Working from home can increase productivity and efficiency. Here are some excellent tips for employers on how to manage a successful telecommuting workforce. Save How Employers Can Benefit from Telecommuting By Fred Sexton , CEO of Worksnaps Pin 9 Share 31 Email 49 Shares

Today’s guest post comes to us from Fred Sexton, CEO of Worksnaps. Worksnaps is a unique service specifically designed to track time for remote workers, telecommuters and freelancers. For employers, Worksnaps improves the visibility and accountability of how time is spent and what you are really spending your money on. FlexJobs Employers receive 25% off any pricing plan at Worksnaps!

Did you know that working from home can actually increase productivity and efficiency? Many company owners don’t realize the benefits that come from allowing employees to work from home. They worry that employees will goof off on company time or that projects will not be completed properly.

How do you ensure all workers are doing their job properly?

What do you do if different team members need to consult on a project?

How will you perform status reports and updates?

Well you might be surprised to know that all of this and more is possible even if your workers perform their duties from the comforts of their homes.

The benefit from telecommuting:

Working from home increases productivity.

There are actually several ways that working from home can increase productivity. There have even been studies on this. The benefit from telecommuting has been proven, let’s take a look at one, for example.

An experiment from Stanford University in July 2012 sought to find out whether or not working from home really works:

Over 10% of U.S. employees now regularly work from home, but there is widespread skepticism over its impact highlighted by phrases like “shirking from home.” We report the results of a work from home experiment in a 13,000 employee NASDAQ-listed Chinese multinational. Call center employees who volunteered to work from home were randomized into home or office working for 9- months. Home-working led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9.5% is from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 3.5% from more calls per minute (quieter working environment).

They go on to elaborate on the experiment:

Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction and their job attrition rate fell by 50%. After the experiment, the firm rolled the program out to all employees, letting them choose home or office working. Interestingly, only half of the volunteer group decided to work at home, with the other half changing their minds in favor of office working. After allowing employees to choose, the performance impact of working from home more than doubled, highlighting the benefits of choice alongside modern practices like home working.

As this study showed, people who work at home can work at a schedule that is comfortable to them.

Telecommuting improves morale and work quality.

You can plan meetings and responsibilities around your workday.

With no dress codes, you are free to wear whatever makes you comfortable and you don’t have to worry about how you look.

You can just spend that time focusing on your work tasks.

There are no co-workers to deal with that you might not get along with. Many employees report bad co-workers as a number one reason they don’t want to go to work.

Many employees who work from home feel more in control of their own schedules and empowered to get their work done.

The real caveat is time management. Work-from-home employees need to be self-motivated and if they slip or get distracted, your work may not get done on schedule.

How to address poor time management.

There are steps that you can take to address time management issues with your work from home employees. You want to make sure employees are staying on task. Let’s explore:

Time tracking: Worksnaps offers time tracking tools that you can use to help keep your employees on task, see where they are at any given point in the project and also allow them to check in with other project workers to see where others are at. This helps everyone work together and in sync.

Personal Accountability: Worksnaps service helps the team to stay on task and collaborate better by knowing who is working on what. It provides visibility and reduces unnecessary interruptions. This is good for all parties involved and it saves time on having to redo tasks later because steps were missed.

Improved invoicing: With accurate and verifiable time tracking, hourly based invoicing or payment is not guesswork anymore. Pay for actual hours worked. You can also monitor work in real time. You do not need to wait until the end of the day or week to know what your contractors have been working on.

Working from home is rewarding.

Finally, work-from-home employees are often more productive because they have the self-fulfillment that comes from working from home. They can take time off when they need it.

They can work where they are comfortable, even if that means taking the laptop out to the garden. They have more flexibility in their work and personal schedules, leading to more productive days and weeks.

While not everyone is capable of working that way, for those who can, the benefit from telecommuting can be huge. It can increase productivity and efficiency because you are more in control of your own time and how you spend it. That study by Stanford showed us that when given the option, half of the people chose to work from home and the other half chose to go back to the office. Of those who chose to work from home, they were even more productive.

Time = money and Happy employees = productive workers







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