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As the fifth part of this series dedicated to telecommuting, I am going to introduce other of the advantages that this working method brings to the companies. Remember that in the last sections of this series I have presented some of the advantages: recruit and keep human talent, increase of productivity, decrease of traveling times and decrease of absenteeism.
Decrease of the incidence to extreme situations
When we work on the traditional way, all the employees work on the same place or maybe on some few places. Obviously this brings some benefits, but also it makes them more vulnerable to extreme situations. After 9/11 attacks, many companies introduced a system called Business Continuity Plan in order to manage this problem. This is a good option but is also expensive and not all the companies are able to pay for a continuity plan. This is the reason why telecommuting brings us another alternative.
With a Business continuity Plan, the company has an alternate office, far away from the headquarters where they have some workstations in order to operate the main tasks so that the business can operate even when a catastrophe is present. However as we can see this generates additional costs in order to have an alternate office working.
On the other hand, telecommuting also offer workstations in different places of the city, but the company is not paying for them, because this are the home of each of the employees. In this way when a catastrophe occurs, some employees are going to be able to work.
Obviously, both the Business continuity plan and telecommuting do not assure us that our company will be able to operate correctly whan the catastrophe dimensions are very big.
However in less extreme and more controlled situations, such as a strike or a lockout near the facilities or problems with public services such as water or light on the headquarters, telecommuting might be even more efficient than a business continuity plan.
On my next post I will present the last advantage from which a company might benefit when they introduce telecommuting.
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