Telecommuting advantages for your company (part 1)

Even though telecommuting exist as a for of working for over two decades, only with the technological advantages of the last years we have been able to explore more profoundly this type of work form. Thereby, today many companies are exploring this new form, which has brought many benefits.

Introducing Telecommuting

In this post and the next ones I will write about the advantages of telecommuting, but before I want to introduce the subject by talking about to points we have to take into account when we want to have employees that telecommute. Firs of all we must understand that telecommuting is not designed for every type of labor. However, in general, we can say that the works that do not involve the next points may be suitable for telecommuting:

• Production tasks that have to be done in a facility
• Works that require expensive equipment, or specialized equipment
• Face to face contact with customers
• Face to face contact with other employees or supplier

The other point we have to take into account is that telecommuting is not as simple as sending our entire list of employees home to perform their tasks. In order to achieve this goal it is very important to plan how are we going to do this taking into account, how to enable their equipment and other systems, how to monitor their work, among others. Moreover if this is a new form of working we want to implement in our company it is very important to implement projects that manage change in order for the employees to adapt to telecommuting. This change, as any other, must be managed in order to avoid conflicts. A good practice is to introduce this change in a gradual form, with pilot trials and mixing physical working with telecommuting according to the day of the week. With time your employees will get used to this new form of working.

With the previous introduction I am now ready to present the different benefits that telecommuting brings to our companies. However this will be the subject for the next posts of this series of articles.

Image taken from Flickr.com