Mark Wadie from The Casino Heat discusses the opportunities and challenges of building a business with a remote working model.

Remote working became a necessity during the most stringent lock down periods of the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020 the number of working adults who spent any period of time doing their job at home increased from 27% to 37%.

Attitudes towards home working have also changed as more businesses saw the financial benefits of forsaking office space and employees found that the challenges of life without face to face meetings were offset by the advantages of a better work life balance when they worked from home.

Whilst previously it was primarily small start-ups who were most likely to adopt a work from home policy for employees now more corporates are ready to go down that route.

The growth of companies specialising in providing temporary workspace has also contributed to this change in attitudes as offices become a more fluid space where employees can opt to hot desk for one day a week or only come in only for important meetings and presentations.

Still, it is the nature of a business that dictates how successfully it can operate a remote working model without losing productivity. A survey in 2021 found that of businesses who are considering placing more emphasis on home working in the future, those in the Information and Communications sector were the highest proportion at 49%.

At The Casino Heat, a media business specialising in content marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click advertising in Europe and Canada, we have been able to embrace the remote working model 100% with staff sourced globally.

Like everything in business, our approach has its pros and cons, but for a relatively new entity – our journey began in 2020 – the flexibility of this approach has served us well to date. Here we share some of the benefits and challenges that our model presents.

Our Team Is Happy, Dedicated and Talented

If you are starting from scratch and you are a new name in any industry, finding the right people to work for you can be tough. Many of the most experienced marketing professionals find the unpredictability of short-term contracts and working for start-ups to be off putting. They would rather take the safety of a long-term contract at a bigger, established company.

But we can make the modern employment market work for us.

We made a decision initially to build a team of workers who could be pulled in as and when required and with specialist skills to suit our needs on individual projects. In particular we look for journalists who can cover off specific areas and PPC managers who have niche knowledge of particular verticals and GEOs.

Fortunately, our management team is well connected and we have been able to recruit from contacts of our own as well as using social networking tools like Linked In to build our database of staff who come from literally every corner of the planet.

As we grow and seek to build content for our websites in every continent, we can draw on talent with localised skills, using the remote working model to our advantage.

So far our employees have been happy and hard-working without the need for HR involvement and we believe we can keep it that way, making us efficient and cost effective at the same time.

The Zoom Culture Has Been Important But Isn’t Perfect

We would be lying if we said that our employment model hasn’t been without its challenges.

No doubt there were a lot of people breathing a sigh of relief when they heard about home working – surely a few pointless meetings with escalating action lists now? Well, that may be true to some degree, but a face to face work culture does have its advantages.

Something of the nuance and power of the work meeting room is inevitably lost in Zoom calls. Arguments can be made more forcibly and communication is often more memorable when points are hammered out with everyone in the same place.

This challenge becomes greater still when you consider that staff members are all in different time zones. Meetings have to be arranged with this in mind and whilst in some cases that simply means starting work an hour earlier or finishing an hour later, where staff are on distant continents in Asia or South America things become more problematic.

Can We Continue To Build a Business In This Way?

With less than two years under our belt and the foundations of a stable business in place we are very happy with the decision we’ve taken to employ a remote work force.

Our approach has allowed us to build a talented team who work at speed to order and enjoy the benefits the set up affords them. So far that has contributed to a high staff retention rate and quality output. And of course, we have saved on overheads at a time when a frugal financial approach is essential.

As with any business model there are challenges, but for us they are emphatically outweighed by the benefits. Each business will have its own needs, but I would encourage anyone starting out now to consider at least some level of remote working for its staff.