Remote is here to stay and changes everything
Interview with Søren Thomsen,
founder of Netminds and InterLogic
I started another company called InterLogic almost 20 years ago, which today employs approx. 350 employees in Denmark, Poland and Ukraine. In approx. for just as long there has been a shortage of IT specialists. According to one survey from April 2022 carried out by Rambøll, 4 out of 5 Danish IT companies have problems with recruitment. More than half have said no to orders and new customers. Outsourcing has been a possible solution to the resource problem. At least it has been for InterLogic's customers and many others who have built development teams in Ukraine and Poland. Others could not dream of it.
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Corona changed everything
When I asked why outsourcing was not considered, it was very much about being onsite. Fair enough. Then Corona came and changed our working pattern from one day to the next. Everyone was forced to work from home and hold online meetings. Even our children had to get used to being in school online. It has gone surprisingly well. Productivity has not decreased. The preliminary results show almost the opposite, and now the employees don't really want to go back again. At least not to the same extent as it was before.
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It probably depends on the country, industry and role. My guess isr however, that in the IT industry there will be three approx. equal-sized groups: Those who come to the office every day. Those who always work from home with few exceptions, and those who come in 2-3 days a week.
50% choose us if we do not offer remote
As an employer I am still nervous about the company culture. Can we link people together when they do not meet every day and what role our office will play in the future. We invent new ways of being together. But many will consider changing jobs if we insist that they come to the office every day as before. And when we are looking for new employees, it narrows down the selection of candidates considerably. Maybe around 50%. There are many talented people who only go for remote jobs. According to a survey carried out by Dansk Industri indicates 58% of companies that offer working from home to attract employees.
Aarhus and Gdańsk are same distance from Copenhagen
And this is where the question arises. If you are remote anyway, does it matter whether you sit in one place or the other? If it is fine that we see each other daily on Microsoft Teams and meet every two or three weeks in Copenhagen, there is almost no difference whether you sit in Aarhus, Gothenburg or Gdańsk on a daily basis. From Gdańsk it takes 1 hour with Ryanair to be in Copenhagen, so both financially and time-wise you can be onsite quite often.
It suddenly opens up a lot of possibilities and solutions to our recruitment problem in Denmark. This is the idea behind Netminds: Remote consultants who can also be onsite.
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We areplan B
Plan A is of course to recruit a skilled employee close to your company called, who wants to come to the office every day. Good luck with that. It is not impossible, but there are simply not enough IT specialists in Denmark for, that everyone can be so lucky. We are plan B, which is better than saying no to tasks because you don't have resources.
