How work from home can boost your business growth further?
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us all that we do not really need to be in office to get our work done. Enterprises had always been skeptical about letting their employees work from home, primarily because of the concerns for lack of productivity. Little did we all know that work from home can serve as a big driver of business growth in a world sans pandemic.
With proper planning, and right kind of collaboration and performance monitoring tools, enterprises can reap numerous benefits from remote work environment that would eventually contribute to business growth.
Ensure Business Continuity During Pandemics
The world is in the middle of a pandemic right now. Enterprises that have managed to keep moving forward are those that have embraced the work from home culture. The Covid-19 situation will pass by. But this might not be the last crisis of our life that have had such a massive impact on businesses. Year after year, we see the wrath of nature in multiple forms, droughts, flash floods, cyclones, which affect different parts of the country or the world. By implementing an enterprise-wide work from home policy, a business can save itself from total jeopardy during such times and ensure business continuity to a great extent. Even if it gets difficult to go remote with an entire organization, critical functions, like finance, legal, HR, governance, customer interfaces, can certainly work remotely to ensure continuity.
Access wider pool of talent
If an organization has a well implemented work from home policy, it can hire the right talents to meet its business needs from anywhere. Particularly in a country like India, where resources are spread across the breadths and the lengths of the country, the option of having access to resources from anywhere will give an organization, especially starts-ups, an edge over others. Organizations’ needs are getting more specific by the day, where people with high expertise in a domain or a tool are needed. Having access to broader pool of talent to satisfy such specific needs can prove to be a huge strategic and competitive advantage.
Improve job satisfaction
By allowing employees to work from anywhere, employers are implementing a very important employee retention mechanism. Employees when allowed to work from anywhere, do not need to relocate from one city to another, go through a tiresome stressful commute to and from office, feel more connected to family and personal relationships and less pressurized. Most employees still see these benefits, that they would get by working from home as perks. All these factors put the employees in a better mental space, making them stick to the same enterprise for long. Even if an organization has a rotational policy of allowing only a certain percentage of employees to work from home, it helps in breaking the monotony. Having the structure of the office and the opportunity to socialize with colleagues and friends, coupled with the flexibility to work from home, will certainly boost employees’ morale.
Save on real estate costs
By letting employees work from anywhere, employers can save all those overhead expenses which happen in the form of rent, lease, maintenance costs etc. Coworking spaces present in many metro cities can be used, providing employees with the required infrastructure and space to work. In the long run, employers need not purchase or lease any new office buildings which generally burns a hole in their pockets. To put things into perspective, an office space in Mumbai which can seat 500 employees, costs around INR 10 crore per year, which translates into INR 2 lakh/employee/year. A company can save this money if employees are enabled to work from anywhere.
Cut down on IT management costs
Implementation of a work from anywhere solution would need a secure remote access to corporate resources. Employees should be able to securely access all the resources and tools they need to perform at their best, without putting corporate applications or network at risk. Moreover, a secure remote access solution should empower users to work on any laptops, desktop or smartphone, be it corporate-allotted, rented or personal. While employees get the flexibility to work from anywhere, enterprises can keep the governance in their hands. This would trim down the expenses on IT support and infrastructure.
Implementing a robust work from policy will keep organizations in good stead in the long run. But not all employees or the nature of their work would be suited for working from home. Having said that, it is an employer’s responsibility to provide the right culture and mindset that an employee needs to achieve maximum productivity when working from home.
