5 Reasons why clever CTOs choose remote work

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Today, most tech companies rely on in-office teams to develop their products. But the nature of work is changing and distributed teams are more and more replacing in-office workforces. Companies who don’t adapt to this shift risk being left behind.

Thanks to the proliferation of bandwidth and modern tools such as Trello or Slack, distributed teams can now work smarter, faster, and more efficiently than ever before.

While there are various reasons why distributed teams have become the better choice for innovative companies, I summarized my personal top five.

1. Access the World’s Best Talent

Do you struggle to find top tech talent in your region?

You are not alone. There are simply not enough good software engineers, by 2020 there will be 1.5 million open positions in the US and the EU. But when you access a talent pool as large as the entire planet, you can find the best engineers anywhere.

Hiring remotely allows you to attract the brightest and most dedicated engineers — regardless of where they happen to live. For every person who is in your location or is happy to move there, there are 100 more who are not.

If you miss out on distributed teams, your competitors will have access to brighter people than you do because the world’s best engineers will most likely not share your postal code.

If you’re hiring for technical positions, hiring remotely is the best-kept, blindingly obvious secret for finding people.

— David Fullerton, CTO of Stack Overflow

2. Rapidly Scale Up Your Team

Remote hiring offers the ability to scale faster, and on demand.

If you’re pushing back projects or missing your milestones, rapidly scaling up your engineering team with distributed team members can enable you to accelerate your product roadmap.

With distributed teams, you can quickly hire for specific skills, without the necessary investments in training. If you ever tried to find a Python expert, who also brings in strong React skills, you know how high chances are to find that profile within your direct surroundings.

By harnessing tech talent across the world, smart CTOs can hire exactly who they need and don’t need to wait for months until the right candidate presents herself.

3. Remote Work Promotes Diversity

Diverse teams make smarter decisions.

Decades of academic studies have shown that socially diverse groups are more innovative than their homogeneous counterparts. When people from different backgrounds, genders, and races come together to solve problems, they bring with them different information, opinions, and perspectives.

Diversity is one of the biggest problems in the tech world, which is mostly dominated by white, male and western-socialized software engineers. Distributed teams leverage diversity by bringing together people from all over the world, that bring in different perspectives and fresh ideas resulting in smarter decisions.

Any time you bring together diverse perspectives, it just creates a bunch of potential that you weren’t really expecting.

— Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter

4. Fuel your Team’s Productivity and Efficiency

The communication and knowledge gap that exists between your teams is the same regardless of the physical distance between those teams. The truth is that with the right tools and processes in place, distributed teams can be even more productive than co-located teams.

Studies found that remote workers get more done in fewer hours thanks to fewer distractions like meetings, conversations, and noisy coworkers.

Working asynchronously forces distributed teams to be more conscious about their projects, their priorities, and their productivity. Because distributed workers aren’t sharing the same physical space, they tend to over-communicate to ensure a common understanding.

5. Increase Team Accountability and Self-Sufficiency

Distributed teams think independently.

When remote engineers are hired, you create a team that knows how to take initiative. Distributed teams have a sense of independence that sparks an entrepreneurial spirit. The flexibility and ownership over their schedules and the access to additional developer circles helps them to keep up the energy and the grit.

Furthermore, modern tools such as Slack, Trello, Google Hangouts or I Done This empower distributed teams to communicate and collaborate more effectively and hold each other accountable.

Distributed Teams — The Future of Work

Distributed teams provide much more comprehensive access to talent, increase diversity, productivity and efficiency, and facilitate a community culture that focuses on drive and initiative.

Moreover, a team that has unlimited scalability and talent can speed up the development and accelerate the product roadmap.
Who would not buy into that?

One thing we should always keep in mind: Distributed team members are no outsourced workers. They are true team members who are given the freedom to work where they’ll be most productive. That establishes an environment of trust and loyalty — one that every employee will be motivated to maintain.

Want to learn how you can leverage the power of distributed teams?

Visit Think.iT.io or reach out and scale your team with the brightest software engineers.