The Covid-19 pandemic has forced a majority of the companies to have their employees work from home. Well, many big companies already allow their employees to work from home. Some companies have like 10-15 days’ work from home opportunity in a month. Some other companies like Automattic have their full team(1,180 employees) working remotely. Recently, if you check the job postings of companies, you can see them posting their work from home policies. Still, many companies don’t provide work from home options (even if they are able to).
So what are the perks in working from home for an employer? How much money can a company save allowing their employees to work from home? Let’s have a look at the work from home benefits for a company.
1. You dont need to pay for office space/expenses
The biggest benefit of remote work. Companies don’t need to pay for office space when your employees are working from home. You can save a large amount of money by having your employees work from home.
2. You don’t need to pay for a desk, computer and other accessories
This won’t be the same for every company. Good companies ensure that they deliver the best tools/work station for their employees. They do this to improve the productivity of your employees. An employee can save a large amount of time working on a good computer than his old slow pc to improve his productivity.
Well, this is the other side of the story. In many companies, remote employees work with their own work station like a computer, headset, operating system, and other accessories. You not only save the cost of the work station, but also the maintenance cost.
On average, a company can save nearly $1,000 – $1,500 per employee for the work station if his employee is working remotely. if you have like 50 employees, it is a big sum of money which you can invest in your companies marketing or other expenditures.
3. You can save the money spend for parties and snacks
As you don’t have an office, you don’t need to pay form snacks and parties for your employees. IBM saved 100 Million annually after starting remote work.
4. Companies can save money on electricity/heating and air conditioning
In US, large office buildings (more than 100,000 square feet) consume around 20 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity and 24 cubic feet of natural gas per square foot every year. 40% of your energy bills come from heating and cooling. On average, your energy bills constitute around 20% of your overall office expenditure.
You can save a big amount of money on energy bills by having your workforce remote. Bigger your office space, bigger your energy bills.
5. Saving commute time employees time and thereby companies time.
As an employer, you often see your employees rushing to the office after traffic jams and other troubles on their way to the office. On average, an employee spends 1 hour a day commuting. Working from home allows your employees not to worry about travel to the office, traffic jams, and other hassles. This helps the employees to be more productive and to bring more to the table.
6. Hire employees globally
Remote jobs make you able to hire from different countries. Automattic has employees from 75 countries all over the world speaking 93 languages.
This not only helps you in hiring the best talent for your company but also saves you a big deal of money cutting the employee cost. For instance, you can hire an employee from India or Philippines by offering 1/6th the salary of an average employee in the United States. Many companies in the United States operate successfully in good profit by having their major workforce in Asian countries.
7. Your work wont be affected in any kind of adversities
Covid-19 pandemic is the best example of this. Companies with remote employees are the ones who adapted quickly with this global adversity. Not even a single workday was wasted for companies who had their employees working from home. Other companies had a tough time adapting to the remote working style. Their employees were not used to remote working style and had a tough time initially adapting to this working style.
Even now, still many months after the rise of COVID 19, many employees are not getting productive working from home. This is where companies who already had their employees remote performed superior and thereby increasing the companies revenue.
8. No more chit chats and waste of office hours
Chances are high that people spend a large number of office hours chit-chatting. While everyone working together in an office they might have lots of topics for small talks like about your new car, election results, newly watched movie, last Friday night party, etc. Remote employees won’t waste much time chit-chatting. This helps your remote employees to be more productive and bring more results into the table, generating more profit for the company.
9. Less leaves
If your employees are working from home, they don’t need to take a full day leave for small sickness. An office employee might need to take a full day or half-day leave if a mechanic is coming to install your new Ac or repair your refrigerator. A remote employee will not take leave from work in similar situations. This eventually increases the productivity and thereby the revenue of your company.
10. No more impromptu and unwanted meetings
Studies show that one of the biggest productivity killers in a normal office is unwanted and impromptu meetings. With remote job providing companies its all planned ahead. You’ll be notified hours before a video conferencing and company meeting so that you can plan ahead.
