Hiring employees remotely can have many benefits – but it can also have drawbacks for certain companies. When deciding whether to hire employee remotely, you may want to ask yourself a few questions first to ensure that it’s the right decision for you. Here are just a few questions that could help you decide whether it’s a good move for your business.

Can You Take Advantage of the Flexibility?

One of the biggest benefits of hiring employees remotely is the flexibility that it can offer your business. When hiring people to work in an office alongside you, you may be limited to applicants that live locally. When hiring remote employees you can hire people from around the world, allowing you to access the best talent. You can also hire people to work out of normal office hours, allowing your business to operate 24/7 and possibly helping you to communicate with clients in different time frames.

This is all worth taking advantage of, but if your business has no need for this flexibility (i.e. if you’d prefer local talent and want to keep a nine to five schedule) there could be no need to hire remotely.

Can You Afford an Office?

Hiring remotely can save huge costs on having to rent office space. If you can’t realistically afford an office but could benefit from hiring employees, hiring remotely could be a great way around this.

That said, if you can afford office space, you may want to consider it. An office may allow easier communication and a place to meet clients and receive business mail. Nowadays, there are many alternative forms of office space that you can look into too such as shared office space and sub-let office space.

Do You Have the Technology?

In order to successfully hire remote employees, there may be certain technology that you may need to invest in and familiarise yourself with.

Cloud technology could be particularly important when sharing files with remote employees, the likes of which you can learn more about online. Using the cloud, employees can access and store company files from any location. Two people can even work on the same document from two different locations.

Video conferencing and instant messaging meanwhile could be important for communication. Being able to communicate by video could allow you to have face-to-face conversations remotely – you can find more information about this software here. Instant messaging meanwhile could be a quick text alternative to email.

Does Your Ideal Employee Want to Work Remotely?

Working remotely can have many benefits for employees such as cutting the cost of commuting, allowing the ability to flexibly work around commitments and reducing the distractions often found in an office. A growing number of employees are being attracted to it – but there are some people that still value the traditional office environment.

Some companies find it valuable to offer the option to work on site, whilst also offering remote work. For work that requires a lot of social interaction and collaborating, it can speed up productivity to have people working on site and relieve frustrations caused by technological limits.