Why your company has to go remote

Isn’t there already too much change these days? So why also switching to remote? That’s a good question, but also an easy one to answer: it’s just because you simply don’t find enough good people for your jobs, that will move to your town and commute to your office every day in the future.

Lot’s of regions in the world have a skill shortage for many needed jobs. It’s because lot’s of people don’t like to move away from their home town, mostly because of strong reasons (i.e. young family with kids, where both parents need a job in the same town or someone who takes care of an elderly family member). On the other hand think of the expensive costs for living in some regions like the Silicon Valley, Sydney or Munich. The best alternative is to work from where you like to live.

With the remote work approach you can hire the best talents with the best fits to your needs from around the world. And you will hire them for a salary, which guarantees them a good live whereever they live. So it’s mostly cheaper than the common western office worker, but that is only a side effect. You will spare anyway a lot of money for office space, furniture, hardware, electricity and cleaning service.

You will employ motivated people instead of bored 9-to-5-people who are used to wait for the time to go home the entire day. Because you cannot measure the remote workers by hours in the office, you have to rate them through work results. So only good work counts! You have to discontinue the work with not fitting or not self-motivated collegues.

Your remote employees will be more motivated on average than the onsite ones, because they are able to shape the work time and get them according to their needs. That can be fetch the kids from school at noon, walk with the dogs, whenever it is used to, shift work time with the partner to care for the kids or work the nights and sleep the days (except planned meetings).

The staff which is working for you will be highly productive, because of the lack of distractions from your loudly cubicle farm and tons of unnecessary meetings.

The quality of your work deliverables will also improve. How is that possible? That’s easy, it’s because there is the need for a better specification at the project and task beginning in the remote environment. And it’s because everything is way better documented in the end. You think that’s extra effort? In poorly specified and documented projects that’s a yes, but this effort is paid in two or tree times generally!

Did I miss something? Or do you think your company cannot or should not switch to remote work? Please write about it in the comments!