If you know about the benefits of remote work, you’ll know that there are many of them – but most articles on that subject focus on the employee benefits. There’s no doubt that remote workers have a better work/life balance that leads to increased productivity. Having said that, it’s important to know that employers don’t just end up with happier staff. Employers create a remote work culture that makes everyone’s work more productive and life much easier. There are so many ways in which hiring remote workers benefits employers as well.
What are the Benefits to Employers for Employees Working Remotely?
Most traditional office setups consist of fancy buildings with a lot of great amenities, but with all of that frill come the cons. Besides being a cost explosive scenario for the employer, it also spells a lot of challenges for employees. They need to commute every day which eats up a lot of time. Also, spending time away at work for so long creates a huge hole in their personal lives. Where’s the work-life balance?
Free coffee and an air conditioned gaming area isn’t going to salvage that. Guess what? Employees will prefer a better work-life balance over all of that. How is this good for an employer?
- Remote employees cut costs for you. No more coffee vending machines, gigantic facility management bills, and rents, no more over the top expenditures.
- Remote employees are more productive. Better work-life balance helps reduce their stress and this is why the output you get from each employee is higher and faster than you would’ve had in a traditional office setup.
- You can find talent from across the globe. You don’t have to settle for anything less. You’re not forced to hire in your vicinity.
By recruiting from the pool of remote workers, employers get access to talent that isn’t available in an office environment. Top talent isn’t always in your vicinity. Shifting to a remote work culture allows you to save tons of money while also giving you the opportunity to source the best talent from across the globe. That is why hiring remote workers benefits your organization in more ways than one. Here’s an elaboration based on practical experience to prove our point:
1. 1st Case: The Sleepyhead
Alex is one of the most talented business development managers in the United Kingdom at the moment. Clients frequently describe working with her as a life-changing experience. Alex is, quite simply, inspirational.
She has a gift for putting people at ease, determining what makes their organisation special, and helping them to decide what to do next, to take the business forward. She’s an innovator who has created bids that are so good, that not only did the client get the contract they were bidding for, they also got millions of pounds of other work handed to them on a plate.
Alex also has a rare neurological disorder, a form of narcolepsy, which means that no matter how much she sleeps, she always feels exhausted, especially during the day. I don’t mean tired as you or I do at the end of a busy day, I mean “haven’t slept in a week and I’ve just run a marathon” tired.
The way people with chronic illnesses, like Alex, try to convey how difficult day to day life is for them is by using spoon theory. It goes like this: A person with a chronic illness has a finite amount of energy they can use each day, represented by the spoons. For each task they choose to complete, they lose a spoon (sometimes a teaspoon, sometimes a tablespoon).
Things that a ‘normal’ person wouldn’t think twice about, like taking a shower, cost a spoon. It’s a simple way of conveying how some people need to budget their energy, and that means trade-offs.
For Alex, the trade off is to choose working from home over a spoon-costly commute.
Alex does have a secret weapon, though. Stimulants. Her neurologist has prescribed her with medication that will help her to stay awake and functional during the working day.Unfortunately, they have side-effects. When she takes stimulants, Alex has to deal with anxiety, and that makes leaving the house, socialising and working in an office more than she can deal with. Either ways, she has to compromise and is left with little to no choice.
Most people with Alex’s condition are disabled, but Alex has been able to deliver an award winning performance by telecommuting. Flexible working hours mean she can work when her energy is at its peak, and she’s never missed a deadline (or punctuated the afternoon meeting with her snores). Alex is a vital part of her virtual team, forging great relationships using Skype, Zoom or other teleconference services.
Without remote working, Alex’s employers and all their clients would be denied her immense talent. It is also possible that the employer would have completely missed seeing her talent and she would have been fired instead of having a thriving career as she does now. This would mean a complete waste of a talented resource and would also imply that chronic illnesses and disabilities mean the end of the world. Hiring remote workers benefits the employer by finding the right talent, no matter their condition or location.
The opportunity she received with remote work became a win-win situation for herself as well as her employer. She can balance her life and manage her day in her own way to stay productive in the hours and circumstances she deems fit. The employer on the other hand saves the extra money they would’ve spent and wasted to accommodate her in a traditional office setup without any great results.
2. 2nd Case: The Paranoid Android
Charlie has a gift of the gab. She’s from Sydney, Australia and is gifted with the ability to talk to people, work out what they really want to say (which is often different to what they think they want to say) and create content that’s engaging to read and gets the right message across.
Charlie’s work is always original; she’s creative in not just the way she chooses to say things, but in finding opportunities to say what needs to be said, not just what’s been asked. She adds value to everything that she writes.
Charlie gave up work to raise her kids, but soon found that she missed the challenge of the office. She felt like Marvin, the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide: ‘Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to watch Teletubbies. Call that job satisfaction? ‘cos I don’t.’
To keep her planet-sized brain engaged and the dollars rolling in, Charlie grabbed an opportunity with a remote employer from New York. She could now work, from home. It turned out to be a good choice when her husband left, and she found herself solely responsible for raising two kids and managing the family finances.
For Charlie’s employer, having her working remotely is a big advantage – She lives in a different country but she fits their requirement like no other candidate can.
Since they have a remote work culture, they don’t need to let go of the best talent owing to her country of residence nor do they have to pay a lump sum to make her move from there to here. If her kids need a day off, Charlie can still get on with her work and she doesn’t need to take time off during the school holidays either; she can even hit her deadlines when she’s away on vacation, submitting content from anywhere there’s an internet connection.
If she wasn’t part of a remote team, her employer’s clients around the world wouldn’t get access to her great content. This shows that hiring remote workers benefits businesses in ways that a traditional office setup can’t.
3. 3rd Case: The Hotshot
Most organizations have someone like Nick. They’re not just good at their job, they’re great at it. They’re so great that word gets around, and people start asking them to do things that aren’t strictly within their job specification.
Competition for Nick’s time gets fierce, there’s always someone at his desk asking for help and that causes a real problem because he’s always being pulled away from the task at hand (and he’s running out of polite ways to refuse to help.)
Nick’s project manager gets a lot more work out of him by having Nick work remotely. Out of sight means out of mind, and he hasn’t had to fend off another PM trying to poach Nick for a long time.
Nick’s still able to interact with his colleagues, but he can do it at his leisure rather than getting constantly interrupted. The company is now getting better value for their money. If remote work wasn’t an option, Nick would have abused the thesaurus finding ways to say no to people.
Hire Your Next Remote Gem
Remote jobs promote diversity. By hiring talent that works from home, you are giving your organization access to not only the top hires from around the world but also to workers who do their very best from the comfort of their own homes.
These are just three examples of hidden gems, workers you just wouldn’t find in an office environment. They’re probably the most talented in their field of work and you’re simply missing out on business growth because of limitations that come with a traditional office setup. You’re still incurring high maintenance costs and paying big salaries for mediocre talent which is only pushing your entrepreneurial success further away.
If you’d like our help (because DistantJob is really, really good at it) recruiting your own tech remote team, get in touch today.
