After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech market hurtles towards a future where remote work reigns supreme. A lot of tech companies started to anticipate the new norms about 10 years before the mass shift to pajama-style working. Reason? You are not limited to one city when looking for tech talent and can get a better match with your team.
Some tech businesses needed help with ensuring local compliance and payrolls. Then, agencies like Outstaff Your Team entered the market to handle remote team management for their clients. So why are work-from-anywhere policies becoming more and more popular, and what are the main concerns related to the future of remote work?
Remote Work Takes Roots in Tech Space
Today’s world has well-established global hiring processes. The majority of questions you might have, due to the risks of distant work, are already answered.
✅ How to synchronize the team and control the performance? Messengers like Slack, Discord, or Microsoft Teams, plus task trackers like Asana or Jira, perfectly arrange transparent interconnections.
✅ How to deal with cultural peculiarities? Globalization erases differences in people’s values and lifestyles, and professional staffing companies make background checks to ensure your new hires align with your company culture.
✅ How to safeguard data privacy? You can follow modern and robust data security measures, allowing you to hire specialists from all over the world without privacy risks. We’ve listed the proven approaches to data leak prevention.
- With multifactor authentication and role-based access control, only people, who have the right to review your data, can access it.
- You can implement VPN or VDI, depending on your goals. VPN enables users to securely access resources (such as files, databases, or internal websites) on a remote network. And VDI provides full desktop environments managed from a centralized server.
- When delegating your People Ops and other business processes to third parties, pay attention if they are GDPR and CCPA-compliant.
- If your project suggests signing NDA, confirm if your hires have completed those papers properly before they start their work.
Tech businesses have already evaluated more flexible hiring strategies. Developers, designers, and other specialists from the tech space have already gotten used to better work-life balance outside office walls and often skip job openings without remote options.
All those factors together create perfect conditions for the further expansion of remote work.
No Way Back?
Taking into account all the points above, we are not surprised that, according to Forbes, remote work is the most widespread working format within the IT space. It is hard to imagine that somebody will be able to “cancel” remote work. Yet, the future outlook for remote work is not associated with its dominance over traditional office mode.
The situations vary from country to country. The number of remote vacancies is growing in the USA (up to 25%), UK, and Italy. At the same time, France and Japan are known for their commitment to classics. There, managements insist their teams visit offices 5 days a week.
The situations vary from company to company. We have numerous successful examples of fully remote companies, like GitHub and Zappier. A wide range of companies stands for remote first. Amid all that, tech behemoths like Meta and Amazon actively promote RTO (Return to Office) policy.
There is clashing feedback on the performance of those who work from home.
On the one hand, remote work can offer enhanced productivity, as team members often experience fewer distractions. This is especially significant for tech professionals whose work demands deep focus and concentration.
On the other hand, feelings of isolation and the potential for blurred work-life boundaries are some concerns. The absence of face-to-face interactions may hinder spontaneous idea exchanges and mutual support that thrive in physical office spaces.
What side to support? Try first, judge next!
Actually, the possible drawbacks of remote teams could be mitigated by talented leaders. Those managers utilize new approaches in a new reality. They conduct different remote team-building activities so that each team member can stay engaged.
The Hybrid Model: A Path Forward
As the tech market is far from being ready for total remote, a hybrid model will most likely shape the future of remote work in tech. It blends the advantages of remote work with the benefits of in-person collaboration. Companies are recognizing that certain tasks may require the synergy of face-to-face interaction, while others can be executed efficiently remotely.
Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple are investing in hybrid work models, redesigning their office spaces to accommodate both remote and on-site employees. This approach not only supports collaboration but also acknowledges the diverse preferences and needs of the tech teams.
Keep in mind that the budgets of tech behemoths and startups are different, and a fully remote format could be much more cost-effective in the early stages of your company development.
Be it a hybrid format or a remote-first, the widespread implementation of work-from-home is a natural practice that every tech company should reckon with to evolve in line with competitors.
