Enterprise Rent-A-Car is to expand its home-working programme after experiencing positive results during a pilot.
The car hire company launched the pilot to establish whether home working was a viable approach to growing its call centre, based in Aldershot.
During the pilot, call centre employees from its Enterprise Business Support (EBS) facility were given the opportunity to work from home and were set up with all the technical support they needed.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car then compared the cost of setting up an employee to work from home against the cost of having an office-based employee. The comparison showed the cost of an office-based employee is around £5,000 per year, while the cost of a home-based employee is only £1,500 in the first year for set-up costs and is then minimal in subsequent years.
Some of the other benefits of the home-working pilot include improved retention, a reduction in absenteeism and disciplinary issues, higher employee satisfaction and a more diverse workforce.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car will now expand the programme as demand for call centre employees increases, with a view to achieving a target of 50% of EBS employees becoming home-workers over time.
Leigh Lafever-Ayer, HR director UK and Ireland at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, said: “Most of our UK employees are branch-based and need to be on the branch floor to look after customers. So we’ve focused our home-working opportunities on back-office functions.
“We’ve proved employees can be as effective working from home and this approach can help control cost. It’s evidence that flexible working can be a very successful business strategy.”
The office cost savings are often the driver for considering home working solutions and clearly significant in this case. However, the less tangible benefits in workforce productivity and customer service are often even more significant to the business as well as the individuals – provided the support mechanisms for remote staff are embedded and sustained.
And let’s not forget the resource consumption benefits in not requiring people to travel to and from an office each day. Both the time and energy consumed in commuting will become a major focus for improving business sustainability and corporate citizenship
This is a great idea, it will benefit employee and company
Employee will save so much money on all levels. Work related
Stress will go down dramatically, retentation and motivation
Will approve, which creates a great customer service.
Bottom line $$$$$$$$$$$$ on levels
Great to see positive news about flexible working in the private sector. All to often we see lazy journalism extolling the risks and costs to business. There’s a wealth of evidence out there that reinforces the findings here. In th epublic sector, where we have been supporting this agenda for 10 years, the savings to the public purse are potentially staggering.
As Paul says though, supporting mechanisms are important and successful implementations include good communication tools and training for middle managers on how to support a dispersed workforce.