By | Chiyako Ikeda
According to Owl Labs, 56% of companies worldwide are either fully remote or have hybrid remote work arrangements. In the United States, the percentage of hybrid remote companies is 85%. Meanwhile, a separate survey of remote workers by Buffer finds that 52% are employees and 42% are independent contractors or freelancers.
It is undeniable that remote work has taken off at an unprecedented rate, mainly because of the worldwide pandemic. As such, it’s likely you, too, might be pondering if the remote staffing solution is for you. In this case, read up on the benefits of remote staffing for your business.
1. Save on Capital Costs
You know this is true. When your employees are remote, you don’t need a big office space. You can be five hundred strong yet have only a 200-square-metre office for your core, in-office team. Therefore, you save money on your lease, utility bills and office furniture and furnishings.
Since you don’t have employees in the office, you don’t have to spend as much on pantry items and office supplies. Additionally, transportation allowances may no longer be expected perks. How much does that translate to in actual cost savings?
According to Global Workplace Analytics, companies can save an average of USD 11,000 in costs per employee that works remotely 50% of the time. This figure accounts for the obvious real estate savings as well as the lower rates of absenteeism and turnover and increased employee productivity.
This means you can save even more per employee when you go 100% remote. While the increase in average savings may not double (it might not be a strictly linear relationship when it comes to cost savings from increased productivity and decreased absenteeism), the additional savings should still be significant when employees work from home full time.
2. Gain Access to Talent From Anywhere in the World
Opting for remote staffing means you can hire from any part of the world. This has the following distinct advantages.
First, remote staffing opens your doors to the very best talent the world can offer. You are no longer limited to hiring people in your immediate geographical area, so you can entertain applicants from India, Dubai, Minsk, Berlin, and other parts of the globe. The ability to select candidates from a wider pool of applicants means a better chance of encountering talented candidates you wouldn’t have come across otherwise.
Second, remote staffing also improves your chances of filling vacancies. Let’s say you’re a relatively small company in Seattle, Washington. What are the chances that you will beat Amazon in attracting local talent? The answer: slim.
However, this becomes less of a problem when you hire remote employees. Suddenly, you can widen your hiring radius to include talented candidates from sleepy towns across small-town Americana. You can even cast your net across the pond and screen candidates from the United Kingdom.
There’s no reason to stop there. You can check out the candidates from Asia, North Africa, South America, Europe, and the rest of the world. Staffing should no longer be a problem if you have a worldwide pool of potential candidates to fill vacant roles.
3. Take Advantage of a Distributed Workforce Available 24×7
One of the often-heard objections to remote staffing is the different availability of employees. How can you work effectively if the people you need are eight, 10 or several hours behind or ahead of your time zone?
However, the prevalence of companies working remotely today, either fully or on a hybrid setup, should tell you one thing. The move towards more asynchronous modes of communication and information sharing is an obstacle one can work around with planning, forethought and discipline. Plenty of applications exist to help distributed teams effectively work asynchronously.
There’s a reason you should try to overcome the potential disadvantages of remote asynchronous work rather than refraining from it entirely. The reason is the considerable advantage of having a distributed workforce available in different time zones.
Imagine this happening to you.
It is a Tuesday, and at your software as a service company headquarters in New York, your engineers clocked out at 6 p.m., as per usual practice. At exactly 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, your company’s biggest client based in Barcelona reported a major service disruption.
Every minute your client is offline means a loss of USD 25,000. They’ve already been offline for five minutes, so you can imagine the panic in their voice when they called your office to report the problem.
What do you do? What can you do? Nobody is at your New York office. Fortunately, you have a distributed workforce with teams in various parts of the world. Your Singapore (12 p.m. Singapore Standard Time), Dubai (8 a.m. Gulf Standard Time), and New Delhi (9:30 a.m. India Standard Time) teams immediately took charge, and 10 minutes after receiving the call, you successfully averted a major crisis.
Indeed, having teams worldwide working in different time zones can be a significant advantage by ensuring that you and your clients are covered 24×7 or a considerable portion of that.
4. Easily Scale Up Your Operations
When you’re not remote, every new hire will require an office table and a chair, a space to call their own. Such physical space requirements can be limiting.
Such limitations increase when you’re hiring someone from out of state. You might have to take care of housing and moving in this case. Likewise, if you’re hiring someone from overseas, you have to add visa requirements and travel arrangements to the things your company must take care of and prepare. You might also have to create an international relocation support package that includes finding an apartment near schools for your new hire and their family.
All these things can delay staffing. Only after you’ve made all necessary arrangements can you bring in new hires. This can hold you back from scaling as needed.
Remote staffing does not come with all this baggage. Remote employees stay put. Therefore, you can quickly scale up your operations and promptly take advantage of business opportunities. Do you need to hire 10 new engineers? No problem if you hire remotely. Not so easy if you’re hiring in-situ.
Remote Staffing Works
The pandemic forced businesses to try remote work, and they have come to realise that there are many benefits to remote staffing. Such benefits include cost savings, access to a worldwide pool of talent, 24×7 availability due to a distributed workforce, and operations that may be easily scaled up according to requirements.
You, too, can enjoy these benefits if you transition to remote staffing.
