In little over two years, the idea of remote working has gone from an experimental tactic employed by companies that want to appear cutting edge, to the norm for practically everyone.
Almost overnight in March 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic pushed office-based staff back into their homes, as the technology existed to allow them to work without all needing to be in the same place.
Across all industries and in all departments, remote working is something that is here to stay. And refusing to recognize that will be the death knell for a lot of companies in the years to come. As tech plays an ever greater role in our daily working lives, those tasked with underpinning organizational programs and technology – i.e. developers – are becoming more important.
There is no reason why these staff members need to be based in an office, though. As with the vast majority of a business’s employee base, they can work just as well at a remote distance as they can in an office environment. In this blog piece, we’ll take a look at 10 persuasive reasons why more companies should work with remote website development professionals.
What Is a Developer?
To begin with, though, let’s make sure that our definitions are understood. There’s no point in evaluating the benefits of doing something different, without fully understanding what is being discussed. For example, exploring the ways to get rid of computer bugs and viruses is useless without knowing the answer to the question “What is a bug?”
In short, a developer is someone who oversees the technical, software-based, components of your business. Dealing with both internal programs, and external, customer-facing, products.
As Robert Half of Australia puts it:
“A Java, C#, .Net, C, Sybase, and Oracle Software Developer is generally responsible for the development, design, and implementation of new or modified software products or ongoing business projects.
Typically sitting within the IT team of a business, a Software Developer will be involved in liaising with the Business Analysts and Development Managers to ensure software projects meet requirements.”
Now that we know who within your business we’re talking about, let’s explore the reasons why you should consider working with remote-based developers.
1: Reduced Infrastructure Costs
These first couple of reasons are going to focus purely on the financial benefits that remote developers bring with them. The greatest deciding factor in a company changing its way of working, is often the bottom line on the spreadsheet. So it’s good that we can address this straight off the bat.
Outside of the digital world in which developers thrive, as a business, running physical premises in an era that prefers the hybrid working model can be costly. Ensuring that the developers on your team aren’t the reason that you have to keep renting office space month in, month out, means that you can save those costs you previously may have thought essential.
2: Reduced Employment Costs
It isn’t just the wider business implications of hiring a developer who needs to present every working day. The salary + bonuses of full-time employees can be driven by their location in the world. It’s not something that a lot of companies want to admit, but the exchange rates with countries around the world make bringing on staff from overseas a much more appealing prospect.
Hiring someone remotely to work as a developer for your company can considerably reduce the cost of employing someone. Not only can they capitalize on modern work from home software, but it could see you pay less in salary for the same quality of work. You can also avoid paying for benefits like gym memberships and perk schemes that can be costly to an organization.
3: Smarter Investments
Our first two points have focused on the money that you’ve saved. And the tendency is to bank that extra money or offer a pay rise to certain important employees. However, it does also allow for the possibility to invest elsewhere. If you’re looking to drive better results from your marketing team, for example, the excess capital gained by employing a remote developer can be invested into the marketing budget.
Or, it can be used on another business goal, like acquiring vanity numbers for business, the details of which matter less than the principle itself. By hiring a remote developer and saving on infrastructure and employment costs, you afford the business freedom to direct more of its money on points of focus that enable growth.
4: Increased Productivity
A long-held belief of those who would turn their noses up at the idea of remote working was that employees would use the unsupervised time to slack off, driving the business into the ground by not getting as much work done. Whilst that may be true for some individual cases, almost every study into remote working suggests that the opposite is true.
So why not use this to your advantage? Regardless of whether you’re an established player or a start-up, the updates that software developers make to platforms are often ones that need to happen quickly, so invest in a remote developer and let them show you just how productive they can be.
5: Greater Alignment
The success of businesses that have great online platforms often relies on their ability to speak directly to the customer. Vague unspecific language leads an organization’s message to get lost amidst the many voices they’re competing with online. And a great way to ensure your message is direct and speaks to the customer is to achieve alignment across the business.
Employing a remote developer can help here too. Without being bogged down by distracting office politics and other discussions that can cause issues with output, you have the chance to greatly align your message with their skill for development. It can result in outcomes that match exactly what you had in mind when pitching improvements to the software of your site.
6: Reduced Risk
As well as keeping a lid on the spending, another key factor in deciding that a business is going to change tack often revolves around how much risk is involved. Strangely, the remote model eliminates the risk that the pre-working from home days carried with them.
You see, when geographical location is such a determining factor on someone getting a job or not, then you’re already limiting yourself to hiring the best of those in a 10/20 mile radius. If you’re saying that you are going to cast your net worldwide by hiring remote developers, then you can go after the best of the best, meaning the time and money you spend on remote developers is more worth it in the long run.
7: Happier Customers
If you can achieve all of the above, you’ll be left with more money to invest in areas that you need to expand and have created a product, platform, or service that is more in tune with your business vision.
Very rarely, if you do those two things, will you see anything other than a similar increase in customer satisfaction. Getting that crowd onside is the lifeblood of any business, and can lead to a greater income and app store rating in the process. So, remote developers really could be the answer to so many of your issues.
8: Greater Availability
Hiring people remotely from around the world means that your business will invariably work across several different time zones. Whilst that may have some setbacks in terms of communication and availability for important meetings, it does allow you to get closer to an always-on operation.
The benefits that this brings can outweigh those negatives, in that your remote developers will be on call to manage any overnight issues on the site, such as a greater Google bounce rate, in a manner that they may not have been able to previously.
9: More Motivated
As with studies into productivity with remote work, similar studies have found a greater collective motivation in remote workforces than those who exist purely in office spaces.
10: Greater Focus
Finally, hiring developers that work remotely can bring greater focus to their projects. When developers work remotely, the vast majority of conversations they’ll have with leaders within the business will be focused purely on the tasks at hand.
This means that they’re better able to carry out their role, and the goals for the organization don’t get lost due to extraneous influences.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve taken a look at software developers and how hiring those who work remotely can be of benefit to your business. Across all aspects of their role, a developer benefits from working outside of the normal, office-based environment. And here, we’ve shown how the business side of that equation stands to equally benefit from this setup.
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