Introduction
Everyone at Sponge Hammer works remotely, we always had it that way. All of our processes, communication, development strategy and methods are designed around people not being in the same physical location. You can read about our company’s culture here, which post talks about remote work as well.
We find that telecommuting is becoming more popular as more employers – also employees – started realising the benefits of it. And we are not alone with this. Large and small companies offer 100% remote roles.
What is remote work?
By remote work we mean when the employee or employees are working from home, or a location of their choice and they are physically not present in an office or workplace. An employee can work a few days from home or can be work from home full time permanently. Our choice is the latter.
Not all companies and roles are suited for this arrangement. Any role that requires access to specialist equipment or to a specific location may not be a good candidate. The sort of roles that require little infrastructure, require the employee to focus can be considered. Programming, creative services, social media management are great options for home office.
There are several levels of implementing remote work in a company. It can opt for allowing employees to work from home some days, work with completely remote teams working in a single time zone, work with teams across multiple time zones and work with completely independent “nomads”. Each comes with pros and cons and we opted for the same time zone method.
Why opt for remote work?
The answer, in short, is this: it is both beneficial for the company and the employee.
As a remote worker your benefits can be:
- Flexibility of working hours or shifts.
- No commuting, which is time and cost-saving.
- Reduced stress, caused by commute, work schedule, no control over the work environment.
- Improve personal and family relationships as a result of a flexible schedule, you can build your career around your time with your family.
As an employer your benefits can be:
- Higher productivity as studies shows that remote workers’ productivity outpaces office-based co-workers’ productivity.
- Decreases sick days as remote workers less often call off sick, not to mention that they cannot get germs from other employees.
- Increases employee retention as more likely the worker will stay within your company because of the benefits.
- Reduces costs as in general employers can eliminate or highly reduce overhead costs.
Although the above reasons are important, we consider our number one to be reducing our CO2 footprint by not commuting. We try to minimise our impact on the planet. CO2 emissions caused by commuting is one of the three biggest threats to our planet and we will talk about it in one of our next posts.
You can check the impact of yours using this site.
Our colleagues say.
When writing this post we did a quick, informal survey in one of our development teams.
80% said the main reason they chose this arrangement is the flexible working hours. They’ve said that working from home gives them enough freedom to balance their life and work much better than before.
60% said that leaving commuting behind was a major factor in choosing to work from home. The extra time and money they save and the reduced stress caused by travel makes it worthwhile.
30% said they find it easier to focus on the work they are doing due to fewer disruptions and less noise from the office caused. They found the in-office discussions, phones going off and people interrupting for trivial things distracting.
For us, remote work is very important as Sponge Hammer Limited has been set up for the business model that only employs remote workers. This gives us the perfect skill set to every tasks, diversity and some level of freedom.
We will have follow up posts where we’ll talk more about how we tackle the challenges that come with running a company built on a remote workforce.
If you have any comments, ideas or personal experiences, feel free to share with us. We are curious to hear new ideas, solutions, and perspectives regarding the above. Don’t forget to follow us on our social media!
You can also find the rest of our blog here!
All photos in this article are from Pexels.
