A new survey report analyzes remote work’s impact on employee success, retention and relationships with their managers. “The State of Remote Work” survey, conducted among 1,097 U.S. workers by OwlLabs and TINYPulse, provides some encouraging news for employers who currently allow or who are considering allowing employees to work remotely. Among them:
- Companies that allow remote work reported 25% lower turnover than companies that didn’t
- Companies with no corporate headquarters (fully-distributed companies) hire 33 percent faster than other companies
- Managers see equal performance between their on-site and remote employees
- Meanwhile, with 51% employees who work remotely reporting that they do so to improve their work/life balance, and 65% of employees who don’t work remotely stating that they would like to work outside of the office at least once a month, the report suggested that allowing even occasional flexibility could lead to an increase in employee retention
“Based on the responses we received, we can infer that remote and flexible work is becoming an increasingly important employee benefit that leads to happier employees,” Max Makeev, CEO and co-founder of Owl Labs told BLR. “And because companies that empower remote workers experience lower turnover, it effectively reduces the burdens, resources, and complexities associated with hiring– which is a tremendous advantage in the current talent wars.”
The report, however, also revealed some potential downsides of remote work, including that remote workers do not receive the same career and management support as their on-site colleagues and that managers of distributed teams find cultivating strong company culture to be a challenge.
For several more insightful statistics regarding the practice of remote work (and the employers and employees who do—and don’t engage in the practice) visit www.owllabs.com/state-of-remote-work. To learn more about Owl Labs, a video conferencing hardware company, visit www.owllabs.com. To learn more about employee engagement platform TINYPulse, visit www.tinypulse.com.
Remote working is a subject that comes up a lot lately. Your point that fully remote companies hire faster intrigues me. I’d say that remote companies have to be careful to make sure they hire people that suit that culture. Hotjar is a company that runs fully remote, and they have a very extensive and detailed hiring process, especially for a startup. I personally love reading about their way of hiring.