Remote working has more benefits than just saving commute time.
As of 2023, 12.7% of full-time employees work from home, while 28.2% are in hybrid.
And in 2022, we at AhaSlides also recruited workers from different parts of the continent, meaning they work 100% remotely.
The results? Business growth almost doubled benefiting from recruiting talents without restricting to a certain geographical location.
Dive in because all you want to know about the benefits of remote working will be explained clearly in this article.
What Remote Working Means to Employers and Employees
A Micromanager’s Nightmare
… fine, so I don’t know your boss.
But it’s probably fair to say that if they agree with Elon Musk’s stance on remote work, they’re an advocate for micromanagement.
If you often find them standing over your shoulder, reminding you to CC them into every email or demanding detailed reports for tasks that take you 5 minutes to do but half an hour to evaluate, you know your boss is a Musk.
And if that’s the case, I can almost guarantee that your boss is against remote work.
Why? Because micromanaging is so much harder with a remote team. They can’t tap persistently on your shoulder or aggressively count the minutes per day you spend in the bathroom.
Not that that’s stopped them from trying. Some of the more extreme cases of ‘overbearing boss’ syndrome came out of lockdown, with apocalyptic-sounding ‘bossware‘ that can track your monitor and even read your messages to determine how ‘happy’ you are.
The irony, of course, is that you’d be much, much happier if none of this was happening.
This lack of trust from leaders translates to fear, high turnover, and a purge of creativity from remote workers. No one is happy in a micromanaged workspace, and as a result, no one is productive.
But that’s not what you want to show to your autocratic boss, is it? You want to project the image of someone who works well under pressure and someone who refuses to look away from their computer even when they hear concerning guttural noises from their dog.
So what do you do? You become one of the millions of workers worldwide who waste 67 minutes daily doing inane work to make it look like they’re doing something.
If you’ve ever found yourself messaging on Slack, or moving random tasks around a Kanban board, just to explicitly show your management that you haven’t returned to bed with a Netflix controller, then you’re absolutely being micromanaged. Or you’re just very insecure about your job position.
In a memo to his workers, Musk said ‘the more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence’. That’s because, at Tesla, a boss’ ‘presence’ is their authority. The more present they are, the more pressure there is for those underneath them to be present, too.
But also, those senior members being more present makes it easier for their seniors, including Musk, to keep an eye on them. It’s quite the tyrannical loop.
What’s clear is that this kind of tyranny is tough to enforce with everyone so dispersed.
So, do your micromanaging boss a favour. Get to the office, glue your eyes to your screen, and don’t even think about going to the bathroom, you’ve already filled your quota for the day.
A Team Builder’s Nightmare
Teams that play together slay together.
Though I just made that quote on the spot, there’s quite a bit of truth to it. Bosses want their team members to gel because this leads to higher productivity in a very natural way, non-corporate way.
More often than not, they encourage this through team-building games, activities, nights out, and retreats. Very few of these are possible in a remote workspace.
As a result, your management can perceive your team as less cohesive and less cooperative. This, to be honest, is totally justified, and can lead to a lot of problems like mismanaged workflows, low team morale, and high turnover.
But the worst one of all is loneliness. Loneliness is the root of myriad problems in the remote workspace and is the biggest contributor to unhappiness while working from home.
The solution? Virtual team building.
Though activity options are more limited online, they’re far from impossible. We’ve got super easy remote team-building games to try right here.
But there’s more to team building than games. Anything that improves communication and collaboration between you and your team can be considered team building, and there’s a lot that bosses can do to facilitate that online:
- Cooking classes
- Book clubs
- Show and tell
- Talent competitions
- Tracking running times on leaderboards
- Culture days hosted by team members from different parts of the world 👇
The default position of most bosses is to see a list of virtual team builders and pursue none of them.
Sure, they’re a pain to arrange, especially regarding the cost and the need to find the right time for everyone across multiple time zones. But any steps taken towards eradicating loneliness at work are very important steps for any company to take.
A Flexibility Dream
So the world’s richest man doesn’t like remote work, but what about the world’s strangest man?
Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission to take his company, Meta, to the extremes of remote work.
Now, Tesla and Meta are two very different companies, so it’s unsurprising that their two CEOs have polar opposite opinions on remote work.
In Musk’s eyes, Tesla’s physical product requires a physical presence, whereas it would be a shock if, on his mission to build the virtual reality internet, Zuckerberg demanded that everyone involved be in one place to do so.
Regardless of the product or service your company pushes out, repeated studies side with Zuck on this one:
You are more productive when you’re flexible.
One study from those long-lost years before the pandemic found that 77% of people are more productive when working remotely, with 30% managing to do more work in less time (ConnectSolutions).
If you’re still wondering how that could be, consider how much time you spend doing non-work-related stuff in the office.
You might not be able to say, but the data puts you and other office workers at spending around 8 hours per week doing non-work related stuff, including scrolling through social media, doing online shopping, and engaging in personal tasks.
Bosses like Elon Musk are consistently blaming remote workers for a lack of effort, but in any typical office environment, that same lack of action is pretty much built into the foundations, and it happens right under their noses. People cannot work consistently for two blocks of 4 or 5 hours, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to do so.
All your boss can do is be flexible. Within reason, they should allow workers to choose their location, choose their hours, choose their breaks, and choose to get stuck down a YouTube rabbit hole about fireflies while researching this article (sorry to my boss, Dave).
