Take a stroll down memory lane with us and think back to late March 2016: spring had sprung; the entire country had college basketball fever, and Virtual Vocations launched its “March Madness Telecommuting Celebration.”
From March 20-26, 2016, we celebrated Telecommute Week—a seven-day salute to telecommuting orchestrated via Virtual Vocations’ website, blog, and Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Throughout the week, our blog readers, social media followers, and registered Virtual Vocations members were treated to new telecommute job search resources, Q&A sessions with Virtual Vocations’ staff members including Laura Spawn, CEO, and Shannon Cyr, Director of Operations, contests and prizes like Amazon gift cards, and fresh blog content including the following:
- Remote Jobs for First-Time Telecommuters
- 7 Telecommute-Friendly Companies with Excellent Perks (explore even more telecommute-friendly employers in the Virtual Vocations Telecommute Companies Database)
- Telecommuting Confessions: Wackiest Work-at-Home Experiences
- Telecommuting: The Future Is Now
Another hallmark of Virtual Vocations’ “March Madness Telecommuting Celebration” was a lighthearted, 10-question survey of more than 700 registered Virtual Vocations members: the Telecommuter’s Tell All Survey. This questionnaire, which polled our site members about everything from their coffee consumption to the time of day they experience optimum work performance, was issued to our registered members via email and was completed on a voluntary basis.
From this survey, we learned valuable information about the personal and professional predilections of our site members that influence their lives as telecommuters. Let’s break down the survey results by category:
Work at Home Environment
This portion of the Telecommuter’s Tell All Survey provides an overview of the work environment that our survey respondents rely on to be most conducive to productivity. Interestingly, the respondents were split down the middle about their preference for telecommuting location, with 50.6% of survey respondents reporting that they work from home all of the time and the other half stating that they telecommute from a site other than their home office at least once a month.
When our registered members do work remotely from home, 82.4% work from a defined work area like a dedicated home office or a corner nook among their living space. Meanwhile, more than 11% of telecommuters camp out on the couch while they work.
No matter where our registered members telecommute, nearly 70 percent of them listen to music while they work. Good news, because listening to music while working can boost productivity through improved concentration, according to a New York Times Report.
You can view the complete survey results regarding the Work at Home Environment of Virtual Vocations’ registered members in the graphs below:
Telecommuting Patterns
It’s no secret that what telecommute job seekers want most is flexibility. This work-life balance afforded by telecommuting is unmatched by any other work model, as affirmed in our Telecommuter’s Tell All Survey results.
From the graphs shown below, you’ll discover that working remotely gives telecommuters the flexibility to work during the time of day or night or week that is most amenable to their personal and professional needs.
More than 62% of our survey respondents claimed that they work best in the morning, while the final third set of respondents do their best work after the sun sets. However, among all of these telecommuters, 80.7% of them spend at least part of their weekend hours completing work assignments from the previous week.
Evidence of telecommuting’s scheduling flexibility is further supported by Money magazine’s examination of a survey of professionals who believe that the eight-hour workday will be entirely replaced by a more fluid remote work model that allows employees to work on their own terms, and as often or as late as they’d like.
Telecommuter Habits
As we learned in our 2015 Year-End Report, telecommuters are as unique and varied as the breadth of career industries that foster remote work. Our Telecommuter’s Tell All Survey questions about Telecommuter Habits help paint an even more detailed portrait of your everyday telecommuter.
Humorously, the survey results confirmed a majority of telecommuters fit the stereotype of a pajama-clad coffee drinker who talks to their pets as if they are people. Although, we do have to give a shout out to the one-third of respondents who claimed that they get dressed every day while working from home. Then again, getting dressed doesn’t necessarily mean that all telecommuters are consistently presentable, since 52.8% of survey respondents confessed that they sometimes skip bathing.
Would you like to share these stats? For a quick summarization of our Telecommuter’s Tell All Survey results, check out the infographic embeded below, or view the Telecommuter’s Tell All Survey Results Infographic as a PDF featuring clickable links to this blog post and our social media profiles:
You can also view additional information about our survey results via our PRweb Telecommuter’s Tell All Survey Results Press Release.
Did you miss this survey during our “March Madness Telecommuting Celebration”? Provide your answers now when you connect with Virtual Vocations on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. We’d love to hear from you!
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Learn how our service works, browse job leads by location and career category, or search hundreds of hand-screened telecommuting jobs to find legitimate work-at-home job leads that match your skills and background.
