New study reveals young start-ups with predominantly office-based staff grow three and a half times faster than comparable organisations who are working remotely.
There is still much debate and strong feelings about the pros and cons of remote working, with unprecedented numbers of companies now offering a hybrid working model to accommodate workers who grew accustomed to the flexibility working from home gave them during the pandemic.
But while workers love remote working, bosses are not so keen, some would even go as far as hating it. Elon Musk has been most outspoken on the subject and Netflix boss Reed Hastings has cited remote work “a pure negative.”
Whilst some studies support productivity increases amongst certain types of remote workers, other studies confirm remote models are detrimental to core functions such as creativity and brainstorming, and certainly remote work can hold younger workers back when it comes to developmental opportunities.
There is no one size fits all but one thing is clear, for start-ups anyway, a new study has revealed that start-up businesses with staff based mostly in the office are outperforming their contemporaries by three and a half times in terms of revenue growth.
Early-stage investment company Reach Capital conducted an analysis of its portfolio of 37 start-up organisations using a model for how office-based and remote work might be configured, proving a strong argument for an office-based work approach.
The survey identified similarities in attrition and net promoter scores, so one must look elsewhere for reasons behind this marked difference in growth.
Creativity has long been a factor in the success of any organisation and the link between opportunities for chance face-to-face interactions and company growth has been the subject of numerous studies over the years. Chance encounters, those serendipitous ‘water cooler moments’, should not be underestimated, these can often be where the magic happens.
Clearly, there are arguments for every configuration of working arrangement in this post-pandemic era, but the evidence from this particular study is crystal clear and the potential to triple one’s revenue is obviously not something to be trifled with.
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