Show:
Cut Expenses & Boost Your SaaS Business by Hiring Fully Remote Team
Out of necessity for the changing times and age, more and more SaaS companies are going fully remote. Some companies prefer to take the hybrid route where there is an alternation between working remotely and showing up at the office sometimes.
However, many others have chosen the fully remote option and are thriving with a more productive and dedicated workforce. There are many benefits your SaaS business can derive from becoming a fully remote team, such as drastically reduced expenses.
This article will highlight more advantages your SaaS business stands to gain from doing this. You will also find a guide on hiring and managing your fully remote team with little to no challenges.
Here we go.
Why your SaaS business needs to hire a fully remote team
Going fully remote may seem a little daunting at first, but in the long run, you will come to discover that it’s worth it. Here are six main benefits that other companies who became a fully remote team have benefited from.
1. Access to the best staff
When hiring a remote team, you have the opportunity to go all out in finding a candidate that truly matches your work ethic. You now have the opportunity to build a world-class team because the distance is no longer a barrier.
You are no longer constrained to a team within your locality alone; you can now choose a team from anywhere around the world who fits into your remote team member criteria.
Just like you create a perfect customer persona to fit your marketing strategy, developing a remote team member persona is also ideal. You can look out for a team member that fits into your:
- Company values and ethics,
- Preferred discipline,
- End focus,
- Work/life balance,
- Decision-making necessities
Since distance is not an issue, you can now select only the most relevant staff members to your team that will work diligently to boost your company to success. As a result, you can broaden your horizon and hire an A-team focused on adding value to the company and is the best fit for you.
2. Lowers overhead costs
Reduced expenses remain one of the key reasons why you should hire a fully remote team. With a remote team, you no longer have to worry about overhead costs for running a physical office.
With employees working from home, you are free from rent, water bills, electric bills, snacks, hardware, etc. This is one of the reasons teams around the world are focusing their efforts on going fully remote. It pays!
Remote work also allows you to hire only part-time workers or contracted staff, which also helps you save more money. Part-time workers don’t require full-time benefits such as health care benefits.
You can also do without expenses like parking spaces, security systems, office maintenance projects, and related bills. When your team works from home, you save on furniture like chairs, couches desks, and equipment costs too.
Companies have found that they can save on expenses even by reducing the number of employees in a working space. Now imagine if the entire team is remote.
3. Reduced employee turnover
When teams work remotely, they are happier because of the flexible work hours. With an increase in the happiness of employees comes an increase in the retention of staff. An employee that is satisfied at work and happy in their workplace is not likely to quit.
With an increase in staff retention, there is less employee turnover, which builds a company’s credibility and reduces employee-hiring-related costs. You no longer have to spend too much and too often on vacancy advertisements, hiring, and screening staff.
The onboarding and training process for new recruits can be time-wasting, tasking, and costly. The period it takes to bring them up to speed can take a lot of time and is risky because there are bound to be more mistakes from a rookie team member.
With a work from home option that creates a better work environment for staff, you can spur employees to stick with your company for the long haul, reducing employee turnover and related bills. In addition, it saves employees the stress of commuting to work, and they become better equipped to deliver.
4. Increases work productivity
Working from home relieves employees of a lot of stress and day-to-day distractions. Firstly, they don’t have to rush to work daily, which helps to cut down on traffic and commuting stress, so they can get right into work when they feel refreshed and geared to work.
Being able to work from home also provides a flexible work environment where employees can allot their time in a way that they can attend to different work-life areas without disrupting their work.
Meetings are also more productive because they are scheduled in advance, and since they are virtual, workers can join in anywhere and contribute effectively.
5. Sick days do not restrict productivity
In a physical office setting, workers take a whole day off when they are ill. However, this does not have to be the case for remote workers. Your remote team can work from home on their sick days at hours that are convenient for them.
Instead of wasting away the whole day and possibly losing money or valuable customers, a sick worker can still afford to work in bed depending on the severity of their illness. Alternatively, they can work after office hours and still turn in necessary tasks for the day.
6. Hiring remote team members is faster and easier
In-office hiring procedures are long and strenuous. There is a lot of paperwork to sort through, screenings and interviews to deal with. Even after this, the HR team needs to ensure that all is in order before the new staff can come on board.
The remote team hiring process does not have to be this way. While background checks are still necessary, the entire paperwork process can be condensed into an online form that goes directly to the onboarding database.
There are HR tools that make the remote team onboarding process smoother and faster; BambooHR is one of them.
How to build and manage a fully remote team
You will find that just about any SaaS business team can go fully remote, so don’t worry about whether going remote is right for you. SaaS businesses and jobs are fast becoming popular, from customer management positions to the best remote SEO jobs on the market.
You can easily find and build a remote team made of only the best hands.
However, there is no general solution that you can employ to help you build your remote team. But, you can take a cue from the practices that companies that have successfully gone fully remote have used. Check these out:
1. Hire motivated people
Remove the physical structure of the office and you will find employees who are lackadaisical and uninterested in working. As you hire your team, lookout for people who are self-motivated, share your business values and are comfortable working remotely.
Creative and motivated employees will be more productive and invest in your company’s growth.
2. Encourage employees with perks
It’s easy for remote team members to feel isolated even in a virtual group. To beat this, you can schedule regular offline meetings or team-building events outside of office hours to help team members get familiar with each other.
You can also encourage team members with special perks and prizes that can boost their loyalty to the company.
3. Improve collaborations with relevant communication channels
Communication (lots of it) is the backbone of many remote teams, and without an excellent platform for collaborations and passing information, many things can go wrong. There will be many mistakes, assumptions, and delays because people are not sure what to do.
Get a platform for sharing information and collaborating on projects because it improves teamwork and leaves no room for guesswork. Everybody knows what to do and when to do it, so work processes are improved and smoother.
Make sure to set clear guidelines and expectations for your processes. We recommend you create an HR video for company policy so everything is super clear for your distributed team.
4. Use the right tools to automate company processes
Along with going remote, companies have found that using digital tools to handle tedious and repetitive tasks is a big stress relief for staff. For instance, you can use tools like MailChimp to send bulk emails instead of manually sending them one by one.
You can also automate your social media processes with tools like Hootsuite or Buffer. All you need to do is set up the social media posts for different social networks and schedule when you would like them to be posted. These tools post on your various social platforms at the scheduled times, saving you the time and stress of posting manually.
With automated processes freeing up more time, your remote team can focus on work that really matters, boost productivity and the SaaS business in general.
Conclusion
The pandemic has forced many companies into creating a remote-physical (hybrid) work-life for their employees. Fortunately, there have been many success stories from this endeavor and your SaaS business too can be a part of this.
The benefits of going fully remote have been outlined for you to see, and you also have a guide to help you become a fully remote team. Good luck!