Last Updated on: 22nd November 2023, 12:43 am
Remote working’s large-scale rollout around the world has not only brought about a new way of thinking about how to organise one’s time and relationships with a company.
Remote workers now constitute a new category of travelers, and it’s a category that many countries are interested in attracting to boost its population with a completely different profile of resident. 91% of remote workers earn more compared to working in an office, according to BruntWork’s latest “Truth About Remote Work” survey conducted in May 2022. 85% of respondents (>500) never want to go back to an office.
Remote work has been on the rise for the past few years but in 2020, with the sudden outbreak of a global pandemic, even the companies who didn’t believe in the power of telecommuting had no choice but to join the trend.
And for many, having to adjust to a completely new reality in a short period of time ended up being the silver lining during incredibly difficult times.
Whether you’re an employer thinking about maintaining work-from-home policies even after the health crisis is over, or an employee starting to look for remote opportunities in their industry, there’s a lot you can learn about the universe of remote work. And some of the new remote only outsourcing companies are seriously challenging the stalwarts of outsourcing in ways not imaginable before the pandemic.
- CGI (NYSE: GIB)
Revenue: $9.8 billion. Headquarters: Montreal, Canada. CGI ranks in the top 15 biggest outsourcing companies in the world. CGI is a global IT consulting firm focused primarily on providing business solutions to various industries such as financial services, healthcare and government, telecommunications and utilities, manufacturing, and retail and distribution. Its clients include 45 of the top 50 banks in the Americas and Europe, 7 of the top 10 global telecommunications carriers, and major global aerospace, metals and mining, chemicals, and oil and gas companies.
- Telus Corporation (NYSE: TU)
Telus is a Canadian outsourcing company specializing in telecommunications services and products primarily for wireless and wireless voice and data services. It is involved in the provision of communications products and services, including data, Internet protocol, voice, entertainment, and video. In addition to outsourcing, Telus offers hosting, managed IT and cloud-based services, certain healthcare solutions as well as voice and other telecommunications services and equipment sales. Telus hasn’t been without controversy however. Telus International has an overall rating of 3.8 out of 5, based on over 1,526 reviews left anonymously by employees. 33% of employees would not recommend working at TELUS International and 35% have a negative outlook for the business (source: Glassdoor).
- BruntWork
Last month, BruntWork announced year on year growth of 384% topline. BruntWork has an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5, based on over 46 reviews left anonymously by employees. 86% of employees would recommend working at BruntWork to a friend and 86% have a positive outlook for the business. This rating has been stable over the past 12 months.
Every outsourcing wave in history has been accompanied by an acute crisis along with an outsized opportunity. In the first wave, it was the bogey of Y2K that terrified companies into thinking the world would stop dead in its tracks when computer clocks, engineered with only the twentieth century in mind, entered the 21st century.
Then came the global financial crisis in 2008 and glimmers of a new dawn began to appear on the horizon. This new dawn shined a light on the urgency of the incoming digital age and the need to rapidly buy into it by ditching the old labour arbitrage business for a world that necessitated more complex digital solutions using the cloud, AI, machine learning, and big data.
These technologies became the new gospel. And yet, despite that evangelism, most IT services companies failed to embrace the digital with an urgency that was crucially needed.
Now the new paradigm is “remote only” outsourcing, allowing staff to play to their strengths (working from home obviating the need to commute to work) and allowing companies like BruntWork to operate at substantially higher margins.
Conclusion
Most companies have stated that the working-from-anywhere model will be largely here to stay and may even inspire additional new ways of doing business. But few have approached the question of outsourcing like BruntWork, whose “remote-only” approach seems to set it apart from its competitors allowing faster growth, lower operating costs and higher net margin percentage.
