– The Business Case for Remote Work — For Employers, Employees, the Environment, and Society (2021)

The purpose of this paper is to share research on the quantitative and qualitative benefits of remote work for employers, employees, and the environment. It is intended to provide hard numbers to inform the hard decisions organizations are making on how they will operate in the future. The paper was made possible with support from Design Public Group, the leader in home office furniture provisioning and stipend management.

Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics is one of the world’s leading authorities on remote work. In this paper, she shares a synthesis of over 17 years of research and corporate consulting on remote work and other flexible workplace strategies. Global Workplace Analytics’ Telework Savings Calculator™ estimates a typical employer can save $11,000 for every half-time telecommuter—the frequency other research shows is what most U.S. employees would prefer. Those savings, which are net of the costs an employer may incur to support remote work, are the result of increased productivity and reduced real estate costs, absenteeism, turnover. This paper details how each category of savings is calculated, the research behind the savings assumption, and examples of organizations that have actually measured the results of their initiatives.

Readers are invited to calculate their own potential savings with a free version of the professional Telework Savings Calculator™. The pro-version offers over 125 customizable assumptions and performs over 600 calculations. The free version allows less customization but is the very same model Global Workplace Analytics uses with corporate clients.

In 2016, members of Congress asked the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate tools that would help agencies estimate the impact of their telework programs. After vetting ours and other tools, their final report only mentioned ours referring to it as “comprehensive and based on solid research.”