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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Telecommuting

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ADVANTAGES OF KEEPING THE TELECOMMUTING PROGRAM
1. Reduced expenses for both employees and the company
Telecommuting can help cut down on transportation and other minor costs for IBM’s employees as well as lead to a lower overhead for the company. According to a report done by Global Workplace Analytics "A typical business would save $11,000 per person per year [while] the telecommuters would save between $2,000 and $7,000 a year” (2017). Unfortunately, many employees do not have the luxury of living close to their place of work. According to a recent census, “It now takes the average worker 26 minutes to travel to work [while] roughly a quarter of American commutes are less than 15 minutes one way [and] nearly 17 percent of commutes are …show more content…

[Which] adds up to 60 hours of dawdling a month, or a total of 759 hours each year” (Huth, 2015). Some of the main distractions being talkative coworkers, surfing the web, and mobile phones. Many of these distractions seen in figure 1 can be almost completely eliminated, leading to a more productive workflow for telecommuters. Those distractions being a noisy office, bad office technology, and pointless meetings.

Figure 1 (Huth, 2015)
DISADVANTAGES OF KEEPING THE TELECOMMUTING PROGRAM
1. Lack of collaboration can lead to less creativity
Teamwork and collaboration are essential parts of the creative process. Although it is not impossible to work in creative teams from home, telecommuting comes with certain communication roadblocks, making it harder to come up with viable, out-of-the-box ideas. As stated by Joonas Virtanen “According the study, far the biggest hurdles for creative remote work were the following: Communication suffers significantly, spontaneity is often lost, and lack of interpersonal relationships makes the work less stimulating” (2015). The study also showed that from the pool of workers surveyed, “only 15% think having remote team members increases the quality of work [and] 46% felt the quality of the creative work suffered due to working remotely” (Virtanen, 2015). Face-to-face communication has proven to be more effective than telecommuting when

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