Enterprise Rent-A-Car is to expand its home-working programme after experiencing positive results during a pilot.
The car hire company launched the pilot to establish whether home working was a viable approach to growing its call centre, based in Aldershot.
During the pilot, call centre employees from its Enterprise Business Support (EBS) facility were given the opportunity to work from home and were set up with all the technical support they needed.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car then compared the cost of setting up an employee to work from home against the cost of having an office-based employee. The comparison showed the cost of an office-based employee is around £5,000 per year, while the cost of a home-based employee is only £1,500 in the first year for set-up costs and is then minimal in subsequent years.
Some of the other benefits of the home-working pilot include improved retention, a reduction in absenteeism and disciplinary issues, higher employee satisfaction and a more diverse workforce.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car will now expand the programme as demand for call centre employees increases, with a view to achieving a target of 50% of EBS employees becoming home-workers over time.
Leigh Lafever-Ayer, HR director UK and Ireland at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, said: “Most of our UK employees are branch-based and need to be on the branch floor to look after customers. So we’ve focused our home-working opportunities on back-office functions.
“We’ve proved employees can be as effective working from home and this approach can help control cost. It’s evidence that flexible working can be a very successful business strategy.”
