Why do more and more startups choose telecommuting?

Product Hunt is also a faithful believer in remote distributed working mode. Two-thirds of the employees in the team are in other areas outside San Francisco, which span nine different time zones. The team mainly relies on team communication and collaboration tools such as Slack and Zoom to communicate and collaborate with employees in different fields.

As technology breaks down geographical barriers more and more, the recruitment and organizational forms of enterprises may undergo innovative changes. Employers have access to the best talents in the world with a click of a mouse. Employees are more like free men, who can work at will anytime and anywhere. The future work may be a remote and distributed work mode, because in the virtual world, everyone can have no distance.

We found that large companies such as Automattic, Toptal and GitHub employ a large number of remote employees. In addition, we also found that small startups such as GitLab and Zapier have begun to choose remote distributed working mode.

Compared with the past, why do more and more startups choose remote distributed working mode? To sum up, more and more founders of startup companies are choosing telecommuting, because it is very necessary to adopt this mode, rather than a fashionable way.

In this increasingly competitive environment, both the startup companies that get financing and the startup companies that choose to start their own businesses are looking for ways to improve production efficiency at lower cost. When people's pursuit of growth and efficiency is stronger than ever, telecommuting will be more and more attractive to startups.

This is why more and more founders of startups choose the remote distributed working mode:

First of all, the founders of startups can bid farewell to the expensive office rent, because almost all the work of a company can be done through telecommuting. For example:

If you ask any R&D personnel who need to commute to work in the company every day, they will tell you that they don't want to work in the office every day if telecommuting is allowed.

Look at the sales staff. Most salespeople are inside salespeople. As a software salesman (domestic sales), there is almost no difference whether working in an office or working remotely.

Finally, talk about the customer service support team members. Most of them monitor a dashboard based on cloud software and answer customers' questions through chat or other cloud conferencing tools. For them, working in an office is almost the same as working remotely.

Therefore, in general, whether it is developing products, selling products or after-sales customer service, these tasks can be completed through remote work. Today's products are almost all based on cloud, and most of the work of employees can be done based on third-party cloud products. So it is not difficult to understand why you can finish your work efficiently without a centralized office.

Theoretically speaking, everyone who works in a startup company can actually telecommute, which has always been attractive. In the past, this was absolutely impossible. A few years ago, communication technology could not meet the remote communication and cooperation needs of a completely remote distributed work team. The continuous iteration of new technology and old technology makes the workflow and team communication faster and smoother, which can usually meet the needs of remote working environment.

Communication between remote team members is asynchronous in most cases, which means that the time interval between communications is sometimes long. In the past, the communication between company members who chose to work remotely may be a little out of sync, resulting in extremely low work efficiency.

Nowadays, tools such as Slack, Zoom and Trello are narrowing the gap between synchronous communication and asynchronous communication. These tools have reshaped the new office experience in the virtual environment. Slack has various channels, gif animation and sharing functions, just like a virtual office, while Zoom allows team members to communicate face to face remotely.

Gone are the days when the communication efficiency of telecommuting teams is low, and almost all working scenes in real offices can be copied. In fact, according to the report, telecommuters in 20 17 years performed better than their colleagues in centralized offices, or at least were similar to them.

A very important reason why many startups choose the remote distributed working mode is that the remote working mode can help companies better recruit talents from all over the world. In the local talent pool, there is a great demand for talents with minority skills, so why should we confine our company to the local talent pool instead of looking at the global talent pool?

In San Francisco, the competition for highly skilled employees is particularly fierce, so many founders of companies began to choose to look for outstanding talents in other parts of the world. For most startups, it is difficult to compete with companies like Facebook and Google in terms of employee benefits.

Now, if a small startup company finds an excellent senior engineer in Fargo, North Dakota, signing and keeping that person becomes a brand-new game. In the remote distributed working mode, the cost of employing people is relatively lower. Companies like Zapier also found that telecommuting employees usually stay in a company for a longer period of time and the turnover rate is relatively low.

The same is true for finding co-founders for the company. Non-technical founders who dream of starting a software company will find it difficult to find an excellent chief technology officer in a field with fierce competition for talents. Therefore, instead of confronting the chief technology officer with those well-known software companies, founders with non-technical background should choose to find the right chief technology officer in other fields outside the hot technical talent market, which will be a better choice for them. There are many reasons why a highly skilled person will not choose to move to Silicon Valley to join a small entrepreneurial team, including family reasons and other reasons. Telecommuting will be a feasible solution for many people.

About three years ago, I worked in a technology company in the San Francisco Bay Area. One day, I found myself having a very in-depth conversation with my manager in Slack. At that time, he was standing in front of the company's standing table, standing opposite me. In the face-to-face situation, we will still choose to communicate on Slack instead of face-to-face communication. At that time, I thought, everyone in this office can actually telecommute from home and finish their work. As it turns out, I'm not the only one who thinks that centralized office is not completely necessary for startups. Everyone likes to work remotely from home. According to a report, from 2005 to 20 15, the number of people working remotely increased by 1 15%, and this number will continue to rise.

Now the communication and cooperation tools are perfect, and the competition for talents in many fields is becoming more and more fierce. Therefore, it is meaningless to open a company with centralized offices. According to my experience in telecommuting in several software startups, if I start a company tomorrow, I will definitely choose telecommuting, without even thinking about it.