A new study has found that businesses offering remote and hybrid work are growing faster than those requiring employees to come into the office, dealing a serious blow to the return-to-office movement.
The pandemic made way for a new way of working. Employees were given professional freedom to get work done on their own pace, allowing for work-life balance to flourish and employee well-being to increase substantially.
However, despite study after study showing the benefits of remote and hybrid work, companies are still pushing to get employees back in the office, and it's having a noticeably negative impact on their recruitment efforts.
Study: Remote and Hybrid Businesses Are Growing Faster Than In-Office Businesses
The study from Flex Index noted that, across basically every company size and time period, companies offering remote and hybrid work policies are growing faster than their in-office counterparts. And in some cases, the numbers are staggeringly in favor of remote and hybrid work.
For example, over the last twelve months, companies with between 500 and 5,000 employees that offer remote or hybrid work have grown twice as fast as in-office business. Over the last three months, they've grown three times as fast.
The Flex Report Job Edition 2023 from Scoop Technologies takes data from more than 6,700 companies covering over 100 million employees.
It's Not Just Tech Either
You might be thinking that this is a unique problem for the tech industry. After all, these businesses drove the adoption of remote work during the pandemic, so surely they're the only ones impacted in this kind of study.
However, that does not appear to be the case. In fact, the numbers found that, even without the tech industry, remote and hybrid businesses were still outgrowing in-office companies at a staggering rate across all business sizes by at least a full percentage point.
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Again, companies between 500 and 5,000 employees remained the starkest of comparisons, with remote work and hybrid work businesses growing their headcount at a rate of 1.5% each, while in-office companies are only growing at a rate of 0.6% over the last three months.
Should Your Business Offer Remote Work?
It ain't 2019 anymore. Flexible work has become one of the most sought-after perks for top talent in virtually any industry, and if you want to recruit the best of the best, you're going to need to meet them where they live.
“In some ways, it's almost like a new frontier of the way that we think about freedom. Flexibility is the new frontier of freedom, and it's very American. And I think people are very unwilling to give that up.” – Rob Sadow, CEO and co-founder of Scoop Technologies to FOX News Digital
Fortunately, there are plenty of studies that show remote work not only provides work-life balance for employees, but it also improves productivity and even increases revenue. In fact, one study showed that companies offering remote and hybrid work boosted performance by 22%.
The benefits of remote work don't stop there either. If you're at all concerned with climate change, remote work is a no-brainer, allowing businesses to reduce their carbon footprint substantially, particularly compared to fully in-office businesses.
All that to say, if you care about employee wellbeing, productivity, revenue, and the planet Earth, your best bet is to keep your employees remote or hybrid for as long as possible.
