Illustration of a woman working on her computer while eating cookies. It reads "Working from home is working for customers Find out why customers love our Work-From-Home options."

How Cloudstaff’s work-from-home initiative continues to support the company’s growth

As one of the leading outsourcing providers in the Philippines, Cloudstaff is committed to building the “Number One Workplace” by creating workspaces that staff love. It has resulted in higher retention rates, greater productivity and far less absenteeism. It is great for staff, it is great for our customers, it is great for us. Due to the pandemic, we extended this philosophy to include our work-from-home offices, and it is delivering great results.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Cloudstaff’s work-from-home initiative has been a key factor in the company’s continual growth. Cloudstaff contributes to SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth by employing almost 4,000 skilled professionals.

With the rise of cloud-based services as a result of technological changes and globalization, many companies have embraced outsourcing to reduce their operational costs and improve efficiency. Outsourcing has provided incredible opportunities for SMEs to maximize their ROIs by reducing their workforce management overheads and costs, providing access to new talent pools, reducing their staff churn and reducing their operational exposure. Businesses can build their own teams of dedicated, experienced staff for a fraction of the cost of hiring locally. 

In addition, Cloudstaff’s corporate culture creates a friendly, supportive, well-connected network that encourages collaboration, professional and personal development, and workplace excellence. This culture is the foundation of the Cloudstaff Experience which includes amazing perks, events and benefits for all staff. The company’s CEO and founder, Lloyd Ernst, highlights how important it is to take care of employees and stay tightly connected even when many of them are working from home. Being able to retain and retrain staff contributes not just to the continued growth of the customers but to the continued success of the company as well. Initiatives like Cloudstaff Newsroom and Cloudstaff Studio are dedicated to keeping staff engaged, entertained and informed.

“In the future businesses will get smaller, not larger,” said Lloyd. It’s important for SMEs to focus on people that add value to the organization and strategies that help drive innovation and growth and to leave everything else such as workspaces, hardware and software, HR and payroll, and government compliance to Cloudstaff.

Cloudstaff offers a hardware management program called mPC (Managed PC) which provides the perfect hardware and peripherals for offshore teams without the upfront costs and to maximize their productivity. It delivers high availability and business continuity for companies looking for hardware portability.

In Q1 of 2020, Cloudstaff received investment from private equity fund manager Navegar with partners like SIFEM who has invested USD 15 million in Navegar Fund II in 2019. This financing enables Cloudstaff to continue its expansion and further improve corporate structuring and back-end processes. According to Lloyd, this successful collaboration has allowed them to change the scope of their thinking and make much better decisions, which has been very invaluable.

Working from home is here to stay and it is expected that many of Cloudstaff’s employees will be working from home permanently. This new setup comes with several benefits, including increased flexibility, improved staff retention, safer working conditions, and more time for staff to spend with their families. However, this does not change Cloudstaff’s commitment to attracting the best talent, which in turn, attracts great clients and yields good returns on investment.

Read about how this strategy is benefiting one of our customers, The Swiss Investment Fund for Emerging Markets, on their website. https://sifem.ch/impact/impact-stories/cloudstaff

The Swiss Investment Fund for Emerging Markets is the development finance institution of the Swiss Confederation. SIFEM promotes long-term, sustainable and broad-based economic growth in developing and emerging countries by providing financial support to commercially viable small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) as well as fast-growing enterprises, which in turn helps to create secure and permanent jobs and reduce poverty.