Advancements of technology and globalization are the main drivers of pushing work from home agenda for many companies. There are other factors, discussed largely by analysists and proponents of work from home strategy, most of them geared towards how it benefits employers and productivity more importantly and employees as a secondary benefit. Remember, we are in business to make profit and if anything we do does not contribute to the bottom line, it becomes questionable. So every time a new policy is implemented, the question we need to answer is, “how will it improve my bottom line?” I will not go into the details of answering this question today, because that is not the purpose of this posting and also it has been answered many times; Nor do I want to state the benefits to the employees, also for the same reasons, but I want to state a third benefit; Benefits to society at large. I want to discuss the benefits to everyone who has no relation to either employee nor employer, but somehow greatly benefits from work from home policy. In particular, rush-hour traffic. Wouldn’t it be great to forget about this term?!
Major metropolitan cities around the world deal with the dreadful traffic daily. Infrastructure suffers and billions of dollars are poured yearly into maintaining outdated roads trying to cope with the population growth. Cities and towns try to build more roads and public transportation to cope with traffic. Yet, no one is happy.
While not every job can be done remotely, a great number of them can and the benefits (to everyone) are tremendous.
According to a survey conducted by Microsoft and published by Forbes, (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/12/18/benefits-working-from-home/), 47 % of people agree that the biggest benefit of working from home is to avoid traffic. Again, this is a benefit to employees, but when you think about how nice would it be for the people who actually need to be on the road at 8 AM to be able to drive 50-60 MPH, that is priceless.
So, will there be a time that we can stop building wider roads and simply have fewer people on them!