The benefits of the virtual office
Why fight traffic if you can be more productive working at home?
Homestars does business nationwide, has 23 employees in Canada and worldwide and is the leading business of its kind — and almost all its operations occur remotely.
The Toronto-based company runs Homestars.com, a site for homeowners to read and write reviews about renovators, repairmen and retailers that receives about 300,000 hits a month. Started in 2006, the company initially used teleworking to attract and keep talent.
“We had a top sales developer who lived in Peterborough, and we would not have been able to drag him to Toronto. Allowing him and other employees to work at home has allowed us to have the team we want,” says Brian Sharwood, president.
Today, the company’s 23 sales, computer programming, administrative and executive employees are located in Newmarket, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Orlando, and even El Salvador, but use web technologies and smartphones to conduct business. Text, audio or video discussions take place regularly on Skype and Google Talk to facilitate sales meetings and current projects. They use DropBox to store and share important files, and Google Docs to access the customer database. Sharwood estimates 95 per cent of the company’s operations take place remotely.
The remaining 5 per cent of business activities — staff training, meetings, some day-to-day work — take place at a 204 square-metre (2,200 square-foot) office in downtown Toronto the company shares with another business.
Sharwood says in addition to saving tens of thousands of dollars over the years on office rent and saving staff time and money on commuting, teleworking has also helped Homestar build a great team. “It allows us to attract a broader array of candidates and hire the right people, including in the local markets where we operate, which is important,” Sharwood says.
The business benefits Homestar has enjoyed through teleworking is backed up by research: the April 2011 report Workshift Canada: The Bottom Line on Telework found that employers can save more than $10,000 a year on a two-day-a-week telecommuter through increased productivity, reduced real-estate costs, and lower staff absenteeism and turnover. The study also found that employees can save up to $3,500 a year on gas, parking, public transportation and office-related food and clothing costs.
By 2008, 1.8 million employees in Canada worked from home at least part-time, comprising more than 11 per cent of all paid workers. Among soloprenuers, that number was also 1.8 million, but it comprised 60 per cent of self-employed people. Both figures represented slight increases in teleworking since 2000. It’s a shift that has been aided by the proliferation of largely free and user-friendly web-based project management, collaboration and communication tools. In addition to those mentioned by Sharwood, small business owners can also use services such as Basecamp, for online project management; WebEx and GoToMeeting, for web confer- ences and webinars; and LinkedIn for prospecting, networking and general business development. “The online world is creating all kinds of wonderful solutions for businesses that can save on overhead costs and allow staff to be more efficient and happier,” says Katherine Roos, small business manager for the City of Toronto. “Our need to connect in person will not go away, but technology gives us the flexibility to determine when face-to-face interaction is necessary.”
“We had a top sales developer who lived in Peterborough, and we would not have been able to drag him to Toronto.’’ BRIAN SHARWOOD PRESIDENT OF HOMESTARS.COM