Don’t forget to hug a telecommuter this week in celebration of Telecommuter Appreciation Week. The US Census bureau sent out a press release to tell you why we should celebrate telecommuters: Americans spend more than 100 hours ayear commuting to work – that’s more than the two weeks vacation time manyworkers have each year. The average daily commute is just over 25 minutes.Residents in New York and Maryland had the longest daily commutes of morethan 30 minutes. And there are some places where the commute would be over 90 minutes each way: Baltimore, New York, Newark, Riverside and Los Angeles, CA, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, DC, San Francisco and Miami have the largest percentage of extreme commuters, the Bureau says. While there is some debate about the effects of telecommuting on your career, here are also these findings from Nemertes to consider:
* The majority of telecommuters view that position as a benefit, so their loyalty to the company increases. Further, they don’t want to lose that benefit, so they work harder to prove their worth. * Senior-level managers and executives work from home-at least part time-so the trend does not indicate that working from home stymies one’s career aspirations. * Companies with telecommuters rely heavily upon collaborative technologies to keep them productive and to better manage them. For example, wikis, internal blogs, shared workspaces, audioconferencing, Web conferencing, instant messaging, and desktop video are becoming common tools on a telecommuter’s laptop. * It costs less to employ a telecommuter. Nemertes has found that it costs $11,000 to $20,000 per year in real-estate and associated costs in major metropolitan areas. Those costs disappear with a telecommuter in exchange for about $6,000 in annual IT costs. * Telecommuters spend less time commuting, and they tend to give at least half of that time to the company.
