In response to the recent comments on home-working from the UK Prime, Minister Boris Johnson, we’d like to elaborate on how beneficial we find home-working as a remote-first digital technical agency.
In a recent interview with The Mail+, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his views on home-working very clear. Boris said ‘you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing’.
We know home-working isn’t for everyone but we’ve seen a lot of our fellow UK business community members responding to this, so we thought we’d add to the discussion and explain the beneficial aspects we have experienced in regards to remote-working.
At Filter, we are proud of our hard-working and dedicated team and we feel that remote-working helps us to encourage an inclusive and collaborative culture. There are no ‘office politics’ and our hierarchy is as flat as possible.
Although we don’t hold in-person meetings, we do hold a company-wide call at the beginning and end of each week, in order to provide a safe space for our colleagues to raise any concerns and to showcase their achievements.
We believe remote working provides a much better work-life balance and this empowers our team to manage their own work schedule as they feel trusted and respected.
For example, if anyone needs to pick the kids up from school or go to a doctors appointment etc, they have the flexibility to do so. We understand that everyone has personal commitments and responsibilities.
As we aren’t based in any one location, we have the benefit of having a much larger pool of candidates when recruiting for available positions. This allows us to find the right person with the right skills and attitude for each role.
We currently have colleagues based in the UK, Poland and Amsterdam for example. In fact, since 2020 we have grown our team by almost 50% and improved diversity and inclusivity as a result.
This makes us more disability-friendly and allows candidates who may have conditions such as anxiety or dyslexia to feel more relaxed and able to work at their own pace.
We have seen that trusting our colleagues to manage their own workload improves productivity and empowers them to create innovative solutions. They don’t need to worry about ‘looking busy’ or being micro-managed.
In February 2022 Finder reported that:
Working from home means we don’t contribute to the emissions caused by a daily commute, we don’t use any physical printed materials and we can all take our own steps to be more sustainable.
We’ve probably all experienced some form of recycling confusion during our career or even when we’re out and about in general. Our colleagues will know their own recycling processes and be able to take actions they are passionate about.
Overall, we are very proud of what we have built here at Filter and we appreciate the fact that our team are human beings with families and responsibilities. We look forward to continuing with remote-working and fostering an inclusive and innovative culture.
We highly recommend checking out the posts from some of our fellow members of the UK business community such as:
If you’d like to hear more from the Filter team, you can sign up to our newsletter or follow our CEO Oliver Morrison on LinkedIn or follow our company page.
