How to equip Fintech remote workers for success

Many Fintech companies have leaned into remote work. A recent search on builtin.com showed over five hundred Fintechs with remote work programs, and 185 that were fully remote. In this blog, we’ll look at the drivers for the growth of remote work in Fintechs and key considerations for how to best equip remote workers to maximize retention, engagement, and productivity.

Why Fintechs are going remote

While it may be tempting to think that finance work is too sensitive to conduct remotely, according to Accenture, the opposite is true. Even in traditional corporate environments, according to a January 2021 analysis conducted by the consulting firm, greater than 90% of finance functions can be done remotely on a permanent basis. Only site-specific work like cash collection, would need to be done on-site until contactless transactions are supported.

Source: Working remotely is good for finance

The major enablers for finance to work well on a remote basis are technology enablement, solid work from home policies, and inclusive cultures. That’s good news for Fintechs, since as modern Internet businesses they are enabled from the ground up for remote workforce.

No escaping the flexible work trend

If many Fintechs are leaning hard into remote work, it’s likely that more will soon be joining the crowd. According to McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey of 25,00 Americans in spring of 2022, 58% of respondents reported that they have the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week. Furthermore, when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87% take it.

In a recent Forbes article, Jeff Winner, the CEO of Fintech company Happy Money shared three predictions for Fintech companies’ evolution in 2023, and one of the three was that companies will need to embrace distributed work. He cites Owl Labs survey data that showed that not only did 24% more workers choose remote work in 2022 and 16% more chose hybrid work, but there was a 24% overall drop in interest in in-office work. This all jibes with the McKinsey findings.

Remote work poses a significant IT and facilities challenge

All that shifting, evolving, and disrupting of the workforce towards remote work is highly challenging for the teams that need to equip and support the workforce. We all know (or should know) that onboarding is a critical juncture for retention, engagement, and productivity. Workers waiting for equipment like laptops, monitors, and potentially ergonomic furniture to arrive (late) is not the way you want employees to start off in their new role. Just getting coordinated between HR, IT, and facilities, plus finance/procurement teams and delivering a smooth and delightful onboarding experience is a ton of work, and the manual processes of the office-based era just won’t do the trick.

But onboarding is only the start. To keep workers at the top of their game while they’re on board, and to make them your best advocates and recruiters (or returning employees) as they are off-boarded, you need to keep them well equipped and taken care of through the whole employee journey.

Anyone in IT can tell you this is not easy. So how do you plan and build for success?

Four keys to equipping remote workers for success

1. Be holistic. Plan for the entire employee journey and the entire equipment lifecycle. It’s very easy to just focus on onboarding and then on retrieving equipment. But that would be a mistake. You need to ensure that replacement, returns, repairs, and re-inventorying are just as tight and efficient as possible. Your asset efficiency, security, and employee productivity are at stake.
2. Be digital. You can’t deliver a transformative employee experience and workflow efficiency without (yes, pardon the dreaded buzzword use here) digital transformation. Employees need a delightful, e-commerce-like digital experience and real-time communications about how equipment is getting to them. HR, IT, facilities, finance teams need SaaS-managed workflows so they can work collaboratively from anywhere (the service teams are often remote too). You simply can’t run a great process on spreadsheets, post-it notes, and emails.
3. Be automated. Your best process will occur when you maximize automation opportunities. Go zero-touch provisioning, integrate your equipment onboarding with Okta workflows, and HRIS systems.
4. Be strategic. Getting equipment to your remote workforce is critical. But it’s not strategic. If you’re an IT leader, your team’s strategic focus needs to be driving top-line revenue or creating net-new innovations, products, or services. At Firstbase, we’ve talked with companies who have devoted nearly half of their IT headcount and resources to build the process, toolsets, facilities, and team to get a handle on the remote work equipment process. It’s not worth it. There is a better way.

How to get to great fast

Firstbase has built an entire cloud-based platform complete with procurement teams, global facilities, flexible equipment procurement options (buy, lease, supply your own), a delightful digital employee experience, SaaS workflows, SSO and HRIS integrations, and highly responsive logistics and customer support. You can lean on Firstbase to take your Fintech’s remote work experience to the next level.  If you’d like to learn more, request a demo.