Lisa Floreancig reports on NAMIC Online about a Minnesota Insurance company (Midwest Family Mutual Insurance) that has gone completely virtual.

In 2002, Boyd set the company on a business path that included no paper and all but five employees working from home… Today, Midwest is completely paperless, allowing not a shred to move out of its central location… Once the paperless strategy was successfully implemented, the next logical step was to move nearly all of Midwest’s 61 employees out of the building and into a home-office environment.

The first thing that impresses me is that they had the foresight to go paperless and officeless all the way back in 2002. MFMI implemented an impressive system (which seems to be documented in this case study) for distributing all documents electronically to different employees as needed (and this in the insurance industry, which is not exactly paper-light). From there they transitioned to a completely office-less environment, implementing technology to route telephone calls to employees over the web.  In addition to saving on office costs, their CEO reports that their employee productivity has actually gone up:

 Boyd attributes the signs of early success to fewer workday interruptions, resulting in greater productivity. “We don’t realize how many interruptions there are in a tight office environment until you get to work from home. We don’t realize how much quieter it is. We still have the opportunity to send each other emails or pick up the phone and collaborate on underwriting files. We still have meetings. We just don’t see each other face to face.”

As to the the future of telecommuting:

I don’t understand why we are not seeing more of this in this country. We are log jammed and snarled in traffic. I hear a lot about energy conservation,” Boyd says. “We are not commuting, but change is tough. And you are dealing with a certain amount of ego of some CEOs who need to be in an office. We don’t need to be in a big office to stroke our egos. Why have all this money tied up in bricks and mortar?”

Christopher Nickson posts on Digital Trends (found via Northern Telework) about a report that was just released that investigated the affect that telecommuting has on the environment. While lots of energy (and burned fossil fuel) is saved when a worker does not drive into work but rather walks down the hall to their home-office, it turns out that 80% of this saved energy is used up by increased energy costs incurred by the worker in their home (or to put it more positively, as Debora Ng writes, telecommuting means a 20% savings of energy). Additionally:

However, more powerful new home computers use more energy, and with routers and servers on 24/7, telecommuting has its own green issues to address if it’s going to make a real contribution to the bigger ecological picture. Additionally, some labor activists are worried that telecommuting could also lead to more outsourcing in cheaper economies, taking downsizing to a new level.

So telecommuting, which is already a growing trend, could have very positive benefits for global warming, the report concludes, but only if it’s carried out “in a planned and managed way.”