After weaving through the city’s rush-hour pedestrian traffic and overcoming the morning small talk at the water fountain, you may have already lost time trying to meet the latest work deadline. These are just some of the reasons why telecommuting can supercharge employee productivity and performance.
But What Really Is Telecommuting?
Telecommuting is what some workers used to do before remote working became popular and in-demand among younger job seekers. The term means working from home but emphasises the use of internet, computers and telephones to continue working and stay connected to the office. Now that these technologies are taken for granted, telecommuting usually just gets referred to as remote working or flexible working.
Sometimes people looking for remote working jobs on job sites miss out on them because they forget to search for telecommuting jobs as well. However, this is never a problem for those that use job recruitment site JobRapido because their site categorises posts together using AI – so all remote working and telecommuting jobs are found together in a single search.
Not everyone is suited for remote working, and they may need to make some adjustments to enhance the working from home experience.
How Telecommuting Improves Productivity
- Fewer Business Hours Lost
Many employees who work from home choose to use the extra time not commuting to work to get on with their tasks. By not being at work, there are also fewer distractions of colleagues socialising. All of these instances may sound harmless and insignificant, but over a year they can add up and telecommuting saves plenty of working hours over the entire business.
- Telecommuting Drives Results
Most people who work remotely have their performance more heavily scrutinised. They are likely to be given daily or weekly targets and tasks that they must deliver. This is a way for companies to ensure their staff are, in fact, working from home. What this does is increases accountability on the employer and adds a degree of pressure, ultimately resulting in more motivation to work and increased productivity.
- Increased Job Satisfaction
Granting staff permission to work from home or away from the office is also likely to help them balance their working and personal lives. This may be to help look after an elderly relative, look after children or for another reason. The bottom line is that it develops trust between the employer and the employee and increases job satisfaction – leading to a desire to perform well.
Job satisfaction also leads to reduced staff turnover for the business. By keeping staff happy, the company does not have to spend more hours, resources and staff time sourcing new staff to replace those that have left.
Will Telecommuting Continue to Increase?
Telecommuting is highly desired within modern workforces, and it does not look likely to subside. Once companies realise the productivity benefits to them – as well as saved office costs – they may be inclined to grant remote working.
2020 has made many businesses realize that they also must offer remote working, which may open the eyes of employers to the benefits of it and start to offer it more often in the future. This will become a possibility if managers find ways to manage teams remotely.
