Stay Home!

By: Ashley Sloat, Ph.D., President of Aurora Consulting LLC

I recently read an article about IBM collecting its marketing team back to an office building from their remote working situations. It made me think about Aurora’s distributed workforce and how I think our clients indirectly benefit.

​Aurora has been able to collect amazing talent by not being limited to a geographical location and not requiring people to uproot their families to work with us.

I love the idea of letting people do what they love from where they love. Nothing is more soul-crushing (in my opinion) than spending hours of your day commuting rather than with family or working, in an office or cubicle trying to balance workload and socialization, or inside instead of on your patio.

Now obviously, not everyone is disciplined enough to work from home. There are those of us that will find any possible excuse to be doing something other than work while at home. Some of us even need more of a physical separation between home and work so that the mind can focus on each one independently of the other. BUT let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. The work-from-home workforce 2.0 is already coming and it will be here to stay once it’s in full-force.

Also, there is so much technology at our fingertips today to enable “face-to-face” communication. For example, we at Aurora use Zoom and Google Hangouts for real-time face-to-face meetings that enable document sharing, screen sharing, and even your lovely face sharing.

So, while there is some need for or benefits of intra-office communication in some industries, I think the vast majority of industries will find that working from home is a wonderful start to finding impressive talent and happier employees and thus more satisfied clients.