June 2, 2017 at 15:37Remote work in numbers and diagrams
On My Circle, 35% of vacancies that offer remote work in the IT sector are posted monthly . At the same time, if we examine the database of the service summary, we will see that 67% of specialists are ready for remote work . There is a clear gap between the demand of employers for remote work and the supply of job seekers for it. As a result, there are an average of 3-4 times more responses to vacancies with remote work than to vacancies with office work. With the growing shortage of IT specialists, it is obvious that those employers who are ready to switch to remote work are in a better position.
We decided to figure out what the remote work market in Russia is like now. To do this, we conducted a survey among users of "My Circle" and "Habrahabr", collected nearly 3,000 responses, all processed, visualized and commented on them.
We hope that our modest study will help employers quickly understand how to work remotely in order to get obvious competitive advantages in staff. It can also be useful for applicants who have not yet had time to work remotely to get an idea of the advantages and disadvantages of such work and as a result have more choice in the IT vacancies offered on the market.
How many work remotely now and where
At the moment, every third is working remotely. Deleters can be divided into three categories. Most of the remote workers are company employees, one in four is a freelancer, and one in ten is self-employed. One in four of the remote workers works for a foreign company.
Only 20% of respondents do not have experience working remotely. Moreover, the vast majority of them are considering the possibility of such work. That is, from the side of the applicants there are no obstacles to the transition to remote locations.
The proportion of remote employees in relation to office workers is noticeably lower in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and significantly higher in small cities. Also, their share is many times lower in large companies compared to medium and small ones. Most likely, this situation is associated not only with the prevailing traditions of office work, but also with the fact that managing remote employees is much more difficult, with the growth of staff, the complexity of management increases exponentially.
The proportion of remote employees in relation to office workers is slightly higher at the age from 30 to 40 and noticeably lower at the most adult ages. It is interesting why, at earlier ages, the proportion of remote workers is lower, although these people immersed themselves in modern technology at an earlier age than previous generations? This is probably due to the fact that a person still needs to undergo some initial socialization, to get the experience of full-time working interaction with others.
If you look at the areas of activity, then the proportion of deleted workers is higher among content managers, marketers and designers, and lower among HR, analysts, testers and administrators.
If you look at the salary, then the relative share of remote workers is much higher in the cohorts with both the lowest and the highest salaries. The first is explained by the fact that at a distance it is much easier to trust a simpler and cheaper job. And the second is the fact that many remote workers choose to work in a foreign company, the salary of which is higher than in the domestic one. So, if on average a quarter of all remote workers work for foreign companies, then up to three quarters of those who have indicated large salaries.
Three myths about remote work
Remote work is surrounded by a lot of myths. We have already touched on one of them a little higher and saw that far from all remote workers work for foreign companies and earn more than others. Now let's look at a few more myths.
As you can see, only a small minority of remote workers use the remote work format to move to where they are more comfortable living, or to travel. Most of them spend the same or even more time on work than working in the office, but they manage their time more freely.
The advantages and disadvantages of remote work
The vast majority of remote workers prefer to work from home. Moreover, almost every fifth person works for a company located in his city.
Communication with colleagues from remote workers is not much different from communication between office employees. Half of them communicate with colleagues several times a day. Moreover, the majority does not happen at all in the employer's office.
We asked the same question about the advantages and disadvantages of remote work, both to those who already had experience of such work, and to those who have never had such experience, and got the following result. It is immediately obvious that people without experience tend to downplay their virtues (diagram on the left) and exaggerate disadvantages (diagram on the right), as is typical for people in general, there is nothing strange here.
Among the most commonly cited benefits of remote work are time savings on the road and a flexible work schedule. Many more like the potential opportunity to travel and work in comfortable familiar conditions.
Among the most frequently indicated shortcomings are the lack of full-time communication with colleagues and many distracting domestic factors. Among the shortcomings, they also most often point out the lack of informal communication with colleagues and the lack of understanding of the processes that occur in the company, loss of involvement.
Most believe that job satisfaction and effectiveness in it are in no way related to the remoteness of this work. At the same time, they are said three times more often that satisfaction from remote work is higher than from office work, and two times more often that higher efficiency.
Remote Tools
Finally, we decided to find out with the help of which tools people working remotely interact, we got a kind of top list.
The grandfather of remote corporate communication is still Skype grandfather (he was indicated by 77% of respondents) and Email great-grandfather (64%). In second place are newcomers such as Slack (40%) and Telegram (38%). And the phone, whatever one may say, is still popular (38%).
There are no absolute leaders among task management services. The first places belong to Jira (37% of respondents indicated this service for conducting tasks) and all the same Email (36%). Second places are taken by Trello (24%) and Redmine (18%).
As it turns out, almost no one watches time using special means: 56% said this. 21% use the capabilities of Jira and 11% - Redmine.
All diagrams were prepared using the infogr.am service