Virtual Services and Office Space
Remote work has been growing in popularity over the last dozen years. In 2015, nearly 25% of all employees reported doing at least a portion of their work remotely. However, the push isn’t just from employees who want to work from home in their pajamas. Many businesses are starting to push employees to work from home for part of the week, and some are starting to hire strict work from home teams.
Empowering employees to work from home has a host of benefits. In addition to providing flexible office space, there are plenty of virtual services for office space. From executive virtual office space to audio visual meeting rooms, there is no shortage when looking for the best virtual office. Here are some of the key benefits of using virtual services to enhance your work from home employee experience:
Benefits of Partial or Full Work From Home
Increased Employee Retention: Gone are the days of employees sticking with a company for 20 or 30 years. Many people plan on sticking with a company for only 3-5 years, with some industries having average turnover of under a year. Hiring and training new employees is a big headache and a massive cost for businesses. One of the strongest employee retention tools a business can implement is using virtual services to give employees the opportunity to work from home for a portion of the week or to enable full work from home positions.
Increased Applicants: A large portion of highly qualified people are looking for work from home positions. Many of these people know that they can negotiate for partial or full work from home because of how extremely good they are at what they do (especially true in the world of programming). Millennials have grown up with the ability to communicate effectively and cheaply with each other from anywhere in the world, and they expect to be able to do the same with work. Offering a work from home position is a great way to increase the qualified applicants for your job offerings.
Increases Employee Autonomy: Autonomy is one of the most sought after parts of a job in today’s workforce. Employees love the ability to control as much of their lives as possible. The more autonomy you give your employees over where they are able to work, the happier they will be.
Reduced Overhead: Everyone knows that office space is expensive. The more people that work in a company, the bigger the office space needs to be. Well, it used to be that way. With the advent of virtual services that provide everything an organization needs to allow employees to work remote in an effective and efficient manner, there is no need to upgrade the office space each time you want to add a few more employees. Virtual services can help keep costs down by removing unnecessary expenses that rack up each time you would normally have to move to a larger office space. Of course you probably still want to keep some sort of office as a central hub for business operations, however, rather than spending thousands of dollars extra each month for a bigger space, consider offering remote work.
Pay Reduced Salaries: Being able to work from home is seen as a huge benefit by many employees. So huge that a large portion are willing to take a reduced salary for the ability to work from home. Research has shown that a full 35% of employees would choose work from home over a pay raise.
Increase Employee Productivity: Work from home might seem a bit daunting if you have never implemented it before. Not being able to micromanage employees gives some business owners the feeling that people are not pulling their weight. However, studies have shown that the opposite is true, especially with work from home employees. Because work from home employees aren’t in a loud environment and distracted by coworkers all day, they tend to be 10-15% more productive than office employees (according to research done by Stanford University).
It is time to embrace the future of office space. Stat International is a great place to start organizing your virtual services and move your business forward.
