Remote work helps founders recruit international talent, save on real estate costs, and gain global experience

Because the cloud is available anywhere, startups are effectively born global. There are now countless stories of cloud-based startups that began life in one country and soon after were offering services in markets all around the planet.

But there is another way the cloud is helping founders go global – by giving them access to the world’s skills and talents.

A new way of working

It used to be that one of the first questions a founder needed to answer was where they wanted their people to work from.

Having a group workspace was traditionally essential for running a business. But it’s expensive and requires you to bet on how much space you think you might need. This is difficult for any founder who is balancing limited budgets against high growth aspirations.

More recently, coworking spaces enabled startups to rent desk space and other facilities.

However, the costs of coworking spaces can mount quickly when many staff are using them, and they can also be noisy and distracting for workers. These spaces also don’t provide the privacy of a dedicated office – a major consideration for any startup founder who is not yet ready to reveal their idea to the world.

Access to global talent cuts real estate costs and offers flexibility

There is a new option that many startups are embracing: remote work. It’s proving beneficial for existing workers, and also enhances your options when hiring new ones.

One of the big impacts of the recent pandemic and lockdowns was that more people started working from home. For many organizations, this proved not only that remote working was a viable alternative to an office, but in many instances it was actually better for workers. This has been especially the case for those who need to concentrate for extended periods, or who otherwise spend large chunks of their lives commuting or traveling between locations.

Remote working means workers can now essentially work from anywhere they can access a reliable internet connection, and allows startups to unshackle themselves from geography when it comes to bringing in new hires.

A distributed startup gives founders a global advantage

One of the biggest advantages of remote working is that startups are no longer tied to a single city – or even a single country.

It increases the size of the talent pool to the entire planet, boosting the number of possible candidates for each role.

It also gives founders the experience of working across different markets very early in their journey. This can be critical for those who want to go global quickly, as they can gain firsthand knowledge of different markets and cultures. This way, startups can be truly born global and enjoy the benefits of a geographically and ethnically diverse workforce from the beginning.

As your startup grows, you can build teams in different time zones, enabling “follow the sun” working. As the sun sets in Australia, development and customer support teams can hand work off to colleagues in India or Europe, and then pick up on their work the following day.

With speed-to-market being one of the critical drivers of startup success, remote working becomes a key enabler of running a 24-hour business.

A cloud-based workforce benefits workers and managers

These benefits are on top of all those enjoyed by workers themselves, such as eliminating their commute times and enabling them to create a more-flexible working life.

The cloud also offers tools for managing a cloud-based workforce, such as:

• Collaboration and messaging tools like cloud-hosted video communication suites such as Zoom and Amazon Chime, as well as the highly popular messaging and collaboration tool, Slack. At Amazon, Chime and Slack are vital tools for helping workers stay in touch with managers and colleagues – tools critical to building the camaraderie and culture essential to any startup’s success.
• Cloud-based business applications like Amazon Connect’s contact centre solution and the customer support suite from Zendesk mean people performing vital support roles can do so from anywhere.

Conclusion

While the need for face-to-face engagement is unlikely to ever go away, embracing remote cloud-based working delivers numerous benefits to workers and managers alike, reducing costs and expanding the pool of talent.

Just as cloud computing has freed startups from needing to invest in their own computing hardware infrastructure, remote working enables a startup to free itself from geography and embrace a cloud of skills from around the world.