It has taken me a while, but I’ve come around to letting my staff work remotely.  If you haven’t, or if you are insisting on your staff returning back to your office after working remotely for a while, I hope you take the time to consider the hard lessons I learned as a manager who believed in-office work was best for your company and employees.

The truth is, I thought my employees wouldn’t be effective working remotely because I was convinced I wouldn’t be effective working remotely.  After all, I was the guy who insisted on reporting to an empty office in 2020 when everyone else was in lockdown.  In fact, I had to argue with my partner it was safe for me to do so since I was the only person there.  Why?  I had spent every working day in the office for the last 10 years and thought I would be distracted or lacking some document or file I needed if working from home.

So, the moment restrictions were lifted in Georgia, not only was I working in the office, but my team was too.  It wasn’t about trust, I said, but the nuances of the recruiting business that made us “better” if we heard secondhand conversations with clients and candidates through our thin office walls. If it matters, I believed strongly in what I was telling them…

But, change, as they say, is the only real constant, and early this year my business partner confided to me that he intended to retire this summer.  Besides losing a key member of our team, other decisions had to be made.  One of these involved the future of our office. Because while we had rented our space for the last ten years, my retiring partner was the owner of the space, and we needed to decide whether continuing to rent or going remote was the better option for our remaining teammates.

One factor that drove the decision to go remote was our need to hire additional staff with my partner retiring.  We had needed to grow the team already in 2022, but with my partner – who wore several hats – retiring, we definitely needed to add staff.  It immediately became clear adding staff, even in the nice area where our office was, was a lot easier if remote work was available.  So, we made the decision to work from home in mid-May and had all systems in operational by June.

A month and a half into our new normal, we’ve learned a lot about working remotely.  Maybe you learned these lessons two years ago, but here is my feedback on working from home and, also, managing a staff remotely.

You can expect your team to be more productive working remotely. As already stated, I expected a dip in productivity when working remotely, but (the three most difficult words to say…) I was wrong.  Like the rest of my team, we dedicated private space in my home for an office and installed technology to keep us all connected and secure.  No doubt, my commute is better, and I am all business once I walk down the steps to my home office.  It is true “you never leave the office” when working from home, but I get more work done now that I work from home.  It’s Sunday, and I am writing this blog about working from home, while working from home…

You will be able to recruit and retain better candidates by working remotely.  Finding and keeping the best people is much easier if you can hire remotely.  It is hard to find qualified candidates for almost any job in the U.S. in our current labor market.  Companies are struggling to find candidates regardless of their position’s experience and compensation requirements.  There is a finite number of people who are right for your opening within commuting distance of your office.  But, as a recruiter, if you let me fill your opening with anyone in your town or region (who can report in occasionally), or, better yet, if you let me fill it with anyone in the country qualified to do the work, you will see the volume and caliber or candidates available to you change dramatically.  With this change in approach, you will be able to hire smarter and happier people.

On the other hand, candidate retention gets increasingly difficult when your competition allows work from home, but you don’t.  On this topic, I also have experience unfortunately.  After carrying (and caring) our team through the pandemic, I lost two key teammates in early 2021 to work from home opportunities as soon as the market rebounded. 

If you want to attract the best people (and you want to keep your best people), let them work from home.

Productive work from home arrangements can be achieved with effective management and technology.  When I approached one of my Sr. Recruiters – who lived only one mile from our old office – with the question of the how effective she could be working remotely, she pointed out she had worked from home before, but the biggest changes needed were in us adapting our management style and technology tools to enable the transition.  Collaborative tools facilitating high touch between people in your organization exist if you will use them.  I thought I needed all of my people down the hall (“within yelling distance”) from me to maintain the pulse and pace of our team, but we connect just as well through Microsoft Teams or similar tools.

Better work-life balance is possible when working remotely.  By now, it may not surprise you I am old school enough to believe work-life balance shouldn’t be a primary goal in the workplace, but more of a bi-product of it.  That is, if we are all about balance, who is focusing on the work?  But I’ve come to understand working from home does foster more work-life balance (and sometimes less work-life balance, as well).  Time and what you do with it is everything, and I just seem to have more of it when working from home.

I have clients who have been told by their executives that employees, after working remotely for some time, now will be required to go back to regular office hours.  I imagine they think this is best for one or more of the following reasons:

• Some people can’t be trusted to work remotely, so everyone should be required to work in the office.

• Some people – because of their specific jobs – must work in the office, so everyone should be required to work in the office, especially if that someone who must work in the office is the manager.

• They have a big, empty office, and management wants to see people in that office doing office stuff.

Of course, there are fallacies in each of these arguments, and they don’t outweigh the very valid reasons outlined above of why working remotely WORKS for both the company and the employee.