Promoting Telecommuting During the Gas Dearth?

Oren F. asks: "The President of AeroAstro, Inc., a small aerospace company, has begun promoting his employees to conserve gasoline during these times of high prices by telecommuting to work each day from their homes at least once a week. How is your company responding to the current situation?"

Let me bring to your attention..

[Anonymous Coward]

..this neat conversion company [switch2hydrogen.com]!

Let's hope there will be more of them soon..

Maybe I won't be so productive

[Dr.Opveter]

I would love to work at home, but my boss prefers to have me in the office. If I'm home there's no way he check if I'm playing a game or something and I guess they prefer to see me slack at the office, since I don't have much to do anyway...
If I would have a lot of work to do I might actually not want to be doing that at home anyway. I've done that before and I know I have a way of not getting out of my chair until something is finished which tends to shift my eating/sleeping pattern etc.

Re:Use a bike

[Dr.Opveter]

I wish I could bike to work. Fuel even costs more in my country (the Netherlands, I think we're even no.1 on the list).
Last week it was even 1.50 euro for a litre.
3.79 * 1.50 euro = 5,685 euro/U.S. gallon
1 euro = 1.22 U.S. dollars,
so I payed almost 7 dollars (6,94) for a US gallon.
I have to refuel my (small) volkswagen car at least once a week, currently I pay 96 dollars to fill it up (55 litres).

Bleh!

Re:Use a bike

[Quarters]

I would love to bike to work. I live nine miles from where I work and the commute is essentially a straight shot down a state highway.

I'll never do it.

The highway, while straight, level, and well paved, is heavily travelled (to the point of congestion) by annoying suburbanites driving their SUVs and talking on their cell phones instead of paying attention to the road.

At speed lane changes with no turn signals used, no checks in the mirrors, no looking out the side windows. Stopping short at lights, making right (or left) turns from the wrong lane because they forgot to get into the turn lane, etc... I've seen it all on my daily commute.

It's dangerous enough in a car. I'd be nuts to try it on a bicycle.

My company's great

[LePrince]

They started doing this BEFORE the increases in gas prices... But hey.

They try to make peolpe carpool more. They encourage this by saying "go ahead, carpool. If someday you're the passenger and the driver has to leave early/later than usual, we'll issue you a cab ticket worth 20$ so you can return home".

But hey, I work for an environmentally-friendly company... We don't all have the same chance.

Re:Our company has a more traditional approach

[jpostel]

At the inbred company I worked for up to last week, the CEO bought the COO (his wife) a brand new MB S500. Lovely car, but that does not look too cool when they are laying people off at headquarters the day he's showing off the new car to the execs.

Policy Recommendation

[oni]

I work at a university which is pretty liberal about this sort of thing, but I can make a recommendation to any private companies that want to encourage it.

Assign a work-at-home day. If everyone picks their own day then you'll never have a day where everyone is at work.

Make the work-at-home day Thursday. My experience suggests this is the day that you'll get the most productivity at home. Definitely don't do it on Monday or Friday or work-at-home day will just be a 3-day weekend! (what do you think this is, France?)

Have an online meeting at about 10:30. Set everyone up with cheap web cams and just spend 30 minutes to an hour on an informal, "here's what we did this week" meeting. Those kinds of informal meetings are good for small groups anyway.

Use an IM client. It's much better than email or phone calls for quickie questions: "hey bob, tell me again what the param list is."

Require a followup email at 5:00. Even if it's just to say, "I've been working on this all day but I'm not done yet."

On the technical side, obviously you're going to need to let employees set up a secure tunnel into a VPN - not the main company network. They need to be able to get to shares on file servers for example, and to hit their machines via remote desktop, but they shouldn't be able to hit shares on their local machines.

All of that said, I really prefer to be at work. My chair and desk here are more comfortable. I'm also one of the lucky ones who lives close to work and I try to ride my bike at least once a week.

Re:Has anyone considered moving closer to work?

[deranged unix nut]

Daily commute cost
------------------
1.5 Hr time = $20.00
20 miles gas * 40mpg * $3/gal = $1.50
Wear and tear on a car $15000/5 years = $11.54

Daily commute cost = $33.04
Weekly commute cost = $165.19
Yearly commute cost = $8,590.00

$50k mortgage / yearly commute = 5.8 years ...or if you don't consider your time to be worth anything:

$50k mortgage / yearly commute = 14.7 years

Car efficiency won't help you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Car efficiency only buys you time. As oil prices get higher, your problems return. There's a root cause to this.

You live in a deeply silly community. The modern suburb takes the worst parts of city dwelling (the constant presence of other people, the absence of unspoiled nature) with the worst parts of rural dwelling (isolation from shops, impossibility of public transportation, impossibility of walking).

Suburbs have only been the dominant form of living for about fifty years. Before that, people did the sensible thing and lived in neighborhoods. One neighborhood alone was called a small town. A few neighborhoods next to each other was called a small city. Many neighborhoods together was called a large city.

Traditional neighborhoods still exist, either in isolation or stacked together. You can live in these places entirely without a car, and your quality of life is dramatically improved from suburban living.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism [wikipedia.org]
http://kunstler.org [kunstler.org]

D'Oh! Corrected URL:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.kunstler.com/ [kunstler.com]