Should you Hire Remote Workers? | Leading Remote Employees

So, growing a remote workforce is a trend that's been hyper-accelerated over the last 2 years since COVID came into our lives. But this was something that was already starting to happen. So, I think it's an interesting topic that we're going to explore over the next several videos and podcasts here as we talk about what you can do to do this efficiently, effectively, and be successful at it. There are a lot of challenges to growing a remote team. There's hiring, there's performance management, there's discipline, there's terminations, there's all the same normal stuff you have in growing a team, only with the challenge of doing it in a remote environment. So, this is something where I still know a lot of you are on the fence of, should I hire remote employees? We've traditionally always been in the office and I'm curious if this is right for us. How do we maintain security? How do we get the right people? How do we know if we can trust them, uh, whether that be just the folks we hire or what they're doing after we hire them. So a lot to dig into here, but today I'm just going to get into some of the pros and cons of hiring remote teammates. Is this a great experience for you? From my business, we have a hybrid approach, so we have a lot of folks that are in office, uh, here in Columbia, South Carolina. We have folks spread around the country, and then we also deal with folks around the world for a variety of different tasks. So this is something that I'm pretty well versed in. Uh, our team's not tremendously huge. So I'm going to default to some experts on some other areas as well because I want to learn alongside you. I want to get better at growing a remote team, being a great leader for my remote team, and providing them with everything they need to be successful. Because that's ultimately my commitment to anybody that joins our team, is that you're going to be better when you leave here than when you started. So how can we do that when you're working from your home office or from a co-working space or whatever that might be? So today, let's dive into some of the pros and cons of hiring remote workers for those of you on the fence about whether or not you should hire remote teammates. So the first pro, I'm just going to fire through a list of things here. So the first pro is the obvious one. This is access to a much wider talent pool. So a great example of this, I posted a job recently on Indeed.com. I posted it locally. I got about 5 applicants. I posted it nationally. I got about 300 applicants. And we're going to get into recruiting later in another episode because recruiting is something that isn't just posting a job and filtering through the applicants. Recruiting is, is just that. It's actually going out and recruiting talent. But I, I think that's a really good example of just how much wider the talent pool can get when we go nationally versus— or even just East Coast. If you're on the East Coast and you want somebody in your same time zone, you're still going to open up a ton more options when you go remote versus in office. And obviously this is a very in vogue thing that people are looking for right now You've heard about the Great Resignation. So that means that there are a host of folks that have been, uh, asked to come back into the office that don't want to come back into the office. You can be opportunistic in acquiring talent and providing a remote advantage. Next pro is going to be cost containment. So this is for you as the employer. It's a lot easier to scale without having to worry about physical space requirements. It's also estimated that you're going to spend about $2,000 per year per employee who is in the office. And there's also cost containment on the employee side. It's going to reduce their costs for having a job. They don't have to pay for lunches. They don't have to— well, I mean, still they have to eat, but they're not going to go out nearly as much. They're not going to pay for the gas to commute back and forth or for the bus ticket or for the subway ticket. They're not going to have to worry about traffic. They're not going to have to worry about parking. And so it's going to eliminate some of that stress and cost when we look at a cost containment perspective of how that's going to work for your employees. There are some other things when we look at the pros. It's also going to reduce some of the wasted time. This is, this is a bit of a pro and a con when we look at it, right? So no water cooler talk means that people are going to be more productive. They're going to be at their desk working, you know, the minute that they decide that their day starts or that you have your requirements in place. But this creates another problem that I'll list out on the con side when we talk about one of the biggest cons for me with a remote hybrid team is keeping the culture alive. And And it's funny because I used to worry about, you know, I'd walk around and be like, man, what do I got to do to get these people back to work? They're over here chit-chatting for 20 minutes and, you know, it's time to get stuff done. But now I'm sitting here going, how do I get these people to chit-chat more? They don't talk as much socially as they should. They're not getting to know each other enough, not developing our culture the way I would like. So the grass is always greener, right? But it is a unique paradox in that we are struggling now to create those collisions of our teammates, and we have to be more intentional about it because they're not just going to bump into each other out in the hallway or passing by each other's offices. So definitely a pro of more focused work, less distractions. But when we get over to the con side, there are some unique distractions to being at home, right? So whether that's children, whether that's pets, whether that's your neighbors, whether that's the, you know, service people coming by, the