Fincredible MacroTalk March 2nd: Remote Work
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When COVID started, remote work became a necessity. In the coming years, it will be a choice, and so far, a significant number of companies seem to be in favor of it. Remote work has allowed some companies to access larger talent pools and attract more talent, all while maintaining their productivity levels. Given these results, several companies have decided to adopt remote work permanently.
In this post, we’ve highlighted some quotes from company earnings calls to give more context on the subject. All quotes are sourced from Fincredible.
Remote Work
Overstock and Dropbox have both adopted remote work strategies with great success. Both companies mentioned the importance of remote work in their ability to attract and retain talent. The ability to access larger talent pools will likely be one of the main drivers of remote work adoption in the coming years.
“In November, we internally announced our future of remote work and reentry design or FORWARD Plan that takes effect in April 2022. Almost all our teams will continue to work remotely most of the time, coming to our headquarters 2 to 4 times a year for collaboration, connectedness and celebration of our culture. The ability to offer remote work has improved our attraction and retention efforts, both of which are important during the nationwide great resignation. Our workforce continues to be engaged and productive working from home.”
Jonathan E. Johnson, CEO
“On balance, Virtual First has been really positive for us. I mean, last year, we saw a 126% increase in offer accepts. That's nearly double the number -- and then also nearly double the number of candidates for op enroll and even an uptick in what we call boomerang candidates, like folks that might leave the company and then come back within a year. So we're finding that from a hiring perspective, it's really resonating and unlocking new pools of talent. And I think more broadly, what you're seeing is that employees once they have the flexibility or when companies like ours offer this flexibility, they then -- employees demand it. So we think it positions us really well, and we think -- I'm really happy with the decisions that we started making back in, I think, October 2020 when we first rolled this out publicly. That said, I mean, I think every company is still figuring out how do you maintain culture in a distributed environment. We are trying to get -- importantly, we're not remote only. We're Virtual First, meaning that the in-person experience is really critical. That's always been true, and we don't see a substitute for that. So we're also excited to -- hopefully, there -- we're able to return to office as it looks like we'll be able to do in the next few months after some false starts in the last several months. But we're really excited about being able to reintroduce the in-person experience. And our team has done a great job of thinking through how do we get the best of both of those worlds, get the best of the in-person experience, have really great retreats or just convening opportunities, but then give people flexibility to work from home day to day.”
Andrew W. Houston, CEO
Companies like Upstart and Gartner have both delivered great results with remote work environments. These companies show that, for some industries, remote work does not lead to lower productivity or worse results than in-office work.
“I'd like to note that the Upstart team accomplished all of this during the second year of a global pandemic, while operating in an almost entirely remote and distributed fashion. We moved to a digital-first strategy while simultaneously implementing what we call a vertical team working structure. This new approach is unlocking Upstart's ability to execute quickly and efficiently as a multiproduct company.”
David J. Girouard, CEO
“In terms of developing people, we've developed new approaches so that we can engage our associates and develop them in a remote environment.
I'll also, on that point, even prior to pandemic, a large portion of our associates were remote as well. So all of our field sales people are remote. Many of our service people, remote. So this isn't new to us, actually. We just have expanded it to be broader than it was pre pandemic. So we already had experience with it.”
Eugene Hall, CEO
Platforms that match workers with companies, like Upwork and Fiverr, have also noticed significant interest from companies in hiring remote workers.
Companies looking to hire new talent have seen that the remote model works well and that by hiring remote workers they can tap into a much larger talent pool.
“And I think more and more businesses understand now after the pandemic that the remote work model works very well. And if it works well for your full-time employees, it could work very well for freelancing experts. And that is essentially what we're seeing companies doing. We think that, again, this is happening more offline than online. But I think that as we offer more robust solutions for the online, and this is what we -- when we talked about this idea of a talent cloud and as we make it more available and more easy to integrate, and more companies are going to do that. I think that's by definition, if half of the talent in the U.S. is not available for full-time hire, companies are going to be forced to work with this talent in creative ways.”
Micha Kaufman, CEO
“Nationwide recruiting is the emerging trend in the future of work. It's something we've talked about, extensively, internally. Over half of job seekers are currently looking for work that either are fully remote or hybrid in nature. That's their #1 demand, if you will, from employers. And only about 40% of jobs can actually be done remotely at this point. If you look at the pre-COVID period, less than 2% of jobs mentioned 'remote' in the job description. And if you look at the current period that we're in, it's north of 10%. So there's been a 5x, in terms of employers' openness and willingness to accept nationwide recruiting as a viable solution in these incredibly challenging times, in order to recruit talent.”
Ian H. Siegel, CEO
“Our focus has evolved because the world has evolved. The old binary notion of freelance versus full-time employee work are being revisited in a world where remote work is rampant, where career and work innovation is happening all around us and where talent and clients are searching for new solutions to both new and old challenges they're struggling with.”
Hayden Brown, CEO
Palo Alto Networks, a multinational cybersecurity company with thousands of customers, has noticed several of its clients are now looking to employ hybrid work schemes.
“We see this mirrored in our customer conversations, where hybrid work is now the way many of these companies are planning on supporting the future of work.”
Nikesh Arora, Chairman & CEO
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