It is one thing to be busy, and quite another to be productive. Your employees can keep themselves occupied during working hours, without having much to show for it at the end of the day. And you will still have to pay them because they came to work. Quite galling, isn’t it?
So long as you own or run a business, lost productivity is one of the most significant challenges that you will have to grapple with on a regular basis.
Lost productivity is not something that you can quickly dismiss. Studies show that businesses will lose up to $227 billion in lost productivity as a result of poor health alone. And that is not the only issue that your employees will have to deal with that prevents them from doing a better job. There are other distractions such as the internet, rare eclipses, shopping holidays, major sports events, and so on.
There is no way to eliminate low productivity challenges, but there are ways to increase work efficiency and thus improve productivity within your business significantly. And one of those ways is to opt for a remote worker or two.
Still not convinced? Well, here are additional ways in which hiring remote workers can help increase productivity within your business company.
3 Ways Remote Workers Increase Your Company’s Productivity
1. Remote Working Reduces On Time Spent Commuting
Not everyone is in a position to live close to their workplace. In fact, one can argue that work commutes in recent times are much worse than they were in the past. It now takes the average worker about 26 minutes to commute to work each way. That is about an hour each day and about 4 hours and 20 minutes each working week. And that is assuming that everything goes well.
So, what happens if there is an accident on the road or the weather is terrible? Well then, the time spent on the road increases. It may stretch for hours!
By the time your employees reach the workplace, they will be cranky and tired. Over time, the stress the commute puts them under will begin to affect the quality of work they do, and their productivity will suffer a great deal.
It is also worth noting the long hours spent by employees traveling to and from work could have been better served to work toward achieving your business goals. So, in the end, more extended commuting hours eat into the time that should have been dedicated to working.
For the reasons above it makes sense for you to opt for telecommuting employees. Employees who work from home do not have to contend with rage-inducing traffic. They can work for you from the comfort of their homes, do things in a relaxed manner, and get more done as a result. And your business will experience increased productivity as a result.
2. Remote Work Reduces Office Distractions
Going to work is not always about getting a job done. For many employees, workplaces provide a chance for them to interact with their colleagues and catch up on what is happening on many fronts. To put it bluntly: workplace interactions offer employees the opportunity to catch up on the hottest gossip.
Now, a little gossip is harmless. But people say gossiping is sweet for a reason. Many employees do not know when to stop, and so end up wasting a lot of time talking about others instead of working to grow their business.
A CareerBuilder study showed that 39% of human resource professionals and managers cited gossip in the workplace as one of the major contributors to low productivity. And who can blame them for complaining? After all, they are expected to know how to get things done by the head honchos.
There is something else that gossip at work can do: It can cause toxicity. Toxicity happens when office gossips are vicious, and hell-bent on the utter destruction of the people they hate. A hostile work environment can become so toxic that the stress levels of the victims of the malicious gossip increase to intolerable levels. And the more stressed people are, the lower their productivity is going to be.
The impact of gossip on workplace productivity is one of the reasons as to why you should consider remote workers. One of the benefits of working from home is that this type of toxic enviroment can be completely avoided, and employees can get to work without being distracted by gossip or other office factors.
A remote work productivity study conducted by Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom, demonstrated that working from home increases productivity. This study was made at Ctrip, a Chinese travel company and it lasted 9 months. The results? 13% performance increase; 9% because employees had fewer breaks and distractions and 4% because they worked in a quieter environment.
3. Remote Workers Understand That Time Is Money
It is a little-known fact that remote work doesn’t need to mean part-time. It’s easy to hire remote workers who work for your company full time. More and more people are leaving their regular jobs and opting for telecommuting ones. They do this so that they can control their working hours and achieve a semblance of work-life balance. You can create an agile work environment that enables employees to do the same.
Some people are very good at what they do. However, if they were to complete all their daily tasks early and leave, they would be seen to be lazy. So many of them just push pencils around and take their time to appear busy. This kind of visibility has a negative impact on worker productivity.
On the other hand, remote working offers employees the chance to work at their own pace without having someone look over their shoulder. There is no need of hiring managers for this purpose. Smaller supervision allows remote workers to become more efficient without fear of being judged. After all, they will be judged by the quality of the product or service that they produce. Who cares if it took them two hours less to do the job? Less supervision may explain why the 2017 CoSo Cloud survey findings show that at least 30% of remote workers who work off-site several times a month feel that they accomplish more in less time while 77% report a higher level of productivity overall.
There is no doubt that hiring remote workers who want to free up more time for themselves is a good thing. These workers in remote positions understand that time is money. As a result, they will be more determined to finish their daily tasks earlier so that they can pursue other interests even without you hiring a remote manager. You will probably never have to wait for them to hand in their work way past their deadlines because they have their priorities straight.
Ready to Boost Your Company’s Productivity?
Don’t knock remote working as a way to boost business productivity – at least not until you take some of the remote workers through the interview process and try them out for a while. This option of running your business may be just what you need to find and retain highly productive working nomads. It is with the help of remote employees that you will be in a position to grow your business and make it profitable in the long run. Just give remote workers a chance, will you? We can help you.