cable guy coming by to fix those things. So distractions are different. Uh, so that's not necessarily just a sole pro of less distractions from working at the house. There are definitely ample distractions of working from home, which fall into the con side as well. So pros, we're also seeing some data starting to point towards increasing retention of employees when allowing them the opportunity to work remotely. I think this is something that may be a little bit immature in the dataset because we're talking about something that we're looking over the last 3 years, which was heavily impacted by COVID. I'd like to see how this plays out because we have a lot of folks that maybe think they like to work from home because they've only had to do it for a short period of time, but might start to feel the isolation of that over the long term. So definitely a pro for now, a lot of data pointing towards it. And once again, one of the things that we'll talk about when we look at the hiring component of this is you have to know the people that you're hiring in the respect of what is the right thing for them. So just because they say they like remote better than in-office, what's the reality of that and why do they like it? And so hiring people who have some experience working remotely is definitely a great idea when you're looking at hiring folks. I don't want to get off on too many tangents here, which I can in each one of these, but basically, like I said, I'm going to layer this out over the next several episodes of HR Simplified where we're going to get into the hiring, the recruiting, the culture building, performance management, all that fun stuff. One at a time. So, you know, one other thing that's worth mentioning is obviously it's a lot better for the environment if people are working remotely because there aren't as many carbon emissions. We're not having folks commuting to and from work. We're having less things, you know, especially if you're driving all over. If you got salespeople, I think about our salespeople that used to run up and down the road all day, every day to go to sales meetings that are now doing the bulk of those over Zoom. That's a tremendous advantage to the environment and definitely something worth mentioning. So lots of great pros when we look at the pros. For the remote work side. Let's look at some of the cons. So the culture we talked about, it can be hard to manage. It can get, get a little loose on you. It's harder to define. One of the things that I'm a big advocate for is being very intentional about culture. So that's one of the things you have to be extra intentional when everybody's remote because you don't have control over, you know, the influences around them. And it's not about control necessarily, but it is about, hey, how do I keep my culture top of mind? You know, in the office, we have these things that you see, these, you know, the quotes on the walls, the symbols, the teammates doing the thing. So it's hard to manage a culture in a remote environment. You have to be incredibly intentional about it. It's also a little bit harder to get people to collaborate. Once again, you have to be intentional. You have to create collisions. We're forcing people, hey, grab 15 minutes with somebody this week that you don't work with very often. Make sure that you're, you know, getting to know them on a personal level, that you guys are reconnecting. Just because you're in marketing and this person's in finance and you don't talk very often, there's no reason for you to talk on a day-to-day basis, we've got to force that collision. And, you know, some people love it, some people don't love it, but as they start to get into those one-to-one conversations with people, they realize, oh, I'm actually really glad I got that 15 minutes on the calendar with this individual because otherwise I don't, I don't know about all the stuff happening in their life and in their work life, and it's just great to reconnect. So it's also, you know, the, the pro side of people are more productive from home. There's definitely a lot of data pointing to that people are more productive. But there's also— we've all seen the dude wandering around the neighborhood all day doing all this stuff around his house, you know, when we were remote. We're like, well, is he— what's his deal? Does he have a job or what? No, he's, he's just kind of taking advantage of the remote work, uh, situation, and he's, you know, taking advantage of being at home and not getting as much done. So not everybody's more productive at home, and that's, that's something that, you know, is a little bit harder to, to manage and lean towards. We're going to talk about that in a future episode as well. And then for us, one of the big things is time zones. Just be a challenge. So we've got folks— most of our US-based staff is in Central to Eastern, uh, but we deal with it with our offshore teammates as well. We have folks that deal, uh, web developers that work offshore, and they're, you know, they're in different time zones, and designers as well. And so it, it can be a challenge of when we're getting work done. And so that's one of the definitive cons. But I'm interested to hear, what are some of the pros and cons you would add to that list for working remote? And have you decided to leverage the opportunity? I view this as a huge opportunity personally for us in our business to be able to grow and scale by taking advantage of what is now effectively a global workforce at our disposal. And how we go about doing that is something that I'm, I'm wildly curious about getting better at, and I'm looking forward to learning from you. So please drop a comment below, make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you can stay involved in all these videos we're putting out after the remote work culture component of running your business. And we look forward to hearing more from you. Thanks for stopping by and talk to you next time.