Telecommuting: Lower Payroll and Better Talent
Sure telecommuting saves money on wages, but it does more than that. It broadens the prospective employee pool, increasing the talent of your team along the way.
Sure telecommuting saves money on wages, but it does more than that. It broadens the prospective employee pool, increasing the talent of your team along the way.
According to CIO.com, 35 percent of IT professionals would take a pay cut if they were allowed to telecommute.
This has to be any CEO’s dream come true. Increased productivity, lower real estate costs, better talent, reduced payroll, and it all happens while CEO’s can sit in the comfort of their patio lounge chair with a tablet PC and a web cam to make it to at least a few meetings per year. It’s a beautiful thing for the future of business.
Granted, everyone is not an IT professional but there is a large portion of the workforce that could go home. About 40% in fact, according to the Telework Research Institute. The question is, would these employees also take pay cuts to do so? Not all of them to be sure, but it would be a fairly safe bet to think that over half would.
For sake of figures, we’ll stick with CIO’s example of the IT professionals. According to the article, IT pros would take up to a 10 percent pay cut, or about $7,900 per year, per employee on average. Factor that out across most big companies IT departments and the numbers get large quickly.
So it Saves Money, What About Productivity?
It is still a debatable topic as to whether telecommuting actually increasing employee productivity, but it’s a debate that is growing stale. The old status quo of “out of sight, out of mind” doesn’t quite apply in a virtual world, where, even from home, an employee can see their workplace and their boss can see them.
Perhaps most important to a company is the quality of the employee rather than an employee’s sheer productivity. By allowing employees to telecommute, a business in California can hire someone in Buffalo, Detroit, Tampa Bay or any other city on earth for that matter. Once the shackles of geography are removed, the talent pool grows and as it does, so does the businesses that hire the best talent.
The New York Yankees are a perfect example, albeit, none of those guys are allowed to telecommute. But you get the idea, a big desirable company doesn’t have to limit scouting to local or even national talent. Everyone wants to play for them, so they only have to open up the opportunity. Then it’s as simple as watching the applicants come knocking.
Would you take a pay cut to be able to telecommute? Let us know in the comments below.
