When it comes to building a strong workforce, offering your staff flexibility can be a big asset. If you want to attract and retain the best talent, then letting people work in ways that suit them can make your company more attractive, and help you keep your people motivated to stay. One of the ways many firms are doing this is by looking at ways to allow people to perform their jobs in their own homes. According to Forbes, one in five Americans who are employed or self employed work from home some or all of the time. This isn’t just a US trend, either, with other countries like the UK following suit.
Home Working is Easier Than Ever to Provide
It is clear that there are huge advantages to having an infrastructure that supports home working. You need less office real estate, and your teams can work on the move when they are between client meetings or on the way to work as well as from their homes using the same technology. With mobile technology, VoIP services and online collaboration, in many roles there is actually no need for people to be on site every day, and some roles can be fulfilled entirely from home if you are able to communicate effectively using reliable online services and devices. It can be argued that companies who don’t currently offer home working should seriously look at why they don’t, and if the answer is that it is simply because they never have before, they should look into getting the infrastructure to change this to avoid losing out on all the benefits.
Home Working Makes Using External Consultants Easier
Many companies now use external consultants to provide services they need, but don’t need on a full time basis in house. Being able to support remote workers gives you a much wider pool of consultants to choose from, as you can work with contractors from other cities or even countries. The amount of people now self employed or working for small consultancies has grown in line with the boom in home working, and as it is now easy and relatively cheap for a talented person to set themselves up with the hardware and software they need to provide a full service to people anywhere in the world who need them, your company can benefit from a much bigger and more competitive consultancy market by not requiring the people you use to work on your site.
Working from home has a great deal of appeal to employees and external consultants as it allows them to live more flexibly. Employees can balance their work and their home lives more easily if able to work from home some of the time, and it can also save them money on commuting and childcare – things that can make a difference that may stop them being tempted by higher paid positions in other companies. If you want to give your staff this improvement in their working patterns and get all the advantages it offers you as a business, look into what you need to do to make home working part of your culture!
