Potential benefits
Telecommuting offers benefits to communities, employers, and employees.
For communities, telecommuting may offer fuller employment (by increasing the employability of circumstantially marginalized groups such as work at home parents and caregivers, the disabled, retirees, and people living in remote areas), reducing traffic congestion and traffic accidents, relieving pressure on transportation infrastructure, reducing greenhouse gases, reducing energy use, improving disaster preparedness, and reducing vulnerability to terrorism.
For companies, telecommuting expands the talent pool, reduces the spread of illness, reduces costs including real-estate footprint, increases productivity, reduces their carbon footprint and energy usage, offers a means of complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and possibly earning a tax credit, if they're American, reduces turnover and absenteeism, improves employee morale, enhances continuity-of-operations strategies, improves their ability to handle business across multiple time zones, and augments their cultural adaptability. Some estimates suggest that full-time telework can save companies approximately $20,000 per employee.
Telecommuting individuals, or more specifically those in "work from home" arrangements, may find that it improves work-life balance, reduces their carbon footprint and fuel usage, frees up the equivalent of 15 to 25 workdays a year (time they would have otherwise spent commuting), and saves thousands of dollars per year in travel and work-related costs.
Half-time telecommuting by those with compatible jobs (40%) and a desire to do so (79%) would save companies, communities, and employees over $650 billion a year; the result of increased productivity, reduced office expense, lower absenteeism and turnover, reduced travel, less road repairs, less gas consumption, and other savings.
In general, telecommuting benefits society in economic, environmental, and personal ways. The wide application of ICTs provides increasing benefits for employees, especially ones with physical disabilities. It also leads to a more energy-saving society without adversely impacting economic growth.
Environmental benefits
Telecommuting gained ground in the United States in 1996 after "Clean Air Act amendments were adopted with the expectation of reducing carbon dioxide and ground-level ozone levels by 25 percent." The act required companies with over 100 employees to encourage car pools, public transportation, shortened work weeks, and telecommuting. In 2004, an appropriations bill was enacted by Congress to encourage telecommuting for certain Federal agencies. The bill threatened to withhold money from agencies that failed to provide telecommuting options to all eligible employees.
If the 40% of the U.S. population that holds telework-compatible jobs and wants to work from home did so half of the time:
The nation would save 280,000,000 barrels (45,000,000 m3) of oil (37% of Gulf oil imports). The environment would be saved the equivalent of taking 9 million cars permanently off the road.
The energy potential from the fuel savings would total more than twice what the U.S. currently produces from all renewable energy sources combined.
Productivity and employee benefits
Telecommuting has long been promoted as a way to substantially increase employee productivity. A working-from-home-related experiment conducted using 242 employees of a large Chinese travel agency by professors at Stanford and Beijing University found that employees randomly assigned to work at home for 9 months increased their output by 13.5% versus the office-based control group. This improvement in output arose from working 9% more hours from saved commuting time and from 3.5% improved efficiency from quieter working conditions. The study also found that home-workers reported significantly higher job-satisfaction scores and their quit rates fell by almost 50%. However, home workers' promotion rates dropped by half due to apparent performance declines, indicating a potential career cost of home-working. More broadly, a review of over 80 older case-studies and surveys reported "little clear evidence exists that telework increases job satisfaction and productivity, as it is often asserted to do."
Telework flexibility is a desirable prerequisite for employees. A 2008 Robert Half International Financial Hiring Index, a survey of 1,400 CFOs by recruitment firm Robert Half International, indicated that 13% consider telework the best recruiting incentive today for accounting professionals. In earlier surveys, 33% considered telework the best recruiting incentive, and half considered it second best..
Since work hours are less regulated in telework, employee effort and dedication are far more likely to be measured purely in terms of output or results. Fewer, if any, traces of non-productive work activities (research, self-training, dealing with technical problems or equipment failures) and time lost on unsuccessful attempts (early drafts, fruitless endeavors, abortive innovations) are visible to employers. Piece rate, commissions, or other performance-based compensation also become more likely for telecommuters. Furthermore, major chunks of per-employee expenses are absorbed by the telecommuter himself - from simple coffee, water, electricity, and telecommunications services, to huge capital expenses like office equipment or software licenses. Thus, hours spent on the job tend to be underestimated and expenses under-reported, creating overly optimistic figures of productivity gains and savings, some or all of those in fact coming out of the telecommuter's time and pocket.
International evidence and experience shows that telework can deliver a broad range of benefits to individuals, employers and society as a whole. Telework is a shift in the way business is accomplished which can make a difference overtime. As an example, a recent study revealed that NBN-enabled telework is expected to add $8.3 billion to Gross Domestic Product by 2020, creating the equivalent of an additional 25,000 full-time jobs. Around 10,00 of these jobs will be in regional Australia. When it comes to environment, it has been estimated that if 10 per cent of Australian employees were to telework 50 percent of the time, it would save 120 million litres of fuel and 320,000 tonnes of carbon emissions. That rate of telework would also deliver a productivity benefit of between $1.4 billion and $1.9 billion a year.
Advantages and disadvantages meta-analysis.
A meta-analysis of 46 studies of telecommuting involving 12,833 employees conducted by Ravi Gajendran and David A. Harrison in the Journal of Applied Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), found that telecommuting has largely positive consequences for employees and employers. In their meta-analytic study, Gajendran and Harrison found that telecommuting had modest but beneficial effects on employees' job satisfaction, autonomy, stress levels, manager-rated job performance, and (lower) work-family conflict. Although a number of scholars and managers had previously expressed fears that employee careers might suffer and workplace relationships might be damaged because of telecommuting, the meta-analysis found that there are no generally detrimental effects on the quality of workplace relationships and career outcomes.
Only high-intensity telecommuting (where employees work from home for more than 2.5 days a week) harmed employee relationships with co-workers, even though it did reduce work-family conflict. Advantages and disadvantages. Life as an independent contractor has both benefits and hindrances. Since they are rarely tied to an employer, they are free to set their own rules of business, limited only by bargaining power.
Since they usually develop a large network of clients, the loss of one or two often has a negligible effect.
Many people simply like the idea of "being your own boss." Aside from materialistic benefits, many people simply enjoy not having to answer to a supervisor.
As an artist/author of any tangible artwork, such as paintings, sculptures, photographs, or written works, a person is entitled to exclusive copyright ownership if they created the work as an independent contractor. If the person created such works while in the employ of another person or corporation, the rights belong to the employer (under most standard employment contracts).
Independent contractors are responsible for their own self-employment tax, which consists of both halves of the FICA tax amount. An employee only pays the employee portion of the FICA tax. Self-employment taxes are not withheld from the earnings of independent contractors who are required to voluntarily declare and pay estimated earnings taxes to the IRS, which can lead to a trap for contractors who run into financial difficulty and become tempted to put off making the required estimated tax payments.
There are several monetary incentives that are guaranteed to employees in the United States, but not independent contractors. Examples include worker's compensation and unemployment insurance; however, independent contractors are allowed to make Individual Retirement Account contributions.
In many jurisdictions, occupational safety and health regulations are less comprehensive for independent contractors.
Source: Wikipedia