84 per cent would leave current job for chance to telecommute: Survey
Employers looking to attract and retain top talent may want to consider offering telecommuting, according to Andrea Garson, vice-president of Workopolis in Toronto.
“Employees are saying they’ll leave their current employer and go somewhere else to have the ability to work from home,” she said.
In fact, 82 per cent of 8,656 people who participated in a poll on Workopolis.com said they would change jobs for the chance to telecommute.
Jobseekers are attracted to employers that offer work-life balance, which includes telework options, said Garson. With a looming labour shortage, employers can’t afford not to do everything possible to set themselves apart from the competition, she said.
To spread the message of the multitude of benefits of telecommuting, Liberal MP Mike Savage, Human Resources and Skills Development critic, made an official call for a National Work from Home Day in the House of Commons on Nov. 24.
“This is the way that work is going and we should be looking at it more closely and seeing, for those people to whom it makes sense, if there are things we can do to encourage it,” said Savage.
A National Work from Home Day would start the conversation about flexible work arrangements in more workplaces, he said.
The idea isn’t a new one, with the United Kingdom having established a Work Wise Week in 2005, which sees about 5.8 million people work from home on their designated days.
So far, more than 52,000 people have joined a Facebook fan page supporting a National Work from Home Day in Canada, said Garson.
“The whole point of all of this is to raise the awareness, mostly with employers, of the need to start having these types of programs to accommodate the needs of workers,” she said.
The most important benefit of working from home, according to 39 per cent of 1,005 Canadians surveyed by Workopolis, is reduced traffic congestion and pollution. If one million Canadians work from home one day per week, in one year they will save 250 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions and 100 million litres of fuel, said Garson.
“There’s a great benefit to the environment,” she said.
Improved work-life balance and decreased stress are the next most important benefits of telework, according to 36 per cent of respondents.
And good work-life balance is a benefit for employers because it leads to increased productivity, said Savage.
In fact, employees report being up to 55 per cent more productive when working at home, according to the Cisco Work from Home Report 2010.
And when employees are more productive, organizations are more productive, which makes Canada more competitive, said Savage.
“From both an employer and employee point of view, some national attention to this, some leadership perhaps from the federal government, could do a lot to enhance Canada’s productivity,” he said.
With technology advances, including video conferencing and webinars, much of the work that can be done at an office desk can be done from home, said Savage.
“Certainly, there are some jobs — police, fire services, some retail — there’s lots of jobs that can’t be done from home but a lot more jobs are able to be done from home now,” he said.
For telework to be successful, employers need to trust employees and ensure they have the appropriate tools to work effectively at home, said Garson.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean buying employees home office equipment, according to the Workopolis survey. Fifty-one per cent of respondents said they would use their own resources, such as a personal computer, to work from home.
“If they have the trust and they have the tools, it should work,” she said. “There are certain jobs that require physical presence to be effective but there are many that don’t.”
Employees are also willing to go the extra mile to save commuting mileage, found the survey. More than one-quarter (28 per cent) would work longer hours, 19 per cent would take a pay cut and 16 per cent would give up vacation days to be able to work from home.
Flexible work options also attract a more diverse group of employees, from working parents to people with disabilities.
“In a lot of cases, businesses have difficulty providing a workspace for people with disabilities and if this allows people with disabilities to take a more active place in the workforce, I think that’s very positive,” said Savage.
The next step is to propose legislation for a National Work from Home Day and Savage is optimistic, especially with Minister of Labour Lisa Raitt voicing her support at a reception following Savage’s announcement to the House of Commons on Nov. 24, he said.
The City of Ottawa already declared Nov. 24 as Telework Day for the city, and the mayor encouraged residents of the nation’s capital to work from home if they could. The city has also been examining ways to allow more city employees to telework.
