Remote work as a tool for scalability and efficiency.

The last 3 years have proven to us that organizations don’t need to have their workers in the same location or in an office setup to get things done. While the acceptance of remote work was accelerated by the pandemic, it was an upcoming trend, and talent organizations that facilitate remote work by equipping organizations with the best talent from around the world, had already emerged therefore when the pandemic happened they played a big role towards enabling organizations transition to remote work quickly.

Working remotely has been found to have many benefits for the worker, the organization, and the environment. The most impactful benefits include;

• Better productivity.
• Savings on costs.
• Savings on time.
• Reduction of carbon emission.
• Work-Life balance.

Communication, work management, and knowledge management tools also evolved to accommodate remote working demands. Below are focus areas where we can use remote work strategically.

1. Winning with distributed teams – Before remote work, distributed teams faced a lot of communication challenges communication tool limitations, and distractions in their work environment. Having everybody join the conversation remotely improves collaboration since every individual contributes without any limitations. We can retain the information discussed through recordings and communication tools are now integrated to work management boards allowing one to create tasks based on action points there and then. This has increased project success significantly since work moves faster and more efficiently.
2. Scaling across borders at low costs – Organizations no longer need to establish offices across the world, they can just hire people from the desired locations and start operations remotely. This gives them the potential to operate 24hrs since workers will be spread out across multiple time zones and they can adjust their work hours to have an overlap where they collaborate and hand off tasks.
3. Effective Communication – Communication tools have evolved to accommodate remote communication needs. New features such as chat, breakout rooms, reactions, and recording emerged. Organizations can take advantage of this to ensure effective communication, this is especially because people can record a meeting for future reference, people can chat after the meeting to clarify anything that was not clear, all the data is retained either in chats or recording,s and no information is lost, unlike in-person meetings or communications. Communication tools also integrate with various work management tools and help with planning such that you can create tasks and assign them from a meeting or a chat post.
4. Measuring productivity objectively – In an office setup productivity is measured through perception, which includes how often one is seen and heard, this often leads to unfair rewards where the loudest most social person is rewarded for little work while top performers are not recognized and are therefore demotivated. With remote work every individual will have to show real results on a day-to-day basis, people have embraced the agile ways of working to help manage and track productivity and resolve issues as they occur.
5. Access to world-class talent and retention – Organisations can access high-quality Talent from anywhere in the world, location is no longer a limitation. Remote work is a measure of retention as well, getting involved in CSR initiatives that give employees a sense of purpose such as mentoring the youth can help to retain employees.
6. High productivity – For an organization to empower its workers to be highly productive it has to look at the things that will help the employee become highly productive and facilitate or avail them, below are two factors that organizations should consider; a) Time flexibility: Workers desire to do the most important work during the hours that they are most productive.  For example, if someone focuses better at 3 am or midnight, then organizations should be comfortable allowing them to work at that time and they can plan a set of hours during the normal workday when they will collaborate with their colleagues. b) Giving them the freedom to decide where they want to work – This includes allowing them to set up their physical work environment in a way that sets them up for success. This means that one can do the work that demands intense focus in their home office away from distractions. They can alternate between a home office and a coworking space for collaborative work.
7. Effective Goals and Expectations setting – Clear expectations setting is critical to success. Working remotely compels organizations to set clear goals that are focused on their mission and vision, otherwise, remote workers will not be motivated to sign in to work. In an office setup goal and expectation setting get clouded by office politics. In a remote setup, you can avoid distractions such as biases and office politics and keep the team sharply focused on the organizational goals. When hiring a team in a remote setup organizations hire for a product purpose, they have to ensure that their vision is crystal clear and can be broken down into practical business goals. When onboarding a remote worker, clear expectations of what is expected of them over a defined period need to be set. Workers push the leaders or managers every day to define what is expected of them so that they can plan their time effectively.
8. Workers’ Mental Health is key to an organization’s success – Poor workers’ mental health can be costly due to high attrition and poor quality of work. Below are some of the factors that often affect workers’ mental health and how they can be resolved using remote work.  a) Obstacles to work execution due to biases and office politics – When we work remotely we minimize the politics because responsibility for an activity will be assigned to an individual rather than an office. The individual is held to account for their task. b) Lack of work-life balance – Unfriendly work hours can result in stress due to lack of time for self-development, family, and rest when people work remotely they avoid commuting and save time which can be used for family or self-development. c) Micromanagement – Micromanagement can hurt workers and affect company morale over time. It is not easy to micromanage a remote team, instead, a manager will be compelled to set clear expectations and measure progress which is good for the company.
9. Milestones on environmental preservation goals – For organizations with carbon emission reduction goals, remote work is one way of making progress toward that goal.

Conclusion

If you are thinking of scaling your business across borders but are having difficulties due to finances you can still go for it, by hiring remote workers in the desired geographical locations and starting operations. Apart from saving costs, your business will gain in many other ways such as high productivity, effective communication, and access to world-class talent.