Telework can save thousands, often millions, of dollars in real estate costs.  Even without telework, many of today's knowledge workers and their managers spend more than half their time away from their offices (travel, meetings, illness, flexible work arrangements, etc).

As the use of telework increases, and with average teleworkers spending 2 or 3 days per week away from the regular office, the resulting empty office space can easily be re-rationalized by desk-sharing, hoteling or other office-space strategies. Some save millions of dollars and/or square feet. The resultant savings should form part of your ROI for telework. For example,

• If you average in common areas (hallways, meeting rooms, washrooms, parking, etc), average per-office costs in many Canadian cities can reach the $6,000 a year range.
• With just a bit of strategic planning, organizations can save about one office for every three teleworkers. Doing the arithmetic, a medium-sized organization with 100 teleworkers can save some $200,000 yearly just by cutting 30 offices.
• With 1,000 teleworkers, an organization could reasonably save some $2,000,000 per year.
• And that's in addition to the other significant savings that telework brings to the organization!

These practical case studies illustrate the savings possible:

• Using telework, AT&T was able to reduce its office-space costs by 50%. Since 1995, the company has saved $500 million in office lease costs by promoting telecommuting.  In 1998, about 55 percent of the company's 55,900 managers telecommuted at least once a month
• Telework allowed IBM to drastically reduced the need for office space and save $56 million per year across the company.  After 2 years with telework the company negated the need for 2 million square feet of office space  
• Pac Bell saved about $20 million over five years.
• Sage Research reported that 30% of corporations with telecommuters agreed that having telecommuters helps reduce real estate costs. (Opportunities in Telecommuting: A Quantitative Analysis of Drivers, Deterrents and Deployment Patterns. Sage Research, Jan 2000.)
• Merrill Lynch reported saving $5000 to $6000 for each office space eliminated through the use of telecommuting. ("Who's in the Home Office?" American Demographics, June 1999.)
• The Texas Workforce Commission Appeals Department reduced the required rent-able square feet of office space by 1,824 square feet by having 19-22 attorneys telecommute. (Workplace Evaluation Study. U.S. General Services Administration, Office of Government wide Policy, Sept 1999.)
• Georgia Power reported a savings of $100,000 annually, with office space needs reduced by two-thirds. ("Telecommute leaves road less traveled." Computerworld, Mar 1998.)
• Of Nortel's 13,000 teleworkers, 4,000 no longer need dedicated office space in a Nortel building. Overall, telecommuting allows the company to save $20 million dollars a year on real estate costs — equivalent to two 20-story office buildings of 40,000 square feet per floor

Misc articles etc
	President Obama aims to reduce number of federal office buildings by encouraging more telework and office sharing
	Work Zone: Musical cubicles -- As technology allows workers to be more mobile, more companies adopt 'hoteling' -- nondedicated spaces that are shared
	Jan 04. Getting people to the seat, Part 1. Network World looks at ways to remove the barriers to federal telework center use
	Jan 04. Canadian HR Reporter — Satellite offices an option when the commute drives staff away No matter how much they love working for you, the commuting grind gets even the most loyal employees dreaming about better work-life balance
	Who's been sitting in my chair? Office sharing, occasioned by part-time workers, telecommuters etc, can be challenging
	Telecommuting for attorneys at the US Patent and Trademark Office enables the PTO to relinquish about three floors, or 47,000 square feet, of office space for a savings of roughly $1.5 million in office rental costs
	US Patent Office expects to save roughly $1.5 million in office rental costs -- Patent attorneys working from home enable the PTO to relinquish about 3 floors, or 47,000 square feet, of office space
	Sun Microsystems hopes to reduce its real estate costs dramatically by moving from 0.8 employee to 1.8 employees per office. That's the message delivered by CEO Scott McNealy recently. Holy cow. Does that mean that Sun will need half of the space that it currently occupies? Could similar "knowledge" companies also reduce their space requirements?
	Sun Microsystems hopes to reduce its real estate costs dramatically by moving from 0.8 employee to 1.8 employees per office. That's the message delivered by CEO Scott McNealy recently. Holy cow. Does that mean that Sun will need half of the space that it currently occupies? Could similar "knowledge" companies also reduce their space requirements?
	Where should I sit? -- When Cigna HealthCare began dispersing workers from its corporate office, executives soon realized the workers often had no place to work when they occasionally returned
	Handling the hotel -- Dos and don'ts of creating temporary offices for teleworkers
	Mine, mine, mine -- Once heralded as the answer to real estate space woes and workers' desires to be less tied to the office, hoteling is getting a critical look as workers lament the loss of workplace anchors.
	Gil Gordon has a new 8-page guide with tips and tricks to help employees get along in today's office setting. It includes simple solutions for problems associated with 'cubicle wars', offices without walls, and 'hoteling'
	Innovative Officing in the Canadian Government
	Hotelling - Fiona Potter
	Tough Minnesota law: building plans contingent upon telework
	Mobility and the New Placemakers - Franklin Becker, Ph.D.
	Real Gold in Real Estate - Brenda Howard
	Boundaryless workforce depends on age, position, company size
	Cube Stakes Nice article about new officing
	Fast Company: The role of physical offices in a virtual world
	In future, when telecommuting becomes a white-collar norm, will a new wave of telecommuters start living - and working - in empty office buildings?
	Hixson, the Cincinnati-based workplace design firm says office of the future needs to do much better job of supporting telecommuting and overall productivity. It's April 2000 survey of Fortune 1000 companies, says: Telecommuting expected to triple over the next 5 years to up to 50% of workforce, and the average worker spending only 36% of time in their workspace. When telecommuters work at employers' premises, they feel unsatisfied with and underserved by the facilities available to them (rating facilities a "2" or lower on a scale of 1 to 5).