It’s 7:55am on a Thursday morning, and you are making your usual drive to work. As the crow flies, it’s about 11 miles from your home to your workplace — but today the crow is certainly not flying. You’ve already spent 35 minutes in your car, and you’re only about half-way there. This means that today’s commute will be at least an hour long – one way.

So you sit, and wait for the thousands of vehicles in front of you to move so you can move. Just when you pick up a little speed, you come up behind a double-parked delivery van. And you wait again, watching the red-light cycle three times before you inch your way up to it. Then your mind wanders to what you can expect for your evening commute – probably something very similar to what you’re experiencing this morning.

Sound familiar? If this is not a common routine for you, it is surely much too common for hundreds of thousands of commuters in scores of cities across this country. Whether it’s by car, train, or bus, Americans are spending way too much time commuting to and from their workplaces. Think of it this way: an employee who spends a total of 90 minutes a day commuting to and from work, will spend about 360 hours a year commuting. That translates into 45 eight-hour days of commuting time!

Not only is this wasted time for the employee and the employer, these types of commuting experiences serve to eat away at an employee’s psyche. So once an employee finally gets to work, he or she could frankly not be in a less productive state of mind.

This is why companies and organizations should truly get serious about teleworking. Granted, it’s not for every company, and it’s not for every employee. But if you have an employee who spends much of his or her time working on the phone and/or on the computer, then this is a good candidate for telecommuting.

In its recent telework study (cited in last week’s blog post), Cisco found that 40 percent of its employees are already located in a different city from their direct managers. So in a sense, these employees are already teleworking (relative to their managers).

There’s no time like the present to more fully embrace telework policies that your company may already have in place – and where you don’t, start a new and robust program.

Innovation starts with happy and inspired employees, and employees who can get to their “creative place” – whether that be a physical place or a state of mind. A telework program alone will not ensure a company’s success, nor solve all its ills. But it can go a long way in getting more from your employees, giving more back to the shareholders, and helping out the environment along the way.