Managing Global Talent: Is a Remote Team Right For Your Business?

Infrastructure Availability Varies
Having a desire to work from home is not the only variable in the equation. We’ve learned that the countries where talent is most cost-competitive are also the places where working from home doesn’t work as well. Internet infrastructure is poor, electricity is unreliable, people burn out and family pressures are high. As a result, performance suffers.

Places like the Philippines – a country with a large number of online freelancers – have poor Internet infrastructure in the majority of residential areas. Home Internet connections in the Philippines are among the slowest in the world, according to rankings by Internet broadband testing company Ookla (166th among the 195 countries included in its survey). Upgrading is either not possible or too expensive.

An easy way to avoid infrastructure issues is to have workers in an office. The norm in countries like India, the Philippines or other rapidly developing talent markets is to have power back-up generators and redundant Internet connections to ensure continuity – options that someone working from home would not be able to set up.

What About My Office?
As with most things, there is no one answer to the question “should my employees work from home?” The best answer is that culture and infrastructure should impact your decision as a manager or business owner with regards to work-from-home policies.

These days, work doesn’t only get done in an office – it gets done on a phone call, with an email, over Skype and even face-to-face. I predict that the future of work is somewhere in this grey area. Offices won’t be the only place where people work. But they’ll continue to exist as places to brainstorm, concentrate, socialize and network.

Patrick Linton is Co-Founder and CEO of Bolton Remote, where he helps startups crush it with their own scalable, full-time, offshore teams.

BusinessCollective, launched in partnership with Citi, is a virtual mentorship program powered by North America’s most ambitious young thought leaders, entrepreneurs, executives and small business owners.