{"id":15078,"date":"2013-03-07T00:03:45","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T00:03:45","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-03-07T00:03:45","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T00:03:45","slug":"Why-Almost-Every-Startup-Should-Be-Working-From-Home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=15078","title":{"rendered":"Why (Almost) Every Startup Should Be Working From Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marissa Mayer may have decided that working from home doesn\u2019t work anymore for Yahoo, but that doesn\u2019t mean that working from home isn\u2019t the best option out there for some tech companies. And for startups it seems like a no-brainer. Here\u2019s why:<\/strong><\/p>\n

No rent, no utilities.<\/strong> This is big, obvious reason that everyone should already know: if your team works from home, you don\u2019t have to rent office space or pay for anything like heat, internet connections, electricity, phone lines, or anything else like that. There\u2019s a big expense that just vanished from your budget. Poof!<\/p>\n

Good home workers are self-starters, and that\u2019s exactly who you want on your team if you\u2019re a startup anyway. If you\u2019re worried about how many hours somebody on your team is working at a startup, that probably means you didn\u2019t hire the right person in the first place. If your team is properly motivated, they\u2019re going to be working just as hard to make the company succeed as you are whether they\u2019re at home, in an office, or anywhere else.<\/p>\n

Plus, counting hours is a waste of your time.<\/strong> You shouldn\u2019t care how many hours anyone on your team is working \u2014 tracking that is both time-consuming and pointless. What you should be focused on is results. If your team members are completing the tasks you need them to in the time you need them to, it doesn\u2019t matter at all whether they\u2019re in an office or at home. Conversely, if they\u2019re not completing the tasks they need to on time, then it should be time for them to hit the road no matter where they work from.<\/p>\n

Home workers allow you to spread your team out. This can be a big advantage, especially in Southeast Asia where you may be working on a product that\u2019s targeted at more than one country. If your team works from an office, everybody either has to be in one place or you need to pay for more offices in different locations. But if your team works from home, you can hire people all over the globe, which gives you access to more talent and more markets without destroying your budget.<\/p>\n

Working from home keeps employees happier.<\/strong> This one is a bit subjective, but at many startups your team members are going to be putting in long hours each day to stay on top of everything. If they\u2019re spending 12 hours a day in an office, that can pretty quickly become soul-crushing, which means you either need to spend more money to buy them food and free massages (or whatever) or allow your workers to become soulless drones (that\u2019s never a good thing). But working long hours from home is easier, as you can still see your loved ones easily every time you take a break or stop for a meal. As I write this article, I\u2019m sitting next to my wife on the couch, and our dog is lying on the floor in front of us. I\u2019m not talking to my wife or playing with the dog, obviously, but I still feel a lot happier and more comfortable here than I would if I was in an office all day. That\u2019s all subjective, of course, but studies have shown that work from home employees really are happier and we all know that happy workers are more productive than unhappy ones.<\/p>\n

The tools for working collaboratively from home are here.<\/strong> Even a few years ago, it would have been much harder to have your teams work from home and still be working together, but these days there are a plethora of mature solutions for collaborative working from home. Here at Tech in Asia we tend to use Skype for conferencing and chatting and Google Docs for collaborative editing, but if those tools don\u2019t fit your workflow, something else out there probably does.<\/p>\n

Working from home doesn\u2019t mean never working together in the real world. Sometimes, you really do have to be there, and it\u2019s important to remember that working from home doesn\u2019t preclude that. Different companies will have different needs, but I think most work-from-home companies do have meetings or events in real life from time to time. Here at Tech in Asia, most of us meet up for our Startup Asia conferences. Does it cost a decent chunk of change to fly team members around for meetings like that? Sure, but it\u2019s still cheaper than renting an office in the long run.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, you can avoid most of the problems associated with working from home by just hiring a trustworthy team that\u2019s actually motivated to help you build the company. And guess what: if you\u2019re planning to do a startup that\u2019s the kind of team you should be building anyway. Working from home saves you money, makes workers happier, and allows you to broaden your searches for talent and to spread more easily and cheaply into new markets. As I see it, that\u2019s a win-win-win-win. Unless there\u2019s some reason you absolutely need to be in an office (and yes, there are some companies that really do need that for one reason or another), why would you be?<\/p>\n

www.techinasia.com<\/em>
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