Remote Work Benefits That Should Not Be Overlooked

We work with finance and budget departments in organizations of all sizes. Even in large organizations, these teams tend to be small (and getting smaller). The best approach for small groups is to enable them to do more with less, do it better, and do it faster. It can be challenging to think of creative ways to drive these efficiency gains.

As a small company, we feel this pressure too. The skills we require of our professionals are hard to find, develop, and maintain. It’s a unique combination of accounting, technology, and a deep understanding of finance department business processes, earned by decades of experience working IN public sector finance.

We are always looking for ways to increase efficiency. Nearly a decade ago, we implemented a remote work strategy for our company with this aim in mind. We invested heavily in technology to enable it, such as: • all meetings and training sessions are conducted online and recorded, • we host the recordings of our meetings/training so clients can play them back at will, • we use transcription services to facilitate easy searching of recorded meetings, • we use online project management tools to keep our clients apprised of project status at all times, • all our systems (servers, phones, etc.) are remotely accessible.

Today we are a 100% remote work organization, and our team is spread out across North America. Here are four big benefits to working remotely:

1)FLEXIBILITY

Benefits for our Team: From spending a month at the beach in Mexico or a few weeks in Japan, temporarily relocating does not necessarily mean you are eating into your vacation. If you have good office space and an excellent internet connection, the world is your oyster. We hear from our teammates regularly how much they appreciate the flexibility.

Benefits for our Clients: Being remotely enabled means we can quickly jump from helping one client in Florida at 9 am to one in Oregon at 11 am and then provide 4 hours of training to clients from Ontario in the afternoon.

2)EFFICIENCY

Every organization cares about maximizing output. We REALLY care. It is what we help our clients do every day. Even though there’s a lot of evidence for increased general productivity, with remote work, consider the time savings from commuting alone.

The average commute time to the office in Canada and the US is about 26 minutes. You could reasonably expect similar results on the trip home. There are better things you could be doing with 52 minutes a day (working out, walking the dog, or playing with your kids).

3)HAPPINESS

Think of the stress and frustration that traffic causes: rushing to work or rushing home to make dinner or take the kids to after-school sports.

There can also be challenges related to remote work. The primary ones are burnout and loneliness. For us, the loneliness component is partially mitigated as we are working together on projects for clients continuously. We have a full staff meeting online weekly with webcams to catch up, discuss requirements and deadlines, and provide training, which results in lots of

human interaction. Finally, we attend, speak, and teach at a dozen or more conferences per year, which gives us a chance to spend in-person time with clients and other teammates.

4)RECRUITMENT

If we were a traditional, office-locked company, we would recruit in our city and be largely constrained by the local talent pool. Or we would need to convince a candidate to relocate. Unlike some of our competitors, we can avoid these twin constraints. We have the luxury of drawing from a much larger pool (the world) and do not need to upset anyone’s life with relocation.

We understood that to grow and thrive, we needed to think differently. Remote work was one of our strategies, and it continues to provide exceptional ROI for us, enabling us to stay far ahead of the competition and provide the best service to our clients.

JAMIE BLACK is President of F.H. Black & Company Incorporated. For over 25 years, he has consulted and trained finance officers, auditors & accountants in government, higher education, and corporations throughout Canada and the U.S. His work focuses on increasing finance department efficiency and effectiveness through the implementation of technology and improved business processes.