Andela, a leading African engineering outsourcing company, announced back in May in a Medium post that it was going remote. In other words, it will shut down its physical offices across Africa and sell off its assets.
Now the news of Andela going remote appears to surprise everyone even though it was already in the public domain.
So, you would wonder why the fuss about Andela going remote?
Well, when Jeremy Johnson announced that Andela was going remote, the engineering outsourcing firm also disclosed that it will lay off 135 employees across five markets as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic begins to bite.
Hence the news of Andela going remote may have been masqueraded by the layoffs.
The layoffs which affected mostly senior Andelans were announced during CEO Johnson’s video conference call attended by over 1,300 staff from Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Egypt, and the United States.
In J0hnson’s Medium post, he wrote: “This week, we announced at an all-hands that we are going to be a remote-first company.
“While we’ve always been a leader in distributed work, we’ve now proven that we can operate fully remote by delivering excellent work to our customers over the past couple of months. We will continue to ensure that our engineers have the infrastructure needed to operate at a world-class level.
“In addition to going fully remote, the transition to a focus on enabling talent requires us to think differently about talent itself. We are broadly known as the top network of engineers across the continent of Africa.
“While we’ve trained more than 100,000 people through programs like the Andela Learning Community, in order to actually be placed with a company, you’ve historically had to be a full-time Andela employee.
“This limits the opportunities we’re able to provide, and it also limits the breadth of talent available to our customers. Moving forward, we will expand the network to include top engineers from across the continent, and eventually around the world — and we won’t require engineers to be full-time employees to apply for opportunities.”
The future of work is remote. Hence, the move by Andela to go remote should not surprise anyone as long as it can offer the same standards as when they own physical offices. Of course, we all know that Andela won’t drop its standards!
