From the beginning of the epidemic, the home office model has become almost a standard on the IT market. As a result of the existing restrictions on movement employees were forced to work remotely. It required many organizational and operational changes, but it also brought new opportunities.
Many teams build their identity and organizational culture based on relationships and communication between team members. The extra life in the offices definitely diversified our daily work duties, which many of us already remember as the good old days. We're also forgetting about the times when we've spent more time with our colleagues than with close friends or even our families.
The standard on the labor market was to work from an office, with the possibility of working remotely to a certain extent. Few companies used the practice of full remote work, and if there were any, it was actually most often technology companies. Currently, regardless of whether you are in IT or work in an accounting or law firm - you have the option of full remote work.
The remote work mode has been adopted by the vast majority of the market, and thus has a significant impact on the processes of building teams and shaping internal relationships.
The adjective of having a physical office has definitely decreased. According to reports from real estate brokers, it is estimated that nowadays about 5% to 15% of employees use the office regularly, and the rest of employees treat the office as a privilege. Some employees were also barred from going to the office due to top-down corporate decisions.
This arrangement means that when building our team we do not necessarily have to focus on its specific location. The model of full remote work is becoming dominant, which allows us to employ specialists from other geographic areas.
Thus, we ask ourselves whether work in certain sectors, and in particular in the IT sector, has not been devoid of borders? Being familiar with the Polish market and the trends prevailing here, we can see that a significant amount of firms provide its services directly to foreign clients, e.g. in the UK or the United States. At the same time, when talking to companies, e.g. from London, we see more and more often that the arguments used previously about locating teams on the spot are becoming increasingly outdated.
At a time when remote work is a standard, we see an increasing trend to hire employees without the requirement to live in a specific location, mostly where the company has its office. Such a trend allows not only to reach more specialists with more experience but also might be a good cost optimization.
Reaching more specialists is a very important factor, which is also related to the financial aspect. High-quality specialists are highly valued on the local markets and are also hard to find. Thanks to the possibility of remote work, companies more and more often decide not to hire a specialist in the city where they have their offices, but to broaden their horizons, especially geographically. This allows for the employment of specialists from smaller urban centers and from other countries in a similar time zone, especially if our language of professional communication is English.
How does it look from the organizational side? If we are looking for specialists within the same country where we have our office, we can consider employing new team members from other geographic areas directly - e.g. on the basis of a labour contract or a B2B contract. You can have more less the same recruitment process as you've had before, just make it an online one.
However, if you want to diversify your risk or if you're not present of the Polish market - you can consider adding an additional entity that will guarantee employment and administrative service of contracts - an increasingly frequent solution is subcontracting with a trusted local partner.
Subcontracting allows us to hire specialists from a given market and the entity servicing the employment gives us certainty of service continuity and provides us with the possibility of flexible scaling of the team, without the need for administrative management and contract handling.