1. Tell them you'll be more productive
So it turns out that people who work from home are actually, on average, more productive than their office-bound compatriots. Yeah, science! As the public radio program Marketplacereported, a Chinese company called Ctrip conducted an experiment where they split a group of 500 employees into two random batches. Half were told to work from home, and half were made to go into the office. The surprising result: stay-at-home employees were actually 13 percent more productive than the office-goers. The presumed reason: They are free of the constant distractions (ringing phones, neighboring cubicles, endless meetings, fire drills...you know what we're talking about) that plague an office.
2. Tell them you'll be easy to reach
Yeah, we know that online collaboration software has kinda a nasty rap for being a wee bit cumbersome, and anything but spontaneous (if you've ever had your inbox filled with endless meeting scheduling and reminder notices, you know what we're talking about). Join.me makes screen-sharing as simple as sending an IM — folks tuning in don't even need to download any software. Bonus: You can join meetings from mobile devices, so even if you're not at your desk, you can still play along.
3. Show them the savings
That desk you sit at ain't cheap — especially if you're in a city such as New York. According to areport put out by the real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, rent for top-notch office space in Midtown in 2011 was a whopping $120 per square foot. Add in savings on office supplies, electricity, and office cake days, and your employer could save some serious parmesan by keeping you at home.
4. Talk to them about security
Your fickle IT department is no longer an excuse. If you use join.me to share and collaborate with your colleagues, your data is protected by an NASA-grade wall of 256-bit encryption. (That's a lot of bits for hackers to chop through.) The software is also simple enough for anybody to use, sans IT department.
5. Tell them that commuting kills
There are countless reasons an employer would want to keep you healthy. After all, a healthy employee is more productive, has fewer sick days, and could keep health care costs down. And there may be no greater health-sucker than a long, horn-honking commute. Studies have long linked long commutes to heart disease, high blood pressure, and just about anything else that can kill you. Case in point: A recent study from Washington University in St. Louis showed that commuters who drive long distances are more likely to be overweight than folks who don't need to commute. So show your boss the data: Working at home keeps you healthy, productive, and makes you cheaper to cover in the health department.
