REMOTE WORK THE FINTECH TIMES
Is your engineering team ready for The Remote Future?
F
ive years ago, no one would ever have thought that working from home would be the norm across industries, and yet with the Covid-19 pandemic that is exactly what’s happened. This shift to home offices and online meetings makes sense from both an employer and employee perspective. For the employers, Boston Consulting Group estimates that remote working models lead to a 20 per cent cost reduction in real estate and resource usage, as well as a 15 to 40 per cent increase in productivity. And this increase in productivity is true on the employee front, where a PwC US Remote Work Survey found that more employee respondents say they’re more productive than they were before the pandemic. There’s also an increase in quality of life, with 97 per cent of people who started working remotely as a result of the pandemic confirming that they would choose to continue doing so for the rest of their careers. However, with this shift also comes challenges, and while companies can get the benefit of accessing talent from all over the world, they are now grappling with how to improve processes, teamwork and technology to continue being successful in this new area. In light of this, Andela’s whitepaper provides insights from its Technology Leadership Survey on Remote Maturity and establishes its ‘remote maturity model’ for assessing how ready a company is for hiring and managing global talent. The whitepaper identifies some of the common challenges that companies face as they transition to working remotely by looking across multiple industries, with a focus on financial services, to identify issues and propose solutions. It also advises how companies can increase their global hiring maturity to stay competitive and reap the benefits of remote work while tapping into talent across the world.
An influx of demand for remote engineers
Interestingly, in this new remote forward world, the demand for software engineering talent has never been higher. Andela found that most of the companies shifting to remote or flexible working practices can be found in the software industry, a sector with a history of remote work already. Working from home can lead to greater productivity and efficiency, and this is particularly true for tech and engineering teams. Nick Branstator, CTO at Playwire Media, comments within 18
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Andela is the first long-term global talent network that connects companies with vetted, remote engineers in emerging markets. Its recently released whitepaper, Is Your Engineering Team Ready for the Remote Future, examines how more companies than ever are making the shift to remote work and analyses how they mitigate challenges by leveraging quality engineering teams By Polly Jean Harrison, Journalist at The Fintech Times
the whitepaper: “Remote contractors are part of the innovation process and can provide technical leadership like architectural work. They can be part of the strategic conversations.”
Tapping into global talent
According to an article from ZDNet, one of the most in-demand jobs across the UK is software developer, ‘for which there were nearly 10,000 vacancies in April 2021 alone. The problem? There aren’t nearly enough candidates to fill all of the empty roles’. This is particularly true where hiring remotely with a global talent network becomes truly beneficial, enabling you to tap into talent wherever it may be found. The whitepaper notes that a ‘huge number of other industries that once had primarily office-based work cultures are now planning on becoming much more flexible, which will create new competition for engineers outside of traditional technology industry hubs’.
Andela’s data further shows that though companies are prioritising hiring talent in the EMEA region, the engineering talent from the LATAM region presents a huge opportunity for companies as there is a sizable
and talented workforce that is comparatively overlooked. The benefits of exploring other countries’ talents are clearly seen, with 30 per cent of those surveyed by Andela saying that working with engineers around the world makes them a better remote workforce. An additional 44 per cent responded that engineers outside of the US provide more global and diverse perspectives to their products. It’s clear that the remote first economy is increasing the competition for talent, with Andela’s research finding the number of companies sourcing talent from more than 10 countries will increase from three per cent to eight per cent over the next two years.
