When you tell people about remote work, they often confuse it with outsourcing. They think this is just another way to cut costs and ship jobs to India. And that’s wrong. The main reason companies decide to let their employees work remotely is because they want to promote quality of life and attract highly talented people, no matter where they live.

So by implementing remote work and offering more freedom to your employees, you will inevitably attract more as well as better candidates. You need to understand that over the past few year’s values in our society has changed significantly. Therefore offering a corner office on the top floor of a tall building and a good looking secretary won’t work anymore. Nether will nice BMW and other corporate luxuries. What people really started to value are freedom and time!

Offering a possibility of remote work will also brake geographical barriers. From now on, you don’t care if the most appropriate candidate lives in South Korea, Denmark or Zimbabwe. What you care about are their competences and work.

Although, remote work isn’t primarily about saving the money, it can help your bottom line as well. To back up my words, let me show you how IBM benefited from it.

Through its telework strategy IBM has reduced office space by 78 million square feet. Of that, 58 million square feet sold at a gain of 1,9 billion dollars. In addition, they rented out a portion of the space which resulted in extra 1 billion dollars of income.

Less office space also means less maintenance costs, cleaning fees, security guards etc. For IBM this resulted in annual savings of 100 million dollars in USA, and at least that much in Europe.

And the savings aren’t just for the company. While the organization get to save on office space and monthly fixed costs, the employees can save up on the most precious commodity, time. Just think about it, how much time do you spend commuting every day? Every week? Every year?

And how much money do you spend on gas? Probably a lot. And less gas also means huge saving for the environment. IBM study showed how remote work saved the company five million gallons of fuel in 2007. This prevented more than 450,000 tons of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere in the United States alone.

So let me sum it up for you, remote work will get you the best and most talented people, give more freedom and time to your employees, help your company’s bottom line and save the planet. Did I convince you?

If you want to know more about remote work, the implementation process, data security, management of remote teams etc., join me in Ljubljana on 19th of May, where I’ll be sharing all my knowledge, researches and experiences from the field of remote work.

For more information about the workshop visit www.teledelo.com.

 

Author

Jure Šutar