Telecommuting gaining momentum
As companies get more comfortable with telecommuting and the U.S. immigration system continues to tighten, workplaces may start to look a lot more like Paul Walsh’s startup — with most employees in different cities.
“I’d rather attract people who are the best at what they do, rather than people who are in a given location,” said Walsh, the founder of Bay Area security bot company, Metacert. His eight employees are spread around the world — in Costa Rica, the Philippines, Ukraine, Croatia and Britian — while Walsh works out of his Danville home or co-working spaces in San Francisco. They hold daily meetings at odd hours over Skype.
The idea of a distributed workforce is not new, of course — though the Internet has made it easier for employees to work remotely.
Even so, employers that offer telecommuting options still make up a small portion of the industry. According to a report by FlexJobs, a jobsearch site focused on telecommuting, 40 percent more U.S. employers offered flexible workplace options than in 2010 — but that was still only 7 percent of companies.
Industry experts say this percentage will climb as distributed workforces shift from a novelty and perk into the mainstream. One reason: Millennials. “There has been this shift in the way generations see work,” said Brie Reynolds, a senior career specialist at FlexJobs. For example, “Millennials were able to complete homework from their home, and didn’t have to go to a library. It’s a big difference having to leave your space to get resources.”
As competing for workers in the Bay Area became too expensive, Wizeline, a technology and services startup in San Francisco, decided to expand farther overseas. The company has offices in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Ho Chi Minh City, where it says visas for international employees are much easier to secure than in the U.S.
“I struggled to hire the first 10 engineers over the first few years,” said Matt Pasienski, Wizeline’s vice president of data and international relations. Hiring abroad “unlocks Silicon Valley-grade engineers who can’t move to the U.S.”
Of course, coordinating around time zones sometimes leads to odd or lost hours of work, and employees can feel isolated. But Reynolds said there are ways to ease such problems. Employees can work in collaborative spaces, such as WeWork, and managers can establish schedules for talking to remote employees.
Walsh said having employees in several countries has helped his entire team with work-life balance.
“I was talking to my engineer in the Philippines while he was taking his kid to school,” he said. “That would have been much more difficult in a rigid environment.”