Marcus Richards
Employees worldwide prefer remote work for all the good reasons. Increased work flexibility and independence, improved life/work balance, and absence of commute are indisputable benefits for employees.
But, how can companies and business owners benefit from developing fully remote teams?
In the Gartner survey from 2020, 74% of CFOs stated that they’d encourage at least 5% of their office-based employees to shift to fully remote work in the post-Covid era. This move aimed to see how cost-effective a fully remote workplace can be.
Fast forward to 2022, where data estimations show that 25% of the entire American workforce will shift to fully remote by the end of the year.
This means that this workplace transition that started as an experiment 3 years ago is at full speed, recognizing technological advancements promotion of employee-oriented company culture, and significant cost cuts.
Here you’ll find how to save money by embracing fully remote work, keeping your company afloat in these turbulent times.
Cost-Effective Sides of Remote Work
One of the reasons you may want to shift to fully remote work is the real estate, utility, and cleaning expenses. The Statistic shows that office costs can go up to $18,000 per employee annually. You’ll get a clear picture of the money you can save by abandoning the office and letting your employees work remotely when you multiply this average cost by the number of employees you hire.
Once you create a fully remote workplace, you won’t have to worry about paying for travel expenses. Work-from-home employees don’t need to commute, and you can reduce business trip costs significantly.
Although food expenses may seem less significant, with employees working fully remotely, you won’t have to pay for coffee, snacks, or company lunches.
So far everything goes in favor of setting up a remote office. But this is a demanding process requiring significant investment. If you want to create an effective, well-connected remote team here are some business aspects you’ll need to invest in.
Data Security and Remote Work Tools
First, if you want to build productive and highly collaborative remote teams, you need to provide effective tools that alleviate their work, streamline communication and business processes, and offer a clear picture of remote employee productivity.
Fortunately, the app market keeps up with the critical shift in the perception of the workplace offering an array of video conferencing and project management platforms followed by the best remote desktop software. By forming a reliable, advanced tech stack you’ll help your team members stay connected, and in sync with all the critical projects and tasks in progress. And most importantly, you’ll be able to track your remote employees’ performance in real-time and make sure that they stay as productive as they were in the office.
Remote Work Office Equipment
Optimizing your tech stack to meet all the requirements and challenges of a remote office is a significant step ahead. But your remote team will need other pieces of equipment besides tools and apps to make a productive and engaging remote work environment.
You can’t expect your employees to be highly productive while working at the kitchen counter without company laptops, monitors, headphones, or a secure internet connection.
While companies don’t need to pay for or share the costs of remote work equipment, and the United States doesn’t have a legislature that regulates remote work expenses, like Spain, you should offer to fully or at least partially compensate for these expenses.
You may follow the example of Twitter, Facebook, and Google that offer $1000 to their employees to cover these expenses.
Many employees prefer working from co-working spaces to working from home. In this case, you can offer monthly allowances to cover monthly memberships for these co-working spaces.
Final Words
If you still wonder whether shifting to remote work will save you money and cut costs here are additional reasons why you should embrace this work model, especially amid a crisis.
Numerous studies have shown that companies can have significant financial benefits from transferring to remote work. According to certain projections, you can save $11,000 per employee by allowing your team members to spend 50% of their time working remotely. This may come as a cherry on top when you consider other remote work benefits like increased productivity and lowered turnover rates.
Here are some other examples of remote work cost-efficiency.
When it comes to reduced real estate costs IBM saved $50 million while Sun Microsystems’ real-estate costs dropped by $68 million annually. At the same time, Flexjobs stated that the shift to remote work has saved them $5 million so far.
