Over the next five years, $8 trillion in value gains will be realized by companies migrating to a modern and distributed workforce.
Globally, a viable work from home population exists within eight regions, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and higher-earning portions of ASIAPAC.
A few common and specific traits make these regions strong candidates for work from home, such as high personal and corporate income level, availability of infrastructure, the level of economic development, and a cultural openness to remote work.
Collectively, these eight viable geographies have a population of one billion. The working populace consists of 400 million people, and of those, 160 million will be permanent work from home.
Not only does this translate to a massive talent pool of remote workers, it’s also a major economic benefit to organizations interested in adopting a modern workforce.
Each remote worker saves their employer an average of $10,000 a year on workspace and related expenses. And these benefits are realized by employees as well, who can save between $2,500 and $4,000 a year spending part of the week working from home.
Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Shopify, and more have already announced long-term plans for permanent work from home. Shopify has permanent plans for employees to be remote-only and intend to rework office spaces to reflect this change.
Reducing the importance of a centralized location makes it easier for companies and organizations to re-allocate operational budgets to other areas. Gartner found that 22% of companies have either made or are planning to make cuts to real estate expenses in coming months as a response to work from home. Moody’s Analytics is already forecasting 20% vacancies for commercial real estate by 2022.
But the economic benefits are not just in rent, utility, and maintenance. Companies with remote work already see 25% lower employee turnover, lower payroll expenses, and higher productivity.
Across 160 million remote workers, these savings translate to $1.6 trillion in annual value creation. Over five years, that’s $8 trillion.
Chief Strategy Officer, DZS
Tuncay Cil serves as Chief Strategy Officer at DZS where he is responsible for driving strategic and growth initiatives across the organization. Before DZS Mr. Cil was a member of the senior leadership team at ASSIA for a decade, serving as SVP Product Management, EVP Enterprise Products, and most recently as Chief Strategy Officer.
Prior to ASSIA, Mr. Cil served as VP Product Management at AirTies and led their expansion into the European service provider market. He has also held multiple senior management roles in engineering, product development, technical marketing, and general management at a variety of both large publicly traded companies and venture backed start-ups throughout the Silicon Valley.
Mr. Cil holds BS degree in Physics from Bilkent University (Turkey) and an MBA from Yale University, where he was awarded John M. Olin Fellowship in Telecommunications Research.