Working From Home Means A More Diversified Workforce

Businesses are faced with a new challenge: they must balance the need to achieve profitability, while also sustaining a healthy productive work-life balance for their employees.

A growing amount of research has shown that working from home has the potential to become a valuable business strategy — especially when it comes to productivity, diversity, and profitability.

When employees work from home, they’re able to skip the extra coffee breaks, the long commute, and the distractions that come with working in an office space. The outcome? Fewer sick days, less time off, and a boost in productivity equivalent to a full day’s work, according to one study from Stanford University.

Simultaneously, remote work provides a unique opportunity for companies to diversify their workplace. Now, the only factors that employers need to consider are competency, skills, and collaboration — which leads to a much larger applicant pool.

For starters, hiring in the new normal places almost no constraints on location. Employers can not only hire from all over the country, but actually from all over the world. When it comes to gender-based diversification, more women are having to make fewer parabolic choices between working as a stay-at-home mom and joining or rejoining the “Master-of-the-Universe” workforce. In fact, a dear friend of mine mentioned that she’s going back to work in her industry while staying at home too. In pre-COVID times, this arrangement would not have been possible, as most companies just didn’t offer true work at home flexibility for the past decade — even two. That choice for parents was a rarity before, and now, it’s protocol.

Workplace diversification also lends itself to greater profitability amongst many American businesses. A report from McKinsey & Company found that, when evaluating diversity among executive teams, companies in the top quartile were 21 percent more likely to enjoy above-average profitability compared to companies in the fourth quartile. Additionally, companies can save an average of $11,000 per year for every part-time remote employee, according to another study. This is the result of heightened productivity, lower real estate costs, less absenteeism, and reduced turnover.