The company which forces employees to work from home

Dear reader: the reason you're reading these lines due to Automattic, a company founded in August 2005 and is responsible for the WordPress platform, a software used by Green Savers and thousands of other sites from around the world to publish their news.

Automattic has about 230 employees, who are spread over 170 cities and different locations. But the company has only one headquarters in San Francisco. In other words, the vast majority of their employees work from home and avoid the morning and evening â€" stress â€" the traffic.

According to the CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, the reason that Automattic has a thirst is not related to working conditions. "Well, we had to have somewhere to receive our mail," explained to Mashable.

According to the charge, this strategy allows Automattic to find the best professionals in the world. "It allows us to reach the best and brightest professionals in the world," he explained.

The company has a monthly amount for each employee find a local co-working-180 ($ 550) â€" and offers an initial investment of € 2,175 ($ 6,600) for each mount your home office.

Automattic organizes some annual sessions with all workers, so that they can know each other better. "What we save, spend on travel," jokes Mullenweg. Employees can also choose the place where you will meet and rediscover.

One of the companies that work directly with Automattic, the WooThemes â€" which makes the themes and plug-ins for WordPress-has 37 people, out of a total of 45, working at home or in co-working spaces.

"Work at home brings several appointments. An e-mail conversation can be misunderstood, so I spent a lot of time on Google Hangout to see our faces, "explained CEO, Mark Forrester.

There are companies that are moving towards the opposite entido. Near the headquarters of Automattic, in San Francisco, three other multinationals repel the work from home. Apple, which has built a culture of secrecy, see telecommuting as an unnecessary risk; Google began offering free meals to keep their workers at Headquarters; and last year, Yahoo asked all the collaborators who worked from home for leave to.

Work from home

The term "telecommuting", which means, in Portuguese, working from home or telecommuting, was invented in the early 70, a NASA scientist who criticized the fact that the science taking a man to the Moon, but was unable to end the problem of traffic.

The solution found by this scientist Jack Nilles, was a concept in which people stop spending hours in traffic to, whenever possible, to work at home or in places close to home. That would mean not only an improvement of quality of life for them, but also for other workers who were unable to do the same.

The first company which adopted this strategy, an insurance company that wanted to increase the percentage of retaining talent, set up satellite offices near locations where many of their workers lived. We were in the years 70, pre-Internet era and pré-computadores.

The widespread use of computers "eureka" moment for Nilles. In 2014, anything is possible from home, since videoconferences, share documents and collaborate in real time from your phone, tablet or computer.

However, telecommuting is still not seen with good eyes by companies. In the United States, only 2.6% of the workforce (2.9 million people) worked from home, on full time, in 2012. About half of the labor force, however, could do it.

According to the Global Workplace Analytics, if all these 50 million workers stayed home only 2.4 days per week, for a year, the reduction of greenhouse gases would come to 51 million tonnes â€" the equivalent of removing all workers from New York.

Foto: ishane/Creative Commons

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