Telecommuting has its benefits.
When you work from home, you can:
✓ Avoid the morning and afternoon commutes
✓ Make your own coffee instead of sitting in drive-thru for too long
✓ Get some benign household tasks, like laundry, done while you work
✓ Wear your jammies for conference calls
✓ Duck out of office gossip and politics
✓ Direct your nutrition better by not feeling like all you have time for is a fast-food burger and fries
Isn’t it easy to tick off the great parts of remote work?
Now think about this one:
Have you ever been too cold or too hot at the office?
Have you sat underneath the air conditioning vent in the summer, only to freeze your butt off if you forget a sweater?
Have you never been able to get warm in the office and yet building rules dictate you are not permitted to have a cooling fan?
When you telecommute, you get to set the temperature yourself.
And this isn’t just a perk to remote work, it’s also a boost to your productivity.
The Undercover Recruiter Andrews Sykes recently cited a study that shows office temperature has an effect on worker productivity.
Of the workers surveyed, 80 per cent complained about their office temperature.
The study also learned:
✓ Men waste 6.4 minutes per day adjusting the temperature; women waste 8.5 minutes
✓ 50 per cent of offices are considered too hot in the summer
✓ 22 per cent of workers leave the office in the summer to cool down
✓ 52 per cent of offices are considered too cold in the summer
That seems like a lot of wasted time complaining and trying to be comfortable.
Meanwhile, those of us in the telecommuting world enjoy the ability to turn the heat up or down as we see fit.
So if you haven’t asked the boss to start working from home — even for a day or two a week — what’s stopping you now?
