Warning! Your business is losing money by not using remote employees

There is no getting around it – remote work and remote employees have become an integral part of the modern workforce. The pandemic has seen to it. The option of working remotely has helped many companies stay in business, which otherwise would have to be closed shut.

There even are businesses that have chosen to pivot to being fully remote companies, offloading their physical presence. One thing is for sure, remote work is here to stay even after the Covid 19 pandemic scare subsides.

Being able to work remotely has helped employees see a completely new way of working. They have now started to question the need for them to battle daily commutes and be in the office every day. Owl Labs’ 4th annual State of Remote Work survey found that 77% of respondents stated that they were would be happier if they could continue working from home even after Covid 19 pandemic is over.

The same survey also found that 1 in 2 people will not return to their jobs if remote work is not on the cards. Let that sink in.

Here’s how your business will lose money if it does not allow for remote work and remote employees in the future.

You are spending on real estate that you don’t need

One thing we’ve realized over the past year is that most office jobs can be comfortably, and successfully, done from anywhere. The employees in these jobs don’t necessarily have to be tied down to a physical office location to do their best work.

Now if the work is getting done and your employees are happy doing it from their homes, why do you need to hold on to a full-fledged office space anymore? Even if you adopt a Hybrid working model, you will still never have your office running at a full capacity of employees.

Commercial real estate is incredibly expensive. Unless you’re a multinational multimillion-dollar enterprise, a capacity office space may no longer serve the purpose for you. You could downsize your physical footprint and maintain a smaller office.

This saves you on rental expenditure and operational costs, to the tune of an amount that you can’t ignore.

You are spending way too much on recruitment costs

Let’s face it – recruitment is expensive. Whether you hire the services of a recruitment agency or do it on your own, you end up spending a bomb before you find the right candidate. The opportunity cost of hiring the old-fashioned way is extremely high, and something most businesses do not realize. Printing a recruitment poster or sharing it digitally for hiring works well for on-campus while hiring remotely all you need is access to references and a great LinkedIn connection.

The costs of onboarding an employee, their benefits and perks, their work equipment, etc. keep pushing that number even further higher. The whole process usually ends up being more than you expect and more than you care to spend. If you knew this upfront, you would probably turn to hire remote employees much sooner.

Instead, if you switch to hiring top talent from a remote employee marketplace, you open your business to massively save costs on recruitment. Such a marketplace gives you the flexibility of choosing the candidates whom you want, instead of receiving hundreds of resumes that do not fit the bill.

Remote employee marketplaces offer fully managed services when it comes to hiring remote talent. All you pay for is the work, everything else including wages, benefits, hiring, etc. is taken care of by them.

You can literally shop for highly skilled and experience remote employees without breaking the bank doing it. Isn’t that a good deal?

You will lose your best employees to businesses that offer remote working options

The biggest asset for any business is the people that work there. And with employees wanting to hold on to the work from home privilege, they would leave their jobs for ones that allow them to work remotely (at least partially).

In a survey by PwC, 72% of people indicated that they would want to work from home at least 2 days a week, and 32% said that they want to permanently work in a remote setup. These numbers make it extremely clear that if remote work is not an option that employers roll out to their employees, enough of them would be ready to quit.

Maybe not all, but you will definitely lose a decent amount of your best employees due to avoidance of remote work. Any growing business would want to retain talent and not lose them to other businesses, and even worse, to competitors.

A long-running adage in HR circles is that employees leave their jobs because of their bosses. In fact, that is not true. Most employees look for a different job when they feel dissatisfied with their current one. Some of the top reasons for the dissatisfaction are related to pay, growth opportunity, and flexibility in hours, and where they work from.

Remote work gives employees such benefits that they are not willing to part with it. They would in fact part with their jobs than give up work from home privileges if it came to it.

You are losing out on the increased productivity that remote work enables

A cost-benefit analysis report by Global Workplace Analytics that remote employees were on an average 20-25% more productive than their office counterparts. It is now a proven and clearly visible fact that working remotely helps employees be more productive with their daily work.

Working in a remote work environment allows for lesser distraction to most employees. This would be the time they would have lost due to their daily commute, water cooler conversations, and random chats when someone drops by their desk. Remote work allows them to focus more on their work.

It also gives them a sense of control over how they work and spend their workday. Remote work inherently provides flexibility that many employees find extremely useful. It allows them to maintain a much-needed balance between their work life and their personal lives.

Final note

Remote work is no longer a perk of the job, it has become a necessity that most employees need. It has become a key aspect of the job and not many employees are willing to do away with the option of working remotely or working from home.

If businesses want to remain competitive in a post-Covid post-physical office business landscape, they need to adopt and fully integrate remote working practices. This will decide whether they will win or lose.