In our CEO’s recent post about Bynder Remote Week, Chris Hall explains why we encouraged all our employees (across six global offices) to work remotely for one full week. Closing our six offices meant not only that employees had to try flexible working, but was also an experiment in efficiency to see if we had the tooling and processes to run a business smoothly from anywhere.
Employees at all levels stepped out of the conference rooms and logged in from the beach, the mountains, and spontaneous trips to visit family or friends whom they haven’t seen in some time.
As a firm believer in flexible working and the benefits to the company as a whole, I wanted to learn more about how each and every one of our employees embraced this opportunity, and more importantly, what they learned from the experience. Therefore, Bynder employees responded to a post-remote week survey.
Below is a snapshot of our findings, but I encourage everyone to check out our full results of remote week here.
What we learned: The benefits
There are some real benefits in stepping outside of the office and having the flexibility to work remotely at your own pace and choose your own setting. Contrary to popular opinions, many of our employees found that working remote improved their ability to focus without in-office distractions and actually boosted creativity.
In some cases, stress levels went down and morale levels spiked, perhaps due to the absence of a long commute and added time to focus on the tasks at hand.
When asked about the benefits of remote week, here’s what our employees said:
Better concentration and less interruption. Flexibility in the day to get things done.
No commuting between office and home saves a lot of time. Time you can spend on work which means at the end a lot more productivity.
In many cases, our employees used the time saved on commuting to do things that were important to them, like go to the gym, spend time with family, or practice a hobby.
What we learned: The potential drawbacks
Separation anxiety is real in our connected world, and time apart from the colleagues can be difficult. Some respondents missed the interaction with colleagues, which in some cases impacted collaboration and inter-team communication.
Others simply missed the perks of our office, such as working with multiple monitors, reliable internet or even the free lunch.
We encouraged all employees to take advantage of technology to fill the communication voids, such as Zoom video, Slack and of course Bynder. Regardless of where we’re working from, we saw that the use of video helps the communication between teams.
When asked about the the drawbacks of remote week, here’s what our employees said:
Not being able to see some co-workers, but I ended up facetiming them which was very helpful.
It is different per job role I would say. For me, having a secure internet connection in a quiet place are the most important things when making phone calls for example.
Remote week turned out to be a real adventure for the whole company. Bynder employees embraced the flexibility by working remotely from hundreds of different locations and learned how to make more use of Bynder’s flexible-work policy, even when the remote week ended. We were happy to hear that most of our employees are willing to take part in this initiative again and are thinking of ways to make it even more effective.
These are just a few of the highlights and lessons learned from across offices. Below you can download a complete overview of Bynder’s 2017 remote week survey.
