It’s only a few weeks until 2008 and Web Worker Daily is asking its readers to finish this sentence:
… business owners have several reasons why they should hire web workers as employees or contractors for specific positions and projects.
You’ll be saving on office costs. If most of your employees and contractors are telecommuting, they probably don’t need their own space in your office. This means that you have to rent or buy less square feet of office space. Also, web workers won’t be consuming electricity and additional resources (water from the cooler, free coffee, etc.) from your office space. Heck, you might not even need office space at all. The money you save by hiring web workers can be spent on advertising, marketing, or for other company investments.
Higher morale for the individual web worker. Several things add to the stress of a cubicle worker: traffic, the weather outside, office politics, dressing up for work, etc. The web worker doesn’t have this type of stress. She can work on her laptop, in her pyjamas, on the sofa. True, the web worker still experiences stress, but it’s considerably less than that of the office worker. If your employee has high morale, surveys show that she’ll be performing much better. And better worker performance is good for business.
Web working has several health benefits. First of all, studies show that stress is physically unhealthy, which means the office worker might need to take more sick leaves than the web worker. Plus, your web workers are physically safer than office workers. This reduces the chance of traffic related accidents as well. This is especially good for your workforce because replacing members of your team is a difficult and costly task, even if the replacement is only temporary.
Increased productivity. Reports state that telecommuting increases productivity by over 40%. If your workers are more productive, then your business will be run more efficiently.
Web workers will have more take home pay as opposed to working in an office or shop. Imagine this, if your office worker receives $20,000 per year, that isn’t her take home pay. Out of that $20k, some goes to taxes, transportation expenses, food expenses, and other things that your employees need to pay for when they’re working outside of their homes.
But, for the web worker, the take home pay is much greater since she’s only subtracting taxes and minimal electric or internet expenses (which you should be providing anyway). So, if we cherish our human resources, we’d let employees work from home if their tasks don’t require them to be present in the office at all times.
While web workers isn’t applicable to all job descriptions, it’s definitely something for most managers and business owners to consider. With these benefits in mind for the coming year, it’s likely that the number of web workers and telecommuting jobs will only increase in 2008.
Originally posted on January 1, 2008 @ 1:18 pm