Cisco’s average US employee telecommutes 2.3 of every 5 days.
A study by a Columbia University business professor estimates job creation nationwide could reach 273,000 jobs, as rural workers could take telecommuting jobs.
Two-thirds of enterprises are buying dedicated bandwidth (i.e., overlay networks) for their telepresence installations.
[HSBC] estimates for every 2,000 miles of personal air travel, one ton of carbon dioxide is emitted.
[HSBC] estimates that for a single meeting by telepresence that might have required three employees to travel from Hong Kong to Chicago, the group could save up to $50,000 in airfare and travel costs.
If only 10 percent more of the workforce regularly teleworked - roughly a doubling of today’s percentage - greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced each year by an additional 42.4 million tons of carbon dioxide, as well as 2.6 million tons of other pollutants.
Over a 10-year period, the direct and indirect benefits of this additional telecommuting would prevent more than a half-billion tons of added pollutants from being released into the atmosphere and generate direct savings of “$96.5 billion, including the cost of 4.4 billion gallons of gasoline each year.”
The National Science Foundation, has over half of its employees teleworking, and reports that 87 percent of employees view teleworking positively.
Importantly, 87 percent of managers report that the productivity of teleworking employees remains level or even increases. In addition, by not commuting, on average “each NSF teleworker reclaims 62 hours of their lives and saves $1,201 a year. Extrapolating those savings across the agency, NSF teleworkers collectively spare the environment over 1 million pounds of emissions and save more than $700,000 in commuting costs per year.”
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management reports that of the 1.25 million federal workers who are eligible to telework, only 9 percent actually do.
These teleworkers comprise just 6.12 percent of the total federal workforce. In 2006, the number of federal employees who teleworked actually dropped 7.3 percent to 110,592 from 119,248 in 2005, while the number of employees categorized as not eligible for telework leaped from 30 to 44 percent.
Only 2 percent of the American workforce are full-time teleworkers, although 28.7 percent of employees work at home at least one day per month, and 44.8 percent have worked from home at some time.
The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that using electronics such as personal computers and wireless networks to telecommute saves the equivalent of 9 to 14 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.
(equal to the amount of energy used by approximately 1 million U.S. households every year); and could eliminate carbon dioxide emissions in an amount equal to taking 2 million cars off the road.