Stress and frustration from long commute times often result to lower work efficiency
Americans take up to 27.6 minutes of travel time to the workplace on average, according to workplace insights platform, Zippia. This totals up to an entire hour of daily travel time. A 55-minute commute in a day equates to more than 333 hours in a year, taking nearly two weeks’ worth of lost time and money for employees.
Clever Real Estate said that employees spend up to $8,466 on commuting expenses every year which takes up to 19% of their income annually.
Apart from added expenses, long commute times also result in feelings of stress, anxiety, and frustration to commuters which leads to a reduction in work efficiency, according to a study from Dartmouth College.
“I as a CEO will never again in my life give up two to three hours a day, five days a week sitting in traffic doing this high stress, low productivity activity. So why would I ask someone else to do it?” said Phil Libin, CEO and founder of video communication platform, Mmhmm.
Highly productive employees that are forced to take long and stressful commutes will have more reasons to leave their companies eventually as their counterproductive work behavior increases and their engagement decreases, according to Zippia.
“Anyone who's forcing people to do something they don't want to do is not seeing that in six months or 12 months or 18 months from now, return-to-work won't be the hardest thing they'll be facing. Retaining talent will, and companies that pushed away their most confident people are going to deeply regret it," said Libin.
“If you have work that doesn't require people to be in the same place, consider the cost of the time of commuting and pay people for it. Or better yet, just eliminate it,” he said. “I’m not saying that companies need to be fully remote. I’m saying that they should be reasonable and take into account the obvious tradeoffs, then they can decide what's best for them.”