The end point of all that freedom in work is simply a lot more happiness. When you’re happy, you have less stress, more enthusiasm for work, and more staying power on tasks and at your company.
The best bosses are those who centre their efforts around the happiness of their employees. Once that’s achieved, everything else will fall into place.
A Recruiter’s Dream
The first contact you had with remote work (or ‘telework’) was likely with Peter, the affable Indian fellow who would call you from a call centre in Bangalore and ask if you need an extended warranty on your chopping board.
In the 80s and early 90s, outsourcing like this was the only kind of ‘remote work’ there was. Given that your chopping board has long since been binned, the efficacy of outsourcing is up for debate, but it most certainly paved the way for the globe-spanning recruitment that many modern companies engage in today.
Zuckerberg’s Meta is one of the best examples of recruiting without geographical limits. At least count (June 2022) they had about 83,500 employees working across 80 different cities.
And it’s not just them. Every big dog you can think of, from Amazon to Zapier, has accessed a global talent pool and handpicked the best remote workers for the job.
You might be tempted to think that, with all this increased competition, your job is now constantly in peril of being passed onto another Peter from India, who could do the same work for a much lower cost.
Well, here are two things to reassure you:
- It’s way more expensive to hire a new recruit than to keep you.
- This opportunity for global work benefits you, too.
The first one is fairly common knowledge, but we often seem blinded by fear of the second one.
More and more companies are hiring remotely is good news for your prospects going forward. You have access to so many more jobs than the ones directly within your country, city, and district. As long as you can manage the time difference, you can work for any remote company in the world.
And even if you can’t manage the time differences, you can always work freelance. In the US, the ‘gig economy’ is growing 3 times faster than the actual workforce, meaning that if your ideal job isn’t up for freelance grabs now, it might be in the future.
Freelance work has been a lifesaver for companies with some work to get done but not enough to hire a full-time in-house staff member.
It’s also a lifesaver for people who don’t mind forgoing a few company perks for the most extreme kind of work flexibility.
So no matter which way you look at it, remote work has been a revolution in recruiting. If neither you nor your company has felt the benefits yet, don’t worry; you will soon.
What's more, there are now so many new digital tools, including Freelancer Planner, that will make remote workers even more productive and efficient. That's why it's really worth looking into.
Remote Working Statistics
Are you more productive working from home? These statistics that we've compiled from different sources suggest remote workers are thriving away from the office.
- 77% of remote employees report feeling more focused when ditching the commute for their home workspace. With fewer distractions and a more flexible schedule, remote workers can enter hyper-productive zones without water cooler chit-chat or noisy open offices pulling them off task.
- Remote workers spend a full 10 minutes less per day on unproductive tasks compared to in-office colleagues. That adds up to over 50 hours of extra productivity each year just from eliminating distractions.
- But the productivity boost doesn't stop there. A Stanford University study found remote employees are a whopping 47% more productive than those confined to the traditional office. Nearly half as much work gets done outside the office walls.
- Working remotely is a money-saving masterstroke. Companies can save an average of $11,000 annually for each employee who ditches the traditional office setup.
- Employees pocket savings too with remote work. On average, commutes eat up $4,000 per year in gas and transportation costs. For those in large metro areas with notoriously high living expenses, that's real money back in their pockets each month.
With this kind of improvement, it's no wonder companies are realising they can do just as much with fewer workers thanks to the rise of remote and flexible arrangements. Employees focused on outputs rather than time spent at their desks means big cost savings and competitive advantages for organisations making the switch.
Tips for Working from Home Effectively
#1 – Get out of the house
You’re 3 times more likely to feel socially fulfilled while working at a coworking space.
We tend to think of working from ‘home’ as strictly from home, but sitting alone in the same chair with the same four walls all day is a surefire way to make yourself as miserable as possible.
It’s a big world out there and it’s full of people like you. Get out to a cafe, library, or coworking space; you’ll find comfort and companionship in the presence of other remote workers and you’ll have a different environment that offers more stimulation than your home office.
Oh, and that includes lunch, too! Head to a restaurant or have your own lunch in a park, surrounded by nature.
#2 – Organise a small workout session
Stay with me on this one…
It’s no secret that exercise increases the amount of dopamine in the brain and generally lifts your mood. The only thing better than doing it alone is doing it with other people.
Set a quick 5 or 10 minutes every day to exercise together. Simply call someone in the office and arrange the cameras so they’re filming you and the team doing a few minutes of planks, some press-ups, sit-ups, and whatever else.
If you do it for a while, they’ll associate you with the dopamine hit they get each day. Soon, they’ll be jumping at the chance to talk to you.
#3 – Make plans outside of work
The only thing that can really combat loneliness is spending time with people you love.
Maybe you get to the end of a working day where you’ve not talked to anyone. If it goes unchecked, that negative feeling can really linger throughout your evening and even into the next morning, when it manifests into dread on another working day.
A simple 20-minute coffee date with a friend can make a difference. Quick meetings with those close to you can act as a reset button and help you tackle another day in the remote office.
#4 – Use remote work tools
Success comes a long way with good self-discipline. But for remote working, it's hard to say every employee can remain self-disciplined. For both managers and workers, why not make it easier for yourself? You can refer to the top remote work tools (100% free) to find a suitable way to improve your remote team's effectiveness and teamwork.
