Virtual Office Resource

I may not be part of the one percent, but apparently I’m part of the thirty-seven percent.

That’s the percentage of workers who now telecommute all or some of the time: 37 percent, according to a recent Gallup poll. This is a big change from the 1990s, when only 9 percent of workers telecommuted. It is even a relatively big jump from 10 years ago, when 30 percent worked outside of the office all or some of the time.

Unsurprisingly, Gallup finds that telecommuting is most common among educated workers. While more than half of all workers with a college degree telecommute some of the time (55 percent, to be exact), only 26 percent of non-college graduates say they telecommute. Clearly demarcating an economic difference, Gallup found that 44 percent of white-collar professionals telecommute some of the time, compared with only 16 percent of blue-collar workers. A little more than half of all workers with households with more than $75,000 in annual income reported telecommuting, compared with only a quarter for those that lived in households that made less.

Not that most workers telecommute a lot; Gallup found that the average was two days of telecommute work per month, and usually this was working from home instead of the digital nomad image many of us have of people working from their laptops from a coffeeshop or on the road. Only 9 percent said they telecommute more than 10 days a month.

For those of us who do make telecommuting a normal part of our work life, the most encouraging stats from the Gallup poll were the changing impressions of working from home. Roughly 58 percent of those surveyed said that they felt telecommuting workers were just as productive as those who work from an office, a jump of 11 percent over 20 years ago.

Gallup did find that the number of people who think telecommuting workers are more productive than those who work in an office dropped from 28 percent 20 years ago to only 16 percent now. To me, however, this just shows that more people are understanding that working outside of the office is not that different from working in a cubicle in terms of productivity.

As Gallup noted, “tech giant Yahoo made news in 2013 when CEO Marissa Mayer changed company policy to require all workers to work in a corporate office. Yahoo's policy aside, an increasing number of employers allow workers the flexibility to do their job remotely if it is feasible for their position.”

This is good news for all of us who enjoy the freedom and productivity of working outside of an office—at least two days a month.