Working from home: green and productive

A quick banana bread – I mean, the ripe bananas couldn’t sit in the freezer forever, right? – turned into a batch of oatmeal cookies, and eventually a relatively laborious vegan Moroccan stew (from the Fresh cookbook, which I can’t recommend enough).  It was a lovely day, albeit profoundly unproductive.  I’m happy to say I’ve grown up, moved on, and now home is sometimes where I do my best work.

© WWF-Canon/Richard Stonehouse
As organizations evolve to support different kinds of working styles and philosophies, from flexible time and generous paternal leave to giant slides down the middle of the office and e-mail-free Fridays, working from home is an option that has been consistently proven duly beneficial.   Lighter on workplace resources, time and resources saved on employee commuting, as well as a general sense of employee control and efficacy make this option attractive to all involved.
We don’t often think of the significant environmental benefit to working from home.  If a million people worked from home just one weekday a year, Canada could save 250 million kg of CO2 emissions, 100 million liters of fuel, and there would be 800 million fewer kilometers driven (stats source: David Suzuki Foundation).   What an easy way to make an impact.
From a business perspective, employees are typically 20-40 percent more productive when “telecommuting.”  Who knew?  So saving two hours a day commuting, being able to take a walk in the morning to get my favourite coffee and joining a conference call in jogging pants from 1990 (that should never, ever see the world outside my house) is actually, in some way, making me better at my job. And with services like Skype and other technologies, conversations don’t lose value.
You know what? I’m writing this from home.
Here are some tips for how to get started.  Be sure to check out what our friends at Workopolis are doing to make a national “work from home day” a reality and show your support on Facebook.