Today, in the midst of a global pandemic, people around the world are learning to balance work and home life, but this time it’s the other way around. If you’re a forward-thinking business leader, the present situation presents a great opportunity to take a serious look at remote working strategically because of the huge benefits this brings to the business. It is possible that many of the new work-at-home employees trying to adjust to the new way of working may want to return to the office as soon as possible, but they may soon realize that working at home can create the same results for the organization in much less time than they spend in the office.
Two-thirds of knowledge workers think the office will disappear by 2030, according to a Zapier survey. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Nicholas Bloom says that requiring employees to be in the office is an outdated work tradition that was set up during the Industrial Revolution. A temporary work from home entails normally working in an office with the occasional work-from-home day away from the office. The framework and structure of the office continues as it is, with the colleagues who work there adjusting their work based on the absence of the ‘lucky’ work-from-home employee. However, when a firm plans for permanent remote working, or a planned number of employees working from outside the company’s office all the time, it is simply a different approach to getting things done and a completely new way of working. The work-from-office environment has team members with a desk and workspace provided by their company. Remote working requires employees creating their own work environment that works best for them, at home, or the café, or a preferred space, without the backup of an office space or desk.
But, are people looking out for that kind of work flexibility? According to the FlexJobs’ 8th Annual Survey of 2019, 30% of respondents have reported leaving a job because it did not offer flexible work options, 16% were looking for a new job because of flexibility issues, and 80% said that they would be more loyal to their employers if they had flexible work options. More than half (52%) of the respondents had tried to negotiate flexible work arrangements with their employer. Zapier’s survey of 880 knowledge workers, conducted online in 2019 by The Harris Poll, found that 95 percent of U.S. knowledge workers wanted to work remotely, and 74 percent would be willing to quit a job to do so. The survey also informed that one in four knowledge workers found their commute to be among the most stressful parts of their job. Founded in 2011, Zapier itself operates as an entirely remote company, and has around 300 employees working in 27 countries around the world wherein employees have the option to either work remote, work in their office in Boston, or switch between the two. According to The Annual IWG Global Workspace Survey conducted in early 2019, gathering the opinions of more than 15,000 business people across over 100 nations, 80% respondents said that when faced with two similar employment offers, they would turn down the one that didn’t offer flexible working.
So, are employers interested in a permanent remote working setup? A Gartner, Inc. survey, concluded on March 30, 2020, of 317 CFOs and Finance leaders including more than 200 CFOs from companies that ranged between $500 million and $50 billion in annual revenue with as many as 100,000 employees, reveals that 74% Intend to shift at least 5% employees to remote work permanently post Covid-19. About 6% of survey takers said that they would leave 50% or more of their workforce remote, 17% of respondents said 20% would remain offsite, and another 25% said 10% of workers wouldn’t return to an office. According to a 2018 report from Owl Labs, which polled 3,028 respondents from 6 continents representing 23 countries using Google Surveys, 16% of companies are completely remote with no headquarters or office option available. All employees work from workspaces, their homes, or wherever they choose. 40% of companies are hybrid – offering both remote and office options resulting in teams and departments always having a mix of office and remote employees. Owl Labs itself works with a fully hybrid team. Collage, an e-commerce custom products company featured in a Harvard Business School case study for innovative company culture, has been all-remote since its inception.
What’s in it for employers? Employers see big benefits when they incorporate work flexibility into the company’s strategy and operations. Research from Stanford shows that employees allowed to work remotely are actually more productive, less likely to leave, and save the organization money because there’s less overhead. Advantages touch many aspects of the business, from hiring the best people, regardless of location, to saving money on office space.
Firms taking planned steps towards remote working have found the following benefits resulting from the move:
Reduced costs: Remote working enables companies to give up office space and free up deposits, reduce operations costs of space rentals, overheads, utilities, and salaries of support staff, as also cost of fixed line phones. With employees using their own devices for work, there is further potential for savings. Remote working also yields savings of transportation cost and time for unnecessary travel. Even society benefits from the resulting reduced congestion and pollution. Companies pay only for work done and not for breaks. According to The Annual IWG Global Workspace Survey (2019), 65% of businesses say flexible workspace reduces capital and operating expenditures.
Availability of more educated and experienced employees: Work flexibility appeals to highly educated and experienced workers. Offering flexible work options can help attract well-educated professionals with solid experience coming from a variety of backgrounds. Firms can even get the benefits of employing competent employees who appear challenged due to their age or physical abilities since remote work utilizes mental faculties more than physical. Competent women employees need not take breaks from employment. A survey carried out by Global Workplace Analytics in 2018 discovered that 97% of respondents are interested in being a flexible worker in the long-term.
