On Monday, the Indiana Chamber released its Top 5 legislative priorities for the 2021 session. Among them is “increasing incentives for attracting remote workers to Indiana.” Recruiting people to live and work in our state, regardless of their employers’ headquarters, will increase the talent pool in Indiana and our tax base.
Other state and local jurisdictions have enacted incentives to attract remote workers. An October 2020 assessment of Vermont’s program, for example, concluded the following: “[The program] has increased Vermont’s population of taxpayers, and has increased the number of children enrolled in Vermont schools. This strategy and incentive also helped strengthen Vermont’s employment base, at a time when Vermont faced a workforce shortage and employers were struggling to find workers.”
Between January 2019 and January 2020, Vermont awarded $500,000 to 140 new Vermont remote workers. Grants ranged from $400 to $5,000, with the average grant size being $3,571, and were awarded to reimburse remote workers for certain relocation expenses. In total, 298 new Vermonters resulted from the program between the grantees, their spouses and children. Sixty-four percent of grantees were under age 40 and 91% had at minimum a college education.
Indiana must establish itself as the destination for those looking to leave congested cities and the coasts. We must, of course, simultaneously retain existing residents working for the many Indiana employers that are expanding remote work options.
Top Indiana businesses will continue to utilize remote work in the next one to two years, the start of what will likely be a permanent increase in work-from-home flexibility for office workers, according to the Indiana Chamber’s recent Employer Workforce Survey. For example, Salesforce is permitting employees to work from home through July 31, and Eli Lilly and Company said its office workers will continue to be remote for the foreseeable future.
As we reported in July, remote work is nothing new. It has been a growing trend in the U.S., surging by 173% since 2005 before the pandemic struck. However, misconceptions about the performance of remote workers are prevalent, with a common one being that in order to “get the best from your employees” they must be together in a physical space under the watchful eye of a manager.
The truth is remote workers are often actually more productive, more engaged and save companies money – and the data from Gallup help prove it:
- Companies that offered remote work reported a highly engaged workforce with 41% lower absenteeism, 40% fewer quality defects and 21% higher profitability.
- Engaged remote employees created a 15% increase in productivity.
- Employees who work remotely from 60% to 80% of the time strongly agreed that their development goals were being met and felt that someone cared about their progress.
- Remote working lowers the environmental impact with a reduced carbon footprint, which is attractive to millennials who have become the largest age group in the workforce.
- Twenty-six percent reported being able to do part of their jobs more efficiently.
- Eighty percent reported being able to better manage interruptions from co-workers.
Additionally, having a remote workforce just makes good financial sense for many. Companies will no longer have to spend big dollars renting and maintaining large workspaces that offer each employee their own individual workstation. A small space for specific meetings or gatherings of only a portion of the workforce at a time may be enough.
It reduces the costs of company-provided perks such as break room coffee and snacks. Also, since retention is higher with a work-from-home staff, it reduces the expenses associated with attrition and having to replace employees who leave the company.
On a related note, e-learning is also on the rise once again. As Indiana schools prepare to continue e-learning in 2021 to protect against the spread of COVID-19, however, more than 84,000 Hoosier students still do not have internet access at home.
