Letting employees work from home can keep them happy, make them work harder and save employers plenty of money, experts say.

Most importantly, embracing work-from-home policies can open up a wide world of talented, experienced people ready to work but who want to limit their morning commute to the distance it takes to walk from their bed to their computer.

“There’s a huge reservoir of talented people who want to work, but they want to work from home,” founder and president of Weave Partners Catherine Chambers said. Weave Partners is a company that specializes in helping people work from home.

Alongside people who want the freedom and flexibility working from home brings, a large population of talented people with disabilities — including those with physical, emotional or health issues — can be tapped by letting employees work from home. 

Bob Fortier, president of the Canadian Telework Association as well as head of consulting firm InnoVisions Canada, says big cost reductions can be achieved by employers as segments of office space are made unnecessary, weather and road conditions become irrelevant to productivity, absenteeism virtually disappears and health-care costs related to stress and sickness go down. He says a company could save up to a million dollars over a five-year period by moving 100 employees out of the office and into their own homes.

Fortier also says recruitment and retention of talent becomes a lot easier, letting companies hold onto skilled workers and even pull away talented people from their competitors.

“If (companies) don’t start looking at this seriously, other employers are going to grab their best and brightest,” Fortier said.

Of course, certain jobs fit the telecommuting lifestyle better than others — like information or telephone-related work, for example — and employees who want to approach their employer about it generally need to be dependable and have a proven track record. Data also shows that just being around in person can give a strong boost to your career despite perhaps not working quite as hard or as well as someone who works from home.

“It remains a bit of a stumbling block because we’ve heard employers value presence over performance in some cases,” Chambers said.

Then there’s the perception of home workers doing it because they’re lazy, an assertion that Chambers suggests does not hold water in actual experience.

“There’s this perception that people might be more casual in their home and that they might not be putting in enough time. But sometimes people put in even more time when working from home because they’re not commuting and because they want to prove they are working,” Chambers said.

Fortier agrees, saying studies have shown people tend to work harder when paid to work from home.

“We know … that productivity increases dramatically in the majority of cases.”