them. Aren’t they talking about Green this and that? Aren’t they always paying some overpaid politician to do another study on energy and employment and who knows what else?

I have an idea for them. Why not have a government incentive program that would give a bonus to a company that advocates a 4-day work week or a 1-day a week work-from-home program? Better yet, incent them if they don’t let anyone go due to economic downturn because they were smart enough to sign up for this program? That way the company doesn’t benefit and still let employees go.

On top of all this, employers get the benefit of employees who are happier because they are driving to work in traffic one less day and they are saving money that they can use toward a vacation or a new car with better gas efficiency.

Plus, we can all work in our PJs one day a week!