I’m lucky to have an employer with a sensible telecommuting policy – all of our staff are entitled to spend one day per week working from home.

If this isn’t something your company does, this column from the Economist provides a useful summary of the reasons why they should.

The benefits of telecommuting are realised in the following areas:

• Personal productivity – the telecommuter gains on average two hours of time normally lost to the commute
• Environmental impact – avoiding the commute means a drop in personal CO₂ emissions; if enough people did this, the global drop in energy consumption could be huge
• Business benefits – it’s increasingly recognised that working from home can lead to productivity gains and cost reductions for the business; see the link above for a discussion of these.

However, it’s going to take some time for working from home to break into the mainstream. Working practises will need to change quite fundamentally in order for less technology-centric workplaces to move to a telecommuting model. But companies should start to move in this direction sooner rather than later.