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It’s Only Common Sense: Your Next Hire is Likely to Work Smarter—From Home

The transition to a remote workplace has been one of the few positive outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic. For those who still cannot get their head around allowing some of their employees to work remotely—you’re limiting yourself. Requiring all employees to show up in person for work prevents your company from truly hiring the best.

Of course, there are line workers who cannot work remotely, and that’s fine; but for those positions that can function remotely—and frankly, that’s most of your office staff, including customer service, designers, methodizers, and CAM—they can and should work remotely.

Here are some facts about remote work that may surprise you:

• Remote workers report higher productivity levels. Think of all the distractions that come from working in the office; everything from inane “water cooler chatter” to attending pointless meetings where your time is spent listening to some windbag pontificate about something or other—all while your own work goes undone.
• Remote workers log more hours. Remote workers are more engaged because they have the flexibility to work in a private space at their own pace without interruptions. I personally know many who work late into the night because their office is now down the hall from their bedroom rather than an hour or more away.
• Remote workers avoid wasting time on lengthy commutes. Sitting in your car for an hour gnashing your teeth at the world and every incompetent driver that cuts you off—talk about a waste of time. A survey by the Becker Friedman Institute calculated that the shift to remote work in 2020 reduced commuting time by 62.4 million hours per day, with aggregate time savings of over 9 billion hours between mid-March to mid-September that year¹. That’s in addition to all the money saved on fuel and, of course, potential auto damages from driving in traffic for all those hours—not to mention the positive impact on the climate by removing so many cars from the roads.

There are so many advantages to hiring remotely, for both the company and the employee. Besides these productivity perks, there’s the benefits to your talent pool: being willing to hire remote workers means you have access to talent from around the globe. Instead of being constrained by the boundaries of your own geography, you can now choose the best people, no matter where they’re located, to fill your critical positions. This is especially useful when hiring for positions like customer service, estimators, and front-end engineers. Rather than settling for subpar local talent to avoid offering expensive relocation packages, you can now hire top-tier candidates for remote versions of these positions at the same rates.

Hiring remotely is a win-win situation: You get access to the best person at the best price. This is especially important for the more paranoid among us who live in terror of not getting their dollars’ worth from every employee. Often, the most ambitious and knowledgeable professionals will give you much more for your dollar than those working in an office.

Those who have the flexibility to choose where they live (and where they work) are generally much happier than those who have to go to the office every day, especially if that office is located in an area of the country where cost of living has become prohibitively expensive.

A friend of mine likes to joke: “The new trend for remote work means that people in California are able to sell their double-wides for half a million dollars and then take that money to a nearby state, where they can pay cash for a beautiful, 3,000-square-foot home for $500,000 and live happily ever after—with a much better quality of life to boot!” My friend says this jokingly, but this really is a great thing for everyone—because who doesn’t want to live in a place that’s both affordable and makes us happy?

In general, we collectively feel more independent now; we want to live where we want to live, and we want to raise our kids in good communities with good schools. This likely means that your next best hire will continue to insist on working remotely.

I also believe this is a trend that will never fully go away. I predict that the next phase will be a shift to independent contractors or “1099ers” as we call them. Then, the prediction that the great business guru, Tom Peters, made in 1999 of everyone becoming “You, Inc.,” will come true.

It’s only common sense.

References

1. “60 Million Fewer Commuting Hours Per Day: How Americans Use Time Saved by Working From Home,” by Jose Maria Barrero et. al, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at The University of Chicago, bfi.uchicago.edu, Sept. 18, 2020.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.