Will Startups Work Remote Permanently?
During the peak times of coronavirus, nearly all of the companies whether corporate or a startup, had to work remotely both because of health issues and the bans from the governments. However, this working remote scheme started to make employers happy in terms of expenses. No extra expense for office space, electricity, water, and many more things. And employees started to work more efficiently than they were before. Although, corporate started to work normally nowadays since the bans have lifted and the risk of coronavirus has significantly reduced. But startups aren’t feeling the same thing, they think remote work could be a part of our lives forever. Not only because of expenses but the relaxation of it makes everyone happy and gives better results in every aspect. Here is a statement from a CEO of a company during the peak times of pandemic and remote work times:
“I jump right into work when I’m ready. And leave when I’m done. There’s zero friction between working and not.”
Wade Foster, Co-founder and CEO of Zapier
The majority of founders, CEOs, workers have been saying that they work more efficiently remotely than working in an office. But some say that there is a lot of distraction while working at home, which may be right but, working remotely if you can set yourself apart from the main distractions, gives you the opportunity to rest after you are done with your assignment or go to another meeting with just a click of your mouse. It helps you to manage your time better and get into more meetings, produce more, and not lose stamina and power as you did before.
Now, why corporate is not really in favor of working remotely but startups are? Except for the biggest companies in the world such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. most of the corporate companies have started to work normally as I have mentioned above but there is a difference with startups. In one of my writings before, Startups Are The New Corporate (click at the name to check the article), I have mentioned that startups are starting to conquer the corporate world and become the new corporate. This is one of the things I meant. Startups are closer to operate on the more modern and new to get along with the trends whereas corporate is more old-school which doesn’t attract young graduates.
“Successfully working from home is a skill, just like programming, designing or writing. It takes time and commitment to develop that skill, and the traditional office culture doesn’t give us any reason to do that.”
Alex Turnbull,
Founder and CEO of Groove
Startups are always open to new things, this could be putting a Playstation in the office or making coffee breaks once in a while or putting up new working schemes when needed. Remote work was always a part of startups but it wasn’t fully active, offices were there to work in. But with the pandemic, they all had to switch to remote working which led to the realization of people working at their homes are more efficient and better. Thus, they didn’t want to give up on this and wanted to continue to see if it is as good as it seems.
With every day passing, people, not only the employers but also the employees, have started to get used to this and realize this would be better if it is permanent. Employees could work in more than one jobs without getting tired too much, employers can easily get in touch with their workers through social media and lead the way through in most of the projects without having to feel so corporate and official which is something that most of the new graduates doesn’t want to feel.
Graduates want an environment where they feel relaxed
All this hype and the efficiency led startups to believe that remote work could be the solution to most of the problems that they face every day. So, they all are taking the decision to work remotely, at least %95 of the capacity are working remotely and the others (%5) is the essential guys either IT or administration that needs to handle everything face-to-face. There is also the possibility that if a startup chooses to work in offices rather than remote working, they will lose their best employees to the one who works remotely.
“In the right roles and with the right people, flex does offer tremendous productivity improvement. It gives people time to process properly, and it gets them out of the office in terms of being bogged down in day-to-day admin. So there is more thought leadership that comes to the table, and that’s where your creativity and innovation come in.”
Osman Khan, Co-founder and CEO of Paddle8
Lastly, let’s look at the numbers here. When a company, especially a startup, works in an office, you pay rent, utilities, insurance for property, office supplies, repairs, maybe food for some. When you calculate all this, you come up with at least 6–7k$ per month. This is a huge number for a small startup that is just trying to stand on their feet with a couple of investments. This is one of the biggest reasons when it comes to working remotely. Nearly all of these expenses are not expenses anymore. You get to keep that money and spend on some other thing.
In conclusion, when you make a pros and cons list for working remotely both for corporate and for startups, corporate might not be able to work full efficiently remotely since it’s too big and handle a lot of things at once but for startups, this is not the case. There aren’t that many people and you can focus better at home and work efficiently than you did before. Most of the CEOs, co-founders agrees with that, too. This mindset will lead most of the startups to work remotely for a very long time at least they work on big and multiple things at once. Also, most of the graduates want a relaxed environment to work and the office is not the best way for that. If you don’t go with the trend, you lose your greatest talents to your competition because they do follow the trend. Another thing is the expenses. It is really beneficial for startups to work remotely when it comes to expenses. No rent, no utilities, and many more things. You get to keep it and spend on other things to get your business going. Among all these pros, who would choose the other way? Well, not me and a bunch of other startups.
