Autonomy

For years I sat in an office environment with people constantly coming and going. The commotion and activity always made me feel like someone was looking over my shoulder. This probably isn't true but perception is reality. Engineers who have quiet time to get their work done free of distractions have a tendency to both do better work and learn new things more quickly. Sometimes we hinder our own growth by asking the next person how to do something rather than just doing that thing ourselves and learning through failure cycles.

The inherent autonomy that comes from a person working remotely helps both the company and the engineer. Independance can help a person achieve loftier goals and with a higher sense of satisfaction.

Life-work Balance

I put life first in Life-work balance because I don't believe that we should be identified by our work first, even in a professional situation. Being able to trade a commute for a workout, taking the kids to school, lunch with a friend, etc will add to the value of the employee's life.

Employees with more time for family, friend and hobbies are happier. I don't have the stats to back that up but do I really need them?

Hire the Best Engineers

Gone are the days of only being able to hire the best engineers within 30 minutes of your office, you can now open up your hiring to highly qualified individuals across the world. I do find that it's best to have engineers at least overlap a few working hours for collaboration but there is no reason that your devs couldn't live in Alabama, California, Maine or Germany.

Less Distractions

When I say less distractions I mean the off-the-cuff kind you'll find in an office setting. If we can limit the amount of impromptu meetings our engineers are in we can maximize their time for deep work. Working remote also give us the opportunity to mute our notifications and just focus.

Savings!

If you don't have to spend so much on an office, think of all the money your company can save. Even on the high end, a full remote setup for an engineer is less than $5k while an office can cost close to that each month! My recommendation is to take some these savings and put them toward on location team building events or team conference budgets. We obviously can't do these things during the pandemic but there will come a day again where we can get together to teach, learn and team-build.