When you’re running a company, you know that time is money. So how does one manage to save a little bit of both for a business? Start-ups are often penny pinching to make it through the earliest stages of development, while well-established companies aim to have a seamless workflow that allows for the most productivity with the least amount of cost. Hiring remote employees is one surefire way to help accomplish both.
What Are Opportunity Costs?
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “opportunity cost” as the following:
In layman’s terms, opportunity cost is defined as the costs acquired from not making use of an alternative option.
How Does Opportunity Cost Affect Businesses?
To further understand how opportunity cost can affect businesses, check out this typical scenario below that demonstrate a way in which companies can lose money because it didn’t make a wiser, alternative decision.
- Employee X works as a company’s social media manager, making her responsible for all of the company’s social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.). The company decides that they want to revamp their website, doing a complete redesign of it that is more modern and use-friendly. Because Employee X is the most tech-savvy of all the employees, they task her with the website redesign. Unfortunately, Employee X has never designed a website before, and thusly, she must spend hours learning how to make use of website templates, figuring out how to individualize the design, and even learning some basic coding. This ends up costing the company time, as Employee X must work overtime hours to do both this and her usual tasks of updating the company’s social media profiles. (Additionally, the website revamp isn’t able to be as spectacular as the company envisioned because of Employee X’s limited abilities given the time frame).
How Does Remote Hiring Save Time & Money?
Remote hiring opens the door for companies to employ the best in business despite location. This means that companies can bring out full-time or contract remote employees to help accomplish tasks that the current employees are not capable of doing at the same speed or level of professionalism. Let’s revisit our case study from above when remote hiring is implemented:
- Instead of tasking Employee X with building a new website, the company instead decides to hire a remote website designer. Because they’ve hire a remote website designer who specializes in building websites, the project is completed quickly and professionally at a fair rate for the job. The company ends up saving money as Employee X does not need to be paid out for overtime hours, which would would have ended up costing more than hiring a professional website designer. (Additionally, the website revamp is a complete success, looking much more professional than it would have if Employee X tried to build it with her limited web design knowledge).
Final Thoughts
Remote hiring allows for companies to bring on the top talent to complete work instead of overpaying unskilled employees to complete jobs for which they are not trained. Many times, the amount it would cost (both in time and money) to train an employee in learning a skill is much higher than it would cost to hire a specialist who can get the work completed at a significantly faster rate and for a lower cost.
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Originally shared on Remote.com