If you’ve been looking for a reason for telecommuting that will get your bosses on board with the idea, Cisco Systems has 277 million of them—that’s how many dollars the company estimates they saved by having just under 2,000 people telecommute an average of 2 days a week for a year. As is often the case with telecommuting studies, there were more benefits than just financial savings, too; telecommuters felt their quality of life was improved and the environment was saved from significant pollution.

Cisco did the study over the 2008 year, with 1,992 employees across the world taking place, with the majority of the employees saying their productivity had improved, as well as the timeliness of their work (all of which contributed to the almost $300 million savings Cisco saw). Few felt their communication with coworkers was negatively affected by telecommuting and the vast majority felt their overall quality of life improved.

With the greenhouse gas emissions from commuting contributing greatly to pollution, many environmentalists have made strong cases for telecommuting and the Cisco study showed positive results in that area as well, preventing  a little less than 50,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas from being released (and that was with employees telecommuting just a couple of times a week on average). The longer your commute, or the more days you work from home, the more greenhouse gas you could prevent from effecting our planet.

For most of us, though, we don’t need much convincing to telecommute, it’s usually higher ups who are hesitant. If you’d like to telecommute present telecommuting study results to your boss and suggest a trial period (starting small with just one or two days a week). If the results are positive, as they were at Cisco, you’ll likely be able to renegotiate for more telecommuting days in no time at all.

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