Some researchers say telecommuting can be more energy efficient if it's done 5 days a week. (Photo courtesy of Penarc - Wikimedia Commons)
Telecommuting is becoming more popular in the U.S. There’s an assumption that working from home saves energy. But some experts say whether it actually saves energy depends on how you do it. Rebecca Williams has more:
Transcript
Telecommuting is becoming more popular in the U.S. There’s an assumption that working from home saves energy. But some experts say whether it actually saves energy depends on how you do it. Rebecca Williams has more:
Something like 33 million of us work from home or a coffee shop at least once a month. And the whole idea of telecommuting just sounds like it saves energy. I mean, you’re cutting out your commute. So it saves gas.
And it can save a lot of gas money.
Sun Microsystems has what it calls an Open Work program. It allows employees to work wherever they want… from home or from a coffee shop. The company studied its teleworkers’ habits in 2007. And they found the average employee working from home two days a week ended up saving 500 to 600 dollars a year in fuel costs.
But things are more complicated than that.
Arpad Horvath is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California Berkeley. He studies teleworking.
“For example one might telecommute, but also maintain an office at the company as well as at home which of course now means we have to support with energy and other inputs two offices rather than one.”
So – if you have a company office AND a home office… and you’re using both… he says the energy savings might be kind of a wash because you’re using more energy at home. And if you’re not commuting… but you hop in the car to run a bunch of errands to get out of the house… you might not save that much gas.
Horvath says… for telecommuting to save the most energy, it can’t be just a couple days a week.
“The ideal situation is that somebody teleworks full time, gives up the company office and doesn’t increase anything else in one’s individual life, doesn’t travel more for pleasure, doesn’t substantially change the setup at home.”
But for a lot of people it just doesn’t work that way.
Surveys from the Telework Research Network show that less than two percent of Americans work from home all the time.
And experts say the main reason is: it can be a trust issue for the boss.
Rose Stanley is with World-at-Work. It’s a human resources organization.
“It’s a cultural shift within an organization to go to the next level of managing without being able to see their employees. That face time is still a stigma culturally speaking.”
Stanley says bosses just need to be trained on how to manage remote workers. She says her boss pops up on an instant message board throughout the day, just to check in.
Another obstacle to full-time telecommuting is… it’s just YOU. There’s nobody to talk to but the dog.
So some telecommuters are trying co-working. It’s a shared working space for people who would normally work from home.
(snd of espresso machine)
Mike Kessler is the co-owner of Workantile Exchange in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It’s a big, open space… with a coffee shop right up front. Kessler says the whole idea of co-working is… instead of having dozens of individual home offices… there’s one office that dozens of people share when they need to.
“The environmental benefits are everybody needs the same thing to get things done… you need your wifi, table, chair, good coffee, meeting rooms, a bathroom… not everybody needs those at the same time.”
He says also… the space is close to where people live, so they can walk or bike to work.
Some analysts think this kind of setup is where more of us are headed. But they say for most companies… telecommuting is not driven by energy savings… it’s a business decision. It’s more about retaining good employees and increasing productivity. If it saves employees some gas money, that’s just a bonus.
For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.