Why Remote Workers Are More Efficient Than Traditional Desk Employees
The 9-5 job scene is changing rapidly. Many businesses are adopting a more contemporary approach to structuring office life—and for good reason.
A study by Gallup concluded that all variations of remote work showed much higher levels of employee engagement than did traditional work options. It should come as no surprise, then, that a number of highly successful companies provide their employees with the option of having the freedom to work remotely. Some of those companies include:
- Dell
- Aetna
- American Express
- Xerox
- Apple
- ADP
- IBM
- com
- com
- Microsoft
- Mozilla
- Lockheed Martin
- Nielsen
- Wendy’s
Freedom Is Part of the Success Equation
You might have heard about extremely casual environments hosted by popular tech companies such as Facebook and Google, where employees are allowed to freely roam the campus in search of creative inspiration—with or without shoes, a desk, or even a schedule.
In the US alone, there are more than 6.1 million remote workers and the number is growing. But these aren’t lazy workers trying to get away with working in their pajamas from the couch. These workers are professionals who have been provided a phenomenal opportunity to work in a way that coincides with their own natural rhythm. Oh, and they just happen to save their companies a ton of money in the process.
Learning from Experience
If you’ve ever wondered what this seemingly less structured approach is all about, and why it seems to produce superior results, all you have to do is talk to someone who runs their business this way—like the folks at Qubit.
Founded by four former Google employees, Qubit is a digital cloud-based platform ahead of its time. Empowering brand management with advanced analytics, audience segmentation, and A/B testing, Qubit has an IT team consisting of just 2 people. Those 2 people support about 300 employees across 6 offices. And they manage everything in the cloud, including many of their workers.
The innovators from Dialpad sat down with Kyle Eve, the head of IT from Qubit, in order to explore his thoughts about the “work anywhere” movement. What they discovered are some key insights into what makes remote working work, and why people who can work remotely often provide the most exceptional work.
Connecting with Other Teams Encourages Collaboration
One of the most important points Kyle mentioned was that by creating a culture where people are free to sit anywhere in the office, they’re encouraged to intermingle with people on other projects besides their own. This allows people to understand a broader perspective of how other teams work. It encourages collaboration, and it’s through this collaboration that workers gain a deeper sense of connectivity to the overall goals of the company and the importance of their role in the company’s success.
By allowing workers to keep their own schedules and do whatever they need to do in order to be productive, including work from home or their local coffee shop, people work with their natural rhythm instead of against it, producing higher quality work.
Freedom to Work from Anywhere Fosters Efficiency
When you consider that most of the technology used across businesses today is hosted in the cloud, which means it’s accessible from anywhere and on any device, it only makes sense for workers to be provided the opportunity to work remotely. The infrastructure is already in place to support remote workers, and there’s no longer a reason to keep people chained to a desk.
Nobody knows this more than Qubit. In fact, Qubit is so efficient when it comes to untethering people from the traditional work routine that they’ve even managed to eliminate the only tool that could keep someone tied to a desk—the desk phone. As a solution, Quibit uses the cloud-based services offered by Dialpad to provide their employees with a single phone number that works across all of their devices. They can answer a call anywhere and seamlessly transfer that call to another device as they move from their desk to their car.
A Model to Learn From
The fact that plenty of well-known companies are offering their employees more freedom doesn’t necessarily mean you should give your office a Viking funeral, but there is much to be learned from their unorthodox methods.
Aside from saving money and allowing people to tap into their natural flow of creativity (like those night owls who work best between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m.), remote workers don’t experience the stress of having to commute to the office, and you get to tap into an entire global market of talent.
Of course, only you can decide if taking a remote approach is the right one for your business. If you’re able to let go of the need to oversee all of your employees in a physical office, you might discover that adding a remote work option increases your efficiency, and therefore, your competitive advantage.
