Suppose you’re interested in maintaining profitability through the coming years. In that case, you will have to find new ways to bring in revenue that doesn’t require as much overhead as a brick-and-mortar business. One of the most successful ways to do this is by taking advantage of remote workers and creating an entire workplace culture around them. Here are seven reasons why starting a remote culture can be your new secret weapon for maintaining profitability in any economic environment.
1. Remote culture reduces costs.
It costs less to hire people outside of your immediate area, as you don’t have to provide them with travel, entertainment, or transportation. Remotes also reduce overhead by not being tied to office space and potentially freeing up expensive office spaces for more employees. A remote culture can help you build a stronger talent pool too. In-person meetings may rule our industry, but that doesn’t mean they work best for everyone; in fact, studies show there are benefits (and risks) to face-to-face and remote interactions regarding collaboration and decision making. To find out which method works best for your team, start small and examine how well teams working on one specific project interact remotely before implementing remotes across multiple projects or departments.
2. Remote culture boosts employee engagement.
Studies have shown that engagement, productivity, and loyalty tend to improve when companies embrace virtual work. The trick is finding employees who can thrive in a remote environment. HR managers discovered that employees who prepare for a virtual career tend to be highly engaged, even if they spend some time working in an office.
3. It creates a work-life balance that leads to higher productivity.
One of the biggest obstacles to increasing productivity and value creation in an enterprise is that workers don’t feel engaged. With more time off, team members will still be spending less time in transit, which saves money on travel expenses and means that people are spending more time with their families instead of worrying about rushing out of work to make it home for dinner. And who doesn’t want that? As companies grow, communication becomes harder. Communication becomes more complicated as you grow from two employees to three or four or ten or twenty. This makes sense because if you talked face-to-face with each person all day long, you wouldn’t have much time left over for other things.
4. Remote culture fosters communication.
Remote culture fosters communication. When you’re in an office, it’s easy to fall into groupthink and become complacent with only talking to people next to you. With a remote team, there’s no such thing as social isolation; everyone needs to be able to communicate effectively on Slack, email, text, and video calls. This fosters better collaboration across teams and departments. It also means that you can work more closely with your colleagues working from home or out of a coffee shop than if they were down the hall. A solid remote culture makes collaboration more manageable and helps foster an inclusive environment for all employees, regardless of where they are physically located
5. It reduces conflict.
Being in an office full of people all day long can stress you out. On the other hand, remote employees enjoy more flexibility and travel whenever they want. This means that you don’t have to deal with co-workers’ drama every day. A healthy work/life balance will ensure that you are less stressed and better equipped to focus on what matters at work. You’ll make fewer mistakes, and everyone will benefit from it. Plus, working remote reduces conflict between colleagues and improves team morale as everyone has their way of doing things. You don’t need to fight for one way because there is no right or wrong way. Everyone works according to their preferences.
6. It delivers the intended result.
If you want to grow fast, focus on creating an environment that fosters personal growth—consistent self-improvement results in increased skill sets and confidence, which builds into professional success over time. For example, if a team member has never managed people before, they will pair them with someone who can mentor them through it and vice versa. This creates an environment of mutual learning and development for all involved parties. It’s also important to keep in mind that not everyone has experience working remotely. Even if your company decides to go remote, it may take some time for employees to adjust, so give them plenty of support.
7. It creates a collaborative work environment.
Collaboration has become increasingly important but often problematic in today’s workplace. It’s more likely you’ll have a better experience building off each other’s skills, knowledge, and experience working remotely. This also means there’s less room for conflict or confrontation when someone disagrees with something said or done. We can get much more done when we focus on our work instead of worrying about others’ thoughts. Plus, when you know people aren’t around to interrupt you all day long, it becomes easier to focus on the tasks at hand. All of these things help create a collaborative environment that drives results.
Conclusion
The past decades have seen many large companies adopt remote work, and for a good reason: It’s better for employee happiness, productivity, and retention. And even if you don’t have full-time employees, you can benefit from a distributed team or virtual employees. No matter how large or small your organization is, it would help if you made sure that people are communicating clearly and effectively to get their jobs done. This means we all need to make our organizations more telecommute friendly, whether it’s as simple as setting up some group chat channels on Slack or determining who needs to be present at meetings based on who has information relevant to those discussions.
