Silver lining? Working at home may help company recruitment

By Brice Wallace

The COVID-19 pandemic could have a long-lasting effect that benefits Utah companies looking to recruit and retain the best talent.

Speakers at a pair of recent Utah investment gatherings said the ability for employees to work from anywhere has been proven effective and could aid companies looking for workers who don’t want to move to Utah and also those who might come here and not want to leave.

Dalton Wright, partner at Kickstart Seed Fund, said future trends might have people return to office settings for in-person interaction and meetings.

“But I think what has been changed forever for us is, it’s no longer an experiment to know if you can build a distributed company, it’s no longer an experiment to know if you can have team members all around the world,” Wright said during a panel discussion about the investing market during VentureCapital.Org’s 37th annual Investors Choice event.

“What that means is that you can attract the very best talent and you don’t have to convince them anymore to come move to Provo.”

At the Entrepreneur & Investor Life Science Summit, presented by BioUtah, a panel was asked about Utah companies’ limitations to growth related to the inability to attract experienced senior management. Amy Belt Raimundo, vice president and managing director at Kaiser Permanente Ventures, said one portfolio company has gone entirely virtual, with the CEO moving to Miami. Remote work “has gone on so long, it really does create new opportunities for people to collaborate differently,” she said.

“I think it’s a tremendous opportunity to be able to tap talent. That said, everyone is now able to tap talent all over the country and all over the world, so the competition doesn’t go away. It changes,” Raimundo said.

“I think overall it’s really good for geographies that typically weren’t getting as much attention or didn’t have all the components in one physical place. You can now source your leadership components from different locations.”

Wright said remote work has both challenges and benefits, but one opportunity is to “access talent you never could access before” — especially for companies not “right in these very specific geographies.”

“I think that’s been changed fundamentally by this,” he said. “I think there will always be pockets of innovation. There’s face-to-face interactions that are super-high-bandwidth and you can’t entirely replace that with a virtual experience, but I do believe that we are not going back to the old way of organizing labor.”

Wright added that when workers “have a taste of freedom” and work/life balance in a way that some of them have experienced through the pandemic, the best people are going to dictate how they want to work and they’re going to choose to work with other similar-caliber people, “wherever they’re found.”

Speaking at the BioUtah event, Jason Lettmann, general partner at Lightstone Ventures, said remote-work technology has created “an opportunity to recruit talent to Utah” and other locations “that aren’t on the radar, so to speak.”

Part of the current “brave new world” includes companies relocating from the likes of the Bay Area and Boston, he said. And in biopharma, he said, competition is so great for C-level executives “that’s it’s just becoming cost-prohibitive and a lot of boards are thinking about whether it’s really worth that.”

Opportunities abound “as other places get overheated and we’ve seen the benefits of remote work,” Lettmann said.

Raimundo, using technology to participate in the BioUtah event, suggested Utah could capitalize on the new tech capabilities to attract people to the state but work for outside companies.

“Obviously, I’m sitting here in San Francisco right now, and it’s on the news all the time how people are fleeing in large numbers, because the cost to living is tough,” she said. “And making places that are beautiful and lovely like Utah super-attractive to live [in] and if you can do that from a remote presence perspective, I think it creates incredible opportunities.”