What If Almost Everyone (Who Can) Worked From Home?

What do you like most about work? Early mornings? Coffee spills?

Desk lunches? Back pain? Wrist Pain? Neck pain? Sore ears?

Stay home and get paid. How does that sound?

Working from home is not an easy sell; convincing your boss that yes, you can be productive in your pijamas, without getting distracted or… sleepy… again.

Plain and simple, a lot of employers believe working remotely hinders productivity… Which doesn’t seem totally off base…

But a 2-year study out of Stanford University says otherwise, claiming that working from home actually increases productivity, along with employee satisfaction. So if the proof is there, why aren’t more of us working from home?

It’s because you don’t actually want to. From a business perspective, having your employees work from home makes a lot of sense.

Let’s start with the obvious: rent. Office space is expensive these days, but working remotely is a nice little hack that can keep you within budget.

For example, when the CEO of China’s largest travel agency had some of his employees work from home for 9 months, he saved $2,000 per employee on rent alone. His employees also saved money by not having to pay commuter fees to get to work. But let’s move past cash for a moment and consider the increase in job satisfaction and performance.

Employees were motivated to work harder due to the flexible nature of their hours. They took fewer breaks, and shorter ones, occasionally pausing work to walk their dogs or to run errands, before returning to their assigned tasks.

And while these benefits of working from home only come from a handful of studies, we can start to imagine a world in which working remotely is the new norm. Not only would the general workforce become more efficient, but another bonus would be a drop in housing costs once we convert all those office towers into condos, helping to ease rent prices in high density cities.

You might not have seen this one coming, but working remotely is also really good for the environment. In 2007, the U.S. Patent office had roughly 3,000 of their employees work from home for a year, which ended up saving $1.8 million in fuel costs; and preventing the release of 9,600 tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

So you see, how could anyone be accused of “goofing off” at home, when they’re also preoccupied with saving the planet?

Make any case you want, the real reason why remote work might not catch on for a while is simply because humans are social creatures, and many of those who have given remote working a try, often find themselves feeling lonely.

This has prompted some companies to allow their employees to work two days of the week from home, so they can take advantage of increased productivity, while keeping them close as team members.

At the end of the day, whether you’re on the couch, or in a cubicle, everyone’s looking forward to 5 o’clock, when they can relax for a little bit, maybe curl up with a loved one, and binge watch more episodes of ‘What If.’

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