How Are Rising Gas Prices Affecting Your Business?

By Karen Axelton

With gas prices averaging more than $3.90 a gallon, according to the American Automobile Association’s Fuel Gauge Report, U.S. consumers are hurting. But gas prices are hitting small businesses in more ways than one. Business owners are paying more for their own gas (especially crucial if your business relies on deliveries or your employees drive to visit customers). They’re likely losing sales as customers cut back on spending to afford gas. Their employees are hurting as well, especially those with long commutes to work. And these pains aren’t likely to stop anytime soon, with many experts predicting gas prices will hit new records by Memorial Day.

One way to ease the pain of rising gas prices at your business is to consider letting employees work from home. When your staff is feeling the pain of high fuel prices, even one day a week of working from home can cut their gas costs by 20 percent a month. That can make a big difference in their morale and their budgets.

This online graphic from the Telework Research Network’s Kate Lister shows the “dollars and sense” of workshifting (also known as telecommuting). Here are some of the facts:

• 40 percent of Americans have jobs that could allow them to work from home at least part time.
• 79 percent of Americans would like to work from home if they could.
• Enabling all those employees to work from home would increase U.S. worker productivity by $235 billion per year.
• It would also save $124 billion in office costs (utilities, etc.), $46 billion in absenteeism and $31 billion in employee turnover.
• Working from home half time saves the average employee $362 in gas per year. (That seems low to me—when I worked at home one day per week as an employee, I saved nearly $600 a year on gas.)

Letting employees work from home half time also cuts U.S. imports of gas from the Persian Gulf by 37 percent and is the equivalent of taking 9.6 billion cars off the road.

So you can see, working from home helps your staff and the planet. Not sure how to go about implementing workshifting, telecommuting or remote working? Working Without Walls, a free ebook created by Network Solutions editor Rieva Lesonsky and the folks at Microsoft has lots of ideas.

Image by Flickr user Andrew Taylor (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Small Business, Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.