Tuesday June 1^st was this country’s first “Unofficial” Work From Home Day.

A fantastic idea, and organizations like Workopolis are even helping to drive the initiatives to make this a nationally recognized day.

 While we’d like to stay out of the law-making business (We’ll stick to what we’re awesome at, thank you….) We’d most certainly agree with Workopolis on the values of telecommuting for employees for a number of reasons. (We also applaud Workopolis for spearheading this initiative – it’s about time industry stepped up….Bravo!)

While there have been posts here before that talk about the ability to reduce the carbon footprint of your organization simply  by allowing a portion of your office workers to telecommute once a week, (See “Feeling Guilty about the Environment – Telecommute!), there are numerous reasons to deploy a telecommuting strategy within your organization.

Let’s address  a big one here – it’s a MASSIVE VALUE ADD for both existing and prospective employees…..(and it can cost you next to nothing to implement….)

Make your recruitment initiatives go a little further by offering this perk to prospective employees.

As the job market tightens and we see the exodus of the boomer generation from the work force, we’re going to see a serious gap between available  roles and available candidates. As the race for these qualified candidates heats up  - how will you differentiate your organization and attract the best qualified and most critical candidates?

There’s always money, but studies have shown that these days – money isn’t everything…… One of the most valued items a company can offer to the 30-45 year old market is work life balance. 

One of the easiest ways to deploy this is through a telecommuting strategy. Allow your workers to work from home, even if it’s only one day a week!

You’ll find that translates into better employee engagement, a reduction in churn, and higher recruitment numbers.

Retain your employees and keep high value workers where they are – and happy with the organization that they work with – simply by giving them a little bit of freedom. It will pay off in spades – as most work from home employees are actually more productive when they work from home (Yes, I said more!!!)

Really – when you consider the fact that there is no water cooler talk, no excess socializing, no long breaks to go to the store, lunches are typically shorter, and breaks more rejuvenating – let alone the fact that they have the ability to schedule themselves more efficiently throughout the day.

The real icing on the cake for this is that deploying a telecommuting strategy into your business is already built into Planet Telecom’s technology.

A user can take the same phone – their phone number, voicemail, extension, and evn presence – and plug it in wherever there is power and high speed internet – effectively making the way that their phone functions no different than how it would function if they were physically in the office.

Couple that with either a VPN client, or a laptop,  or one of the zillion programs that offer remote access to  their desktop and files,  and you’ve got a winning strategy, that costs very little, and delivers a LOT.

So really….If you could recruit more effectively, improve overall morale, and more easily retain your employees – how much is that worth to your organization?

If you’re starting to see the light on this, drop us a line and we’ll work it out with you. 

If you are still skeptical, why not start with next year’s “Work From Home Day” as a test?

I’m sure you’ll soon find that one day a year could turn into one day a month, and potentially, one day a week or more.