Earlier this year, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer changed corporate culture and created a mandate requiring employees to spend most of their time in the office instead of working remotely at home. This step is greatly at odds to the common advances productivity gained through the use digital workplace technologies.
Support for these technologies, including the fact that teleworkers are 35 to 45 percent more productive when working out of the office than when in their cubicles, can be found in a recent BizTech article.
In a small business where everyone wears multiple hats, imagine what even a 25-percent increase in productivity means. At a company with eight employees, that is like having two more full-time positions!
Smaller organizations need to provide employees the perks of working from home, such as not wasting so much time stuck in traffic and the chance to have a better balance between work and family life. Plus, for the organization, the cost per employee is less than supporting a traditional office.
To make a remote working environment successful, businesses need systems — such as a collaboration platform and knowledge management solutions — that allow people to access their information from anywhere while not increasing security risks.
One key advantage for workers outside of an office environment is silence, according to the article. Cubicles and open-office environments are rife with distractions, such as co-workers chatting and socializing.
To rectify these distractions, some offices even pump in white noise to diminish sound. In other offices, it’s common to see workers using earphones to block out the distractions. Engineers, writers, programmers and others will be most productive when they can focus on a task for hours on end without interruption — a clear advantage of telework.
In the end, companies should focus on the work employees are doing, and not as much on where they’re doing it.
Source: BizTech, May 2013
