Understanding the costs and benefits of a remote workforce

- As a small business owner you may want to consider working with remote employees. By "remote employee" and I mean someone who doesn't physically work in your office and may work in a different part of the country, or even a different part of the world. This can be an attractive option to saving money and some time. Now, rather than telling you whether or not you should or shouldn't work with remote employees, I want to explore some of the benefits and the costs of using this as an option. First of all, one benefit is that you're working from a wider pool of talent.

This means that when you try to hire someone you're not just hiring someone in your own city, you're now looking at people all around the world, and that gives you an option of finding people who are very, very talented, that you may never have had the option to use before. Also, you may find that you're paying less salary by working with a remote employee. That could be because of differences in the economies, or it could also be because someone is more willing to work for less because they have the flexibility of working out of their own home.

Also, you may save money on physical facilities. If you have to have an office space where lots of people are working, that can be a tremendous overhead cost for your small business, but remote employees, well, they're remote and there is no need to pay for an office. And also, you may find it easier to develop talent and retain people when you give employees the option of working from their own home; That makes them more likely to want to stay with you. You've created flexibility, and that's attractive to many employees.

Now let's consider some of the costs. First of all there's a cultural cost to your business. I'm talking just about the business culture itself. There's value in having employees that work and interact with each other, and if they're working remotely we may not be able to have that same kind of cultural boost that happens in a confined environment. Second is the issue of accent. Perhaps you have someone who's working from a different country who has a different accent than your customers use.

You may run into issues with that if they're using a phone and may find that you need to invest some money in helping them change their accent to match your customers. Third, there can be infrastructure issues. In particular if you're working with someone in a less developed country, they may run into issues. For instance, perhaps electricity doesn't work as much and they have brownouts from time to time. And that leads to four, is communication. When someone is in a remote environment you may find it a little bit harder to communicate with them either because they're in a different time zone or just simply because you don't have the convenience of walking into their office.

You may also experience issues with loyalty. Because there isn't that face-to-face interaction, it's a little easier for them to not care quite so much about your business. And finally, a remote employee is just not fit where physical interaction is necessary. If I'm needing to give people material and documents, that's not the same as working with someone remotely. Remote employees work best when everything takes place over the Internet.

Now, one more caution. If you as an individual aren't very tech savvy, let's just say that computers aren't your friend, remote employees are probably not a fit for you because technology is a key component of working with these kinds of employees. If you struggle with computers now you'll likely struggle greatly in trying to manage remote employees. But, if after exploring all these options you find that working with remote employees is a fit for your business, it's a powerful way to grow and get help while keeping an eye on the costs.