Benefits:

• Employee satisfaction and increase productivity - Employees who telecommute spend less money on transportation, clothes, and food. (In 2011 in Canada, cost savings were estimated at between $600 and $3,500 annually for an individual telecommuting two days a week.
• Cost-effectiveness - Employers save on office space, furnishings, maintenance, parking, and other opex. Telecommuting helps recruits and retain top talents.
• Accessibility - This virtual realm opens up huge possibilities when it comes to staffing (wider pool nationally/internationally) and stakeholder engagement (no need to limit ourselves to our traditional geography).
• GHG emission reductions -Significantly reduce the City workforce's carbon footprint by saving employees hours spent commuting.

Barriers:

• Performance concerns and Trust issues- Without being able to monitor and check in on employees continually, management in the conventional sense worries about the reduced performance of their employees. This is because of the all-pervasive working culture that we have grown up with along with older generations.

• Management resistance/change in management practices (moving towards results-based and performance measures, increased micro-management risk ) - This is related to additional work to change in management style, however, examples show that this change likely will save time over the longer term.
• A lack of remote training and skills both for management and employees. A two-fold issue: Companies are not investing enough in the training of their employees, and possible remoters are not making use of the resources that are available. The need for access to the right tools and the need of clear infrastructure management (employer/employee responsibilities).

• Inequity in that not all jobs can be performed off-site - A Canadian study (2011, by Telework Research Network for City of Calgary) estimating that only 44 percent of jobs are compatible with telecommuting). Also, not everyone has access to the internet, and a suitable working environment at home (Workspace sharing). Studies show that the higher a person's salary, the most likely they are to be able to work from home - this is mainly because remote work is particularly common among university graduates, managers and professionals, but its practice also depends on the sector and the nature of the job. On the first images below, the 2015 GSS data shows that two of the occupation categories employing the most workers in Canada have very low proportions of telecommuters. Remote work is much more frequently practised in only four of the 10 occupation categories. Occupations with a large share of low-income workers generally have few telecommuters, as the graphs on the right illustrate. The second image shows that the higher a person's salary, the most likely they are to be able to work from home.

• Professional or social isolation - Reduced face to face interaction can lead to lower-level interaction/relationship building/professional or social isolation/lack of advancement. Hiring remotely might not always be easy. Face-to-face communication is considered high bandwidth because we can transmit and receive the greatest amount of information in a given time period. One of the biggest downsides of remote work is the low-bandwidth communication methods like email and chat (the conversation does not happen in the same/real-time). However, to compensate, video meetings have become the standard alternative for business communication. From an employee perspective working from home can bring loneliness and burnout as a new way of balancing Work/life/boundaries.