Addressing the Location Stack Requires Data-Driven Decision Tools
5 Key Drivers You Need to Know About
Madhu Chamarty, CEO and Co-Founder
Angel investor and entrepreneur Balaji S. Srinivasan recently shared on Twitter that “the location stack is the set of choices for where you live, where your company is incorporated, where your code is located, and so on. Due to remote, crypto, and COVID these are all now free parameters. The map has opened up.” His Tweet got me thinking about how the idea of the location stack has changed, particularly in response to the way that the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the need for remote work and distributed locations. Now the decision about where a company works is a complex (and ongoing) optimization problem.
Important workforce and workplace trends that began to take shape over a year ago are not going away anytime soon: remote work for specific jobs, spoke-node-hub models for high-growth companies