When gas prices and traffic levels are up, employee morale and productivity are down. It’s time for Finance to ask: “Do we all really need to be in the office every day?”

Telecommuting - it’s a touchy subject for CFOs. There’s the camp that raves about productivity and a myriad of other benefits, and there are those who trade horror stories about security breaches and how their office communication plunged.

Which one is right? Depending on your company, either one - or both. Before youcan consider whether or not your company should offer telecommuting to employees, it needs to figure out whether it can. In this first installment of a three-part series, we’ll go over what your company needs to get a telecommuting program up and running.

First, consider the cost of implementation. Telecommuting can pay off, but only if a company’s willing to fork over the up-front costs, including:

• Extra computers, as well as additional copies of any needed software,
• Business phone lines or cell phones for at-home, office phone services like automatic call forwarding, and
• High-speed Internet connections at off-site locations.

Of course, there’s always the option of requiring telecommuters to bear some (or all) of these costs. Many employees already have at-home computers company-provided laptops and cell phones, and current residential Internet connections are fast, reliable and cheap.

But companies do need to ensure its telecommuters’ at-home systems meet certain security criteria. An at-home employee who’s doing critical Finance work on a machine running Windows ‘98 (gasp!) is likely to cause a serious system problem somewhere down the road.

Security: It’s the one area Finance absolutely won’t be able to skimp on. Letting employees work from home can open a can of worms for both compliance and records-retention. If off-site access to sensitive data is given to a Finance staff, a company will need to strengthen surveillance and auditing, as well ensure that both office and at-home computers remain secure.

In the next part of our series, we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty of how telecommuting can benefit Finance.

Tags: Implementation, Productivity, security, telecommuting