When the U.S. General Accountability Office was charged by Congress to investigate tools that could be used to quantify the impact of distributed work in government, they asked to peek behind the curtains on our calculator. Ours was the only tool referenced in the GAO’s report to Congress. It stated our Mobile Work Savings Calculator™ was “comprehensive and based on solid research.”
All of our calculators are informed by a proprietary database that includes over 7,000 case studies, research papers, government reports, and news items on workplace strategies that impact human and organizational agility and performance.
Answers to questions we typically get regarding the assumptions behind our Mobile/Remote/Hybrid Workplace Savings Calculator:
- Our standard remote work model assumes half-time remote work – which is roughly the national average for those who work remotely on a regular basis. It seems to represent the ‘sweet spot’ that mitigates the employer and employee concerns about issues such as company culture and employee loneliness yet still offers substantial employee, employer, and environmental benefits.
- Regarding who can work remotely, we assume 45% of the population holds jobs that are compatible. That’s based on an update we did of a very thorough study conducted by Mathews & Williams, a couple of PhDs, who went through the Bureau of Labor (BLS) Statistics data and evaluated the jobs that met their criteria for remote work compatibility. Only four categories of jobs made the cut: professional, technical support, administrative support, and a fraction of sales jobs. Management-level jobs, even within those categories, were not considered eligible. Unfortunately, that study was done more than 5 years ago – ancient in terms of the current state of technology, so we revised Matthews & Williams’s assumptions to reflect the existing rate of participation among those categories that they excluded.
- Recognizing that you can’t take the kids to school on just the days you head to the office, we relied on a synthesis of a number of respected studies by groups including the Reason Foundation, the Air Quality Board, and private company surveys to estimate how much driving is reduced on remote workdays. We used BLS data to estimate how much extra utility use might cost while working at home.
- Not everyone wants to, can, or should work remotely. Our estimate for those who want to is based on a synthesis of studies by respected researchers.
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