25 Companies Going Remote Permanently

Flexible and open talent are broad terms, covering scenarios from local freelancers coming on-premises to globally distributed online contractors to innovation sourcing through tournaments or contests. The defining feature is project-based or temporary work that is staffed with workers who are not permanently attached to a company. If done correctly, these ways of working can help organizations access skilled talent while providing the flexibility that many workers increasingly crave. The bottom line was also a factor; 53% of companies who permanently closed office space say they did so to save money. The company also plans to open new office hubs across the world to accommodate employees who aren’t ready to work remotely. “The vision is to have one floor of office spaces in ten cities, rather than ten floors of office space in one city,” said Armstrong.

Slack will not open its offices—which range from Dublin and Vancouver to New York City and Istanbul—until June 2021 at the earliest. In the meantime, the company is optimizing its remote work policies and practices. “We’re using this moment as an opportunity to try new things and question long-held assumptions about nearly everything,” said Robby Kwok, Senior Vice President of People at Slack. As a result, Coinbase’s new policy will give the company a wider talent pool to hire from—no matter where employees prefer to work. Although remote working is becoming commonplace in most Western European countries, the flexible method has not been fully accepted among Czechs, especially by employers, despite the country being just as technologically equipped as its peers. The “virtual” part of the name simply refers to the way in which the company establishes its presence in the country.

Well-known companies with fully remote or hybrid work setups

Results from the Gallup Workforce survey are based on self-administered web surveys conducted May 26-June 9, 2021, with a random sample of 9,915 U.S. adults employed full or part time, companies going remote permanently aged 18 and older, who are members of the Gallup Panel. For results based on these samples, the margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

A hybrid structure allows some employees to work remotely while other team members work from a central location or office. All hiring and onboarding has some costs — whether screening a freelancer, setting up a contest, or hiring a full-time role. If a project or task is going to be repeated over time, the scale tips toward making a more permanent hire to economize on these costs, especially if they involve training a new hire on firm-specific processes.

Companies Going Remote Long Term

It’s also possible that the decontextualization that helps to facilitate using open talent reduces IP risk — for example, information leakage without context tends to be a less useful datapoint than seeing the big picture. As a result, the open model can potentially create siloes that, in some cases, protect IP better than traditional working arrangements. With these factors in mind, we believe that remote work is hastening a shift that reduces hiring, screening, and monitoring costs for managers and lessens burdens on workers to understand firm-specific context. In surveys conducted by Ozimek from a representative panel of firms, more than half of hiring managers indicated that remote work has opened up their ability or willingness to utilize remote freelancers, both during the pandemic and going forward.