A staggering 3.7 million employees now work from home for at least half of their business hours. Zoom into the United States, and teleworking is performed by 50% of the US workforce. And guess what? These numbers are only continuing to grow. Remote work is no longer the anomaly — it's the norm. With the ever-growing numbers and climbing stats, it's safe to say that if you're not on board with remote employment, you're risking being left in the dust.
Need more of a push before you jump on the "work from home" bandwagon? Rounded up below are four reasons why agencies should be remote-friendly. From being able to better support your clients to showcasing an attractive company culture to potential employees, learn more about why having a remote team is the way to go in the twenty-first century if you want your agency not only to succeed, but to thrive.
Why Agencies Should Allow Remote Work
1. Better Support Your Clients
Clients come first and foremost, always. Fortunately for remote agencies, they're able to better serve and support their clients than your typical co-located team. Why? With a remote team, accessibility actually becomes easier. Remote agencies are able to allow for more flexible hours. The beauty of having a dispersed team is that your agency can cover a wide array of timezones, making for more variety in scheduling and communication.
Video conferencing, in particular, provides a unique and fulfilling means of communication between not only internal team members, but between clients and the agency. With innovative video conferencing technology, you can bring together different people from across the globe, broadening prospects, and offering fully committed support along the way. Around the clock support from a global team isn't something to bat an eye at.
2. Have a Talented & Diverse Team of Employees
The more diverse your employee pool, the more diverse your product. Location independence allows for a widening of ideas and broadening of cultural influence on your product or service. What's not to love about that?
Similarly, remote teams are helping to shrink the gender gap, particularly in the tech field. Jobsite has reported that 76% of female tech professionals think businesses that offer remote work would be more likely to retain top talent, which proves to be a promising stat for agencies wanting a more diversified team of employees.
3. Establish an Attractive Company Culture
Having a positive company culture is something that every agency should strive for if they want to recruit and, most importantly, retain top talent. A remote company demonstrates the fact that it values employees and respects them enough to provide them with location freedom and flexibility. Is that a big deal? For millennials, it's a huge deal.
FlexJobs reports that 82% of millennials would be more loyal to an employer if they had flexibility in their position. Considering that millennials will soon be taking over a majority of the job market, there's certainly something to take note of in this stat. Agencies are more likely to draw in high-performing employees by embracing a remote culture and workflow.
4. Create "Out of the Box" Solutions
Remote-friendly management reflects a company's ability to "think outside of the box." How so? If you can run a company from around the world, then you can most certainly come up with unique solutions to every sort of challenge that arrives on your desk.
Opening yourself up to remote work means opening yourself up to ever-evolving technology, an intelligent employee base, and a more engaging workplace — with these assets, it's difficult to think of anything that can't be accomplished by a remote agency.
Looking for more? Check out these tips for achieving work-life balance while working remotely next.
This article was written by Chelsey Grasso of Remote.com.
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