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Feeling right at home with remote work?
By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>
REMOTE work is now becoming the norm.
According to Chris McNamara, the chief revenue officer for the company named Remote, companies that embrace remote work have more diverse workforces.
Alternatively, companies that fail to embrace some form of remote work will have trouble recruiting talent.
He believes remote work has become the new norm. 
“I think over the last couple of years we’ve experienced the shift to remote work and I think what started as a reaction to the pandemic has become almost an awakening to the benefits of working from home,” Mr McNamara told Talking Business.
“I think that’s not only true from the employee side but also on the employer’s side.”
Mr McNamara said there was a lot of research now showing that not only is employee satisfaction higher with remote work, but employees working remotely are actually more productive.
One Stanford University study found that employees working remotely demonstrated higher job satisfaction, 35 percent lower attrition and 11 percent higher productivity than their peers working for the same company, but doing it in the office.
Aware of ‘remote’ benefits
Mr McNamara said more people around the world were becoming more aware of these benefits and it was now quite possible for companies to put in the right infrastructure for remote work – which especially suited knowledge workers, who could work in any setting.
“Perhaps even more important than having the right tools is having the right culture,” Mr McNamara said.
“You need the right management to be in place because it’s not the same, from my experience, that working remotely is the same as working in an office.
“If a company and a management team expect those things to be exactly the same, I just don’t think that’s going to work out,” he said.
“You need to be thoughtful about: how are you going to co-ordinate activity when people are working remotely? How are you going to share knowledge when people are in different locations and not in the office? How do you build culture when it’s not about pizza and beers on Friday?
“It needs to be something way more intentional when people are located in different places around the country, potentially even different places around the world.”
Remote itself is ‘fully distributed’
Mr McNamara said his company, Remote, had 1000 employees and it operated in 70 different countries. The company does not have a head office. It is a fully distributed team.
He said more and more employers were adopting distributed work models because they were finding it harder now to source the talent.
Mr McNamara said this now required a different approach to management and perhaps a greater level of trust than what some managers would be accustomed to.
“We work with customers who are opening up jobs outside their home country,” he said.
“So an Australian company decides to open up jobs in the Asia-Pacific region. We’re finding that for certain types roles, those companies are able to hire 50 percent more quickly because they are no longer competing for people in exactly the same locations.”
Mr McNamara said remote work “was here to stay” because employee interest in flexibility was “going nowhere but up”.
“Companies that preclude flexibility for their employees will find themselves on the wrong side of the decision when employees are choosing where they’re going to work.” 
Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness
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