Remote Work Goes Mainstream as Platforms Enable Anywhere Hiring and HR Management

For all the talk of the Great Resignation, changing jobs is trivial compared to the great migration to remote work that started as a lockdown order and quickly became a lifestyle.

While many jobs can’t be done remotely, the work of people who stay in place on a computer all day is highly portable, a quality  increasingly desirable to those individuals. That puts companies in a position to hire the best talent anywhere, no matter where anyone is, with a platform assist.

It makes perfect sense to Job van der Voort, CEO at Remote, who told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that it has never added up why so-called “knowledge workers” with laptops should be required to go to offices at all. And that’s a pre-COVID sentiment, as the company was founded in 2019.

He told Webster, “The way we think about it, and the reason we founded Remote, is because we don’t understand why it would be necessary at all for you to commute to a particular place, or to live in a particular city, just to do work from your computer all day.”

And there are macro forces in play in 2022 adding new dimensions to that logic.

“The power dynamics have completely changed between employers and employees,” he said.

Where in the pre-pandemic, pre-connected world we had always shown up at offices in proximity to our dwellings because that’s how work was done, “with a hybrid model it’s important to define what it means. If you say part of the team is permanently in the office and part of the team is permanently remote, that’s going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not impossible.”

All it takes is a few companies with vision to drop all on-site requirements and van der Voort sees an opening of the flood gates on a remote work trend that’s been years in the making.

“What we see is that employers that want the best talent have no choice but to embrace remote work [and] building more of a distributed workforce.”

Data confirms the trend. The February PYMNTS Connected Economy Monthly Report found that “65% of U.S. consumers reported working remotely online in January 2022, meaning that the virtual workforce in the U.S. is now roughly 89 million workers. This is up from 63% of consumers who worked remotely online at least some of the time in December 2021.”

Get the report: The Connected Economy: Working In The “Whenever, Wherever” Office

A Global Employer of Record

Even employers of with large numbers of knowledge workers on computers were forced to stitch together new remote ways of operating when lockdowns hit, as even these businesses were largely office-based until the pandemic.

Companies are experimenting with hybrid work, remote, work from home, and even a return to the office, the longer the COVID-19 all-clear holds. Then there’s the totally new way.

A unique HR and payroll management SaaS solution, the Remote platform has “entities all over the world and we can act locally as employer on paper for any given individual so that you can hire that person and give them a proper local contract and local payroll, local benefits and everything that comes with that,” van der Voort said.

“To hire someone in any given country in the world, you, as an employer, have to do a whole lot of things,” he explained.

“Benefits are different for each country. What we do is we figure out all those different components and make them work for every country. Then we build on top of that to make it easier, for example, to receive your money, make it faster, to allow you to receive money in different currencies, for example, and a whole host of other things.”

That “host of other things” includes expansion of its payroll and benefits offerings, helped along by its $300 million Series C funding round announced Tuesday (April 5).

The company has now raised $495 million and achieved a valuation of close to $3 billion, experiencing “exponential growth resulting in a 900% employee increase and more than 13-fold growth in annual recurring revenue in the past year,” according to the Series C announcement.

See also: Hybrid Work Model Points to Uneven Recovery for Metro Downtowns

Freedom and the Future of Work

As ideas change around what (and where) a workplace is, it’s another expression of the connected economy being able to tap talent anywhere on the globe regardless of where a company is based.

With platform automation performing the back-office tasks like compliance and agreements, companies can focus on bringing the best people onboard no matter where anyone is.

“The beauty of it is, what we’re finding is that great people are everywhere,” van der Voort said. “If you look at the countries that we have open for our customers, then you see that there’s a really strong correlation with how long the country has been open, the GDP of the country, the number of inhabitants with how many employees we employ there.”

Saying, “to me the future of work is all about freedom,” van der Voort told Webster that global HR platforms allow companies to become less restrictive not just with location but with other aspects of work-life balance, like the ability to manage one’s own schedule better.

One thing he’s sure of in the next three years is that companies will move more to what he calls “asynchronous working, which essentially means that you spend more time writing things down, sharing things ahead of time, rather than discussing things in a meeting.”

He said, “We have to move to a whole different model of working together.”

Many owners and managers were on eggshells about sending their workers home, until pandemic-era productivity proved to be at least on par with in-office. That realization is changing a lot of minds and bringing more employers to work with platforms like Remote.

Some will stick to offices and hiring from surrounding ZIP codes, but van der Voort said they will “miss out on the greatest advantage of remote work, which is access to global talent. If you say you have to be able to commute to the office, even if it’s just one day a week, you’re essentially saying we only are going to hire people who live close by or are able to move close by. In that sense, you lose through competition of companies that say it doesn’t matter where you live.”

See also: Remote Notches $150M Series B At $1B Valuation