Michael Dell Bucks The Trend: Wants Half Of His Employees To Work From Home

Over the last year, the already horrific traffic situation in Silicon Valley has gotten worse.

People that live there blame Marissa Mayer at Yahoo and Meg Whitman at HP and their demands that thousands of their workers drive into the office every day, one San Francisco resident told Business Insider.

Michael Dell is bucking that trend. As part of the company's "2020 Legacy of Good" plan, he wants to get half of his 14,000 employees in Round Rock working from home. Currently about 20% of them do, Dell's vice president of Corporate Responsibility Trisa Thompson told KVUE's Shelton Green.

Obviously, there's a bit of "eating your own dogfood" with this mandate, because Dell sells a lot of IT equipment to companies to help them support remote and traveling workers.

But increasing the ranks of remote workers has also been good for the company, saving it about $14 million last year, Thompson says. Thompson calcucaltes these workers also kept 6,735 metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere by no longer commuting.

Dell's commitment to remote work is the biggest we've ever heard of, though its not the most extreme. Startup Automattic, the company responsible for the WordPress blogging platform, has 200 employees and almost all of them work for home.

Still, Dell is showing other big companies that remote work is not something to be feared (a la 1999), but should be encouraged for thousands of workers.