AnswerConnect’s Distributed Workforce Saves Time
Do you have one of those change jars for your end-of-the-day pocket change? There’s one on my kitchen counter. When it fills up, we’ll take it to a coin-counting machine, see how much we have and splurge on something fun.
What if you could do that with time? What if you could save up 55 minutes each work day—the average amount of time each U.S. worker spends commuting to and from work, 260 days out of the year? To that, add 45 minutes spent getting ready each weekday morning, and you’ll end up with approximately 18 days’ worth of saved time. That’s a generous vacation’s worth.
In his book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler points out that “In a country that has been moaning about low productivity and searching for new ways to increase it, the single most anti-productive thing we can do is ship millions of workers back and forth across the landscape every morning and evening.”
Computer networking giant Cisco reached the same conclusion in their 2009 Teleworker Survey, a study of company telecommuters. Of the 2,000 employees surveyed, “69% reported higher productivity when working remote, and 75% said the timeliness of their work improved.” Cisco reported an overall increase in efficiency just by giving employees the option of working from home.
Pinpointing areas of increased productivity in a distributed workforce is easy. Conversations at the water cooler, for instance, take a surprising toll on time. The average worker admits to wasting two hours out of every eight-hour workday. Twenty-three percent of 10,000 people surveyed blamed socializing with co-workers.
Telecommuters work alone, in theory, but not in isolation. Free or inexpensive web-based tools–Skype is just one example–fosters collaboration between workers. Employees gain the focus of solitude and the flexibility of instant communication, and they’re less tempted to share workplace gossip or fantasy football stats.
This flexibility extends to scheduling too. On-site employees are constrained by office hours. Working outside the office, they’re able to maximize their time by choosing to work their most productive hours, regardless of the stereotypical 9-to-5 daytime work shift.
This may seem like incremental savings, but they’re all minutes in the time-jar. Just as my family is always surprised when we cash in our spare change, I’m sure Cisco was surprised to discover that telecommuting saved them $277 million annually in productivity.
To many workers, their commute may seem like a necessary inconvenience. In fact, given the efficiency of distributed work (and the availability of tools enabling it), a commute is becoming a distinctly unnecessary inconvenience–one that adds up.
