Monday, January 10, 2011

The Cost of Interruptions: the business case for Telecommuting & Virtual Offices

A brief Fast Company article caught my attention recently titled, “No Interruptions Day”. The author reminds the readers of the frightful reality that “The average office worker is interrupted – by coworkers, emails, or phone calls – every 11 minutes. Even worse is that it takes basically that much time to refocus on the task at hand.” If you do the math, this equates to over 40 interruptions per day, and many hours of unproductive time spent attempting to refocus on the task at hand.

The business case for telecommuting and virtual offices becomes even stronger if you also factor in typical commute times which may vary from minutes to hours in large metropolitan cities. The bottom line is that working in a virtual office often results in more productive and satisfied workers with who have the advantage of dozens if not hundreds of hours more fruitful hours per year.

My experience working as a member of several large teams within a virtual office environment over the past six years had proven to me that this workforce model is considerably more productive and effective for many jobs. Of course, there are many jobs that require working from a designated location or a fully collaborative environment – including retail and customer-facing positions and software engineers – but it is a proven and very beneficial model for many knowledge workers.

Has anyone else experienced higher productivity as the result of working in a virtual office environment?

Jack Spain

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