Not every company can implement working from anywhere. As a software product company, with clients in almost every continent, Addteq finds its equilibrium in being global. What are the advantages for a software product company to be geographically diverse?
Having our employees in different parts of the world, working in different timezones, allows us to be closer to the user in interacting with them and understand their nuances in using our products, especially for clients that have a large user base. The support and/or customer experience person will be available quicker, understand the user better and respond effectively, this creates a connection between the user and the product.
Cloud services, especially the ones that everyone relies on to collaborate, are also sensitive to outages, availability issues, speed and latency. When you have a deadline, meeting or working on a project with others, the last thing you want to experience is any delay because of a service. Having your support close to you reduces the response time and resolution time. It is a great benefit to the user and the product.
Creative input increases with having employees with different backgrounds, working in different locations. Developing collaborative products such as Excellentable that help team members to edit, share and scale up data in real time from different parts of the world requires the creative input that can be perfected with diversity. The ideas coming from different backgrounds, cultures can bring the agility, creativity, and innovation.
The last point is also my favorite, stress management, employee morale and retention. Our R&D team has frequent releases. In each release, the first 24 hours is very important because anything can happen in different parts of the world. Having employees in different time zones that can triage the issues without much delay to get the information and channel in the right direction is very important. This reduces the stress on your most valuable employees. Think about a situation where a user in Japan reports an important bug or an outage which someone in the US needs to solve or be aware of.
So, there are definite advantages in creating a global workforce that can function well together. Whether it is customer experience, support or creativity. It helps both the organization and the workforce.
