With the advent of all this great new technology we’ve experienced over the last 10 years, it should be easier and easier to free us up to work from anywhere.  We can work from home with high-speed internet connections, wi-fi networks, and virtual private networks (vpn).  We can work nearly anywhere with a Blackberry, an iPhone, or any number of advanced cell phone.

Some of you are lucky enough to get to work from home, at least part of the time.  Some of us with old-school managers are not so lucky.  Although I have a great job that I truly love, I don’t love the fact that my one-way commute is upwards of an hour to 90 minutes.  I know that I’ve chosen to live that far away from work, and I accept it, but it’s still tough.

What truly irks me is my boss, who’s getting ready to retire soon, is adamantly opposed to telecommuting.  He’s a great guy, don’t get me wrong, he’s just the type of manager that always needs his team available to him, in-person, when he needs them.  I think as the old-school managers begin to retire we’ll begin to see more and more telecommuting.  I just hope I don’t reach retirement age before it happens.

There’s some great arguments in favor of telecommuting:

• It gives your company a greener reputation.  We’ve all seen tons of commercials with companies hyping what they’re doing to be a greener company.  Imagine the positive publicity your company could receive if they started making telecommuting a regular part of each employee’s schedule.
• It helps your company recruit better employees.  What person wouldn’t want to work for a company that supported telecommuting (and also flexible schedules, while we’re at it)?  It’d be a great selling point.
• It would promote greater productivity.  Most people take pride in their position and want to do a great job.  Telecommuting would not only take away the long commutes, which would allow employees to work longer, but it would also help employees avoid office distractions like the chatty co-workers, the long lunches, and useless meetings.  At the very minimum, if you’re conferencing in on one of those useless meetings you could continue working while you’re on the phone.  It’s difficult to do that during an in-person meeting.
• More telecommuting would improve the traffic for everyone still commuting to work.
• It would take a lot of cars off the road, reducing our dependence on foreign oil
• and most importantly, telecommuting would improve employee morale.  I know it would for me.

Why hasn’t telecommuting caught on to the extent it should have by now?  I understand that some careers just don’t lend themselves to telecommuting, but many do.  Also, some bosses just love to hold onto that sense of control and don’t trust their employees to work from home.  That’s just sad.

I guess it’ll be up to our generation to start the telecommuting revolution.  Let’s all hurry up and become the leaders of our companies so we can get telecommuting into the mainstream of the business world.

Tags: Going Green, life, work