Larger potential labour pool: One of the important reasons for companies to use remote working is to expand and diversify their talent pools with the ability to add talented team members regardless of their locations. When an employee pool isn’t geographically restricted, the likelihood of finding the right employee rises. Employees can also be attracted, in many cases, at the most economical rates for the company. Employees are also available for work at short notice due to reduction in induction, recruiting and training time. Firms can even go global by using remote workers with unlimited skilled personnel being available from across the world 24×7. Firms are able to hire talented people who speak different languages for remote work. Crowdsourcing of ideas is easily enabled from remote workers. Firms can also maintain redundancy of personnel ready to work when required. One crucial implication of maintaining more remote workers is that it gives firms access to skilled workers in new locations that they wouldn’t have considered in the past.
Productivity improvement: Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban working from home wasn’t due to productivity being a concern for her so much as decreased communication was at that time. A 2013 study reported by the Harvard Business Review has confirmed that working at home boosts productivity among workers: 65% of respondents indicated that they would be more productive working from home than working in a traditional office environment due to fewer distractions (74%), fewer interruptions from colleagues (72%), reduced stress from commuting (70%), and minimal office politics (64%). There are also lesser conflicts due to remoteness, and paperwork reduces due to digitalization. There are benefits of reduced driving and jet lag effects on productivity of employees. If commute time and time to get ready for work is included with office work time, as compared to remote working for performing the same job, the increase in productivity offered by remote working is starkly apparent.
A study conducted by Vouchercloud.com in 2017, which surveyed 1,989 UK full-time office workers to discover online habits of employees at work, found that the average worker spends just two hours and 53 minutes being productive with distractions like checking social media, reading news websites, and discussing out of work activities with colleagues, preparing and consuming snacks and beverages taking up a bulk of the remaining working period. All of this ‘distraction’ time is excluded from the working time in a remote working arrangement.
According to The Annual IWG Global Workspace Survey (2019), 85% respondents confirm that productivity has increased in their business as a result of greater flexibility. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, Nicholas Bloom studied China’s largest travel agency, Ctrip (published: 20 November 2014) headquartered in Shanghai for the impact of working from home on growth while avoiding exorbitant office space costs. They tracked two groups of employees: half worked from home for nine months coming into the office one day a week and half worked only from the office for about two years. They found a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home. Another finding of the study was that resignations at the company dropped by 50% when employees were allowed to work from home.
Scalability and flexibility: Adding work and employees involves just connecting up more employees to the digitalized setup of remote working. This arrangement also enables more span of control for managers as compared to an office arrangement. Hence, the firm can grow faster with the same number of supervisors and managers. Employees can work while travelling too. VIPKid is an online company providing ESL (English as a Second Language) education to children primarily in China, but also in Japan and Korea. Due to the online structure, teachers for VIPKid may be located anywhere there is an internet connection, and hence, are located all over the world. This flexibility allows them to add teachers anywhere in the world. Teachers can also travel anywhere in the world and still teach classes.
Employee safety and a resilient setup: The Covid-19 pandemic also highlights a critical advantage of remote work: It can help keep workers online and healthy in situations where going to the office puts team members at risk. With wildfires, storms, and increasing climate uncertainty, a distributed workforce can keep companies online in the event of a crisis. This keeps firms resilient to slowdowns and other disruptions. Employees stuck in locations which become inaccessible to travel due to a travel-restricting event like a pandemic or storm can work with continuity from anywhere.
Employee motivation and retention: Employees benefit by saving money and time for commuting, they can work from anywhere even a comfortable Café, they can spend more time with their families and also report feeling less stressed. As a result, they’re much more productive and happier. Remote workers are more loyal, engaged, and likely to champion their employer. At SYKES, a leading customer contact management solutions company with 55,000 employees, the company’s remote work program called SYKESHome, performance measurement data backs up that work-at-home employees are more engaged and consistently deliver high-quality service. Customer satisfaction, call resolution, and other key performance indicators for SYKESHome are higher than from traditional suppliers. Global computer technology company and long-time remote work leader Dell believes that employees become loyal, engaged employees and active promoters of the organization when employees have access to flexible work options like remote work. That translates to customer satisfaction and, presumably, increased revenues.
In conclusion, with global companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Shopify, and TCS convinced with the benefits to opt in for the permanent remote work setup, it seems that the workplace is all set for a long-term makeover.