One opportunity for earning a salary while working from home is to work as an architect. While it is true that not every architectural engineering company is going to want to let its architects telecommuting by working at home; there have always been a few of the more liberal firms which allowed employees to work from home offices as they fully understood that a professional working from his/her own space can often be much more productive. Not to mention the fact that such an approach to employee relations has always had the added bonus of leading to a reduction of financial overhead.
With the addition of more and better technology where much architectural drawing is now done on a computer with absolutely marvelous software, more enterprises are opening up to the idea of letting their men and women work from home via telecommuting. After all, if the employee is providing his/her own work space, that is just that much less overhead that management has to put into leased or purchased work space.
If you are considering approaching your superior about the possibility of telecommuting and working from home, the following could well be an argument that would work in your favor. This same point could just as easily be made for many professions, not just architecture. Before using this argument though you might want to take into consideration whether:
· your current work environment is over crowded
· your employer is looking at expansion which would require more space
· tax benefits that might be available to the firm similar to those offered in some locales for car pooling.
Who knows? Maybe by making such a suggestion you might not only be granted your request to work from home; there is always the outside chance you might even receive a bonus for coming up with an idea to save the company money.
Stop and think what the cost of workspace is for any firm working out of Manhattan. It is not at all unheard of to pay a lease rate of $70 per square foot of floor space per year. If a large architectural firm can decrease the amount of space to be leased by even as much as 100 square feet it can save $7,000 per year. So how much is 100 square feet? One ten by ten office or 2-3 cubicles if they are crowded together. Now imagine that this same large firm agreed to let 10 people work from home via telecommuting. The savings could suddenly jump to $70,000 per year. Now that is not an amount to turn one’s nose up at.
In addition to office space itself there is also the question of ample parking space. Just as having less people work directly out of the office reduces overhead; so does having to provide less parking space. The savings just keep adding up! So go ahead and make your pitch for working from home to your boss. You’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain.