The idea of telecommuting and remote employees has been around for some time but the ever rising popularity of remote work and companies seeking out remote employees comes as no surprise as new, innovative technology makes telecommuting and virtual collaboration easier and more effective than ever before.
Because technology has allowed work environments to become more flexible and customizable, top Tech and IT specialists are demanding more flexibility for themselves.
With many large tech companies being located in busy cities, more and more tech employees find working from home to be more efficient and time saving since they are not spending hours a day commuting.
Furthermore, top tech cities like New York and San Francisco have such high cost of living that recruiting top talent to move into those cities is a challenge.
Instead, companies are recruiting talent from all over the world without the relocation costs.
Large corporations have multiple offices and their IT staff might be located in a completely different state.
IT Technology allows these IT administrators to help employees remotely without having to go on-site.
Remote work isn’t just convenient for both employers and employees, but studies have shown that it’s also more effective.
“Employees across various industries who spent 60 to 80 percent of their time working remotely had the highest rates of engagement,” according to a Gallup’s report.
Some benefits of remote technology include:
- Increased response times – Working remotely means you not longer have allow for travel time in between meetings or traffic impeding your work schedule. If you have an IT issue, you don’t have to wait for an IT staff to physically be present to help you. Remote technology increases response times in so many ways which gives you more time to do your work.
- Minimized cost – As mentioned above, hiring remote employees cuts out relocation costs as well as other expenses. If your organization is mainly remote, you save the cost of a large building lease, parking expenses, and maintenance fees.
- Increased Productivity – Multiple studies have said that employees are more productive when working remotely. They are more comfortable in their own space, are not distracted by unnecessary office conversations, and are more motivated to work hard and stay on track. When interviewed, many remote employees say they work hard so they do not lose their remote privileges. With remote technical support services, you can speed up IT solutions, reduce downtime and allow your staff to be more productive. In fact, 82% of telecommuters report lower stress now that they are working remotely.
- Access to a wider variety of expertise – if your organization has the proper IT technology to function remotely, you can get in contact with IT professionals, contractors, and other contractors from all over the world and have them do work for you, remotely.
- After Hours Access – the days of having to drive into a physical office to get work done are over. If your IT admin has you setup to work remotely, you can work on projects anytime and be online as needed. As long as your computers are on—and the permission to grant your managed IT service provider access to your computers and/or network— procedures such as upgrades and troubleshooting can also be done at any point in the day.
- Customer Friendly – Remote support is not only more convenient for business owners, but it is customer friendly as well. Remote support allows technicians to work in the background without disturbing the customers currently in your business.
- Lower turnover – It has been proven that remote organizations have 25% less turnover that companies that do not allow remote work. The same study found that working remotely leads to sharply reduced employee attrition, due to higher work satisfaction.
- More Working Hours – Employees who work from home are 52% less likely to take time off from work.
Indefinite. Or even permanent. These are words companies are using about their employees working from home.
With 2020 and many locations all over the world being forced to work from home due to COVID, companies that were not using a remote model were kind of forced into it.
In just three months we were transported from the white-collar workplace from cubicles and offices to kitchens and spare bedrooms.
In fact, many companies are discovering all of the benefits of working remotely and companies like Zillow, Twitter, and Square have announced that their employees can work remotely long-term.
Many other companies have even said that they have no immediate plans to return to the office and that their organization is thriving and working harder than ever.
In fact Mark Zuckerberg said as many as 50% of Facebook employees could be working remotely within the next five to 10 years.
Zuckerberg pitched the idea as both “a matter of satisfying employee desires and also as an effort to create more broad-based economic prosperity.”
Living in a world where there are so many options for remote IT software, it is no surprise that so many organizations are making the shift to a more remote lifestyle.
If your are a leader in your organization and you have shifted to a remote model, here are some top notch monitoring softwares to help you track productivity, projects and more:
- Teramind
- Time Doctor
- VeriClock
- ActivTrak
- Interguard
- Hubstaff
- Staffcop
- Veriato
- DeskTime
- Work Examiner
I think we will definitely see the biggest shift in history of companies moving to a remote model, not just for the near future, but many of them as a permanent solution, and we are all for it.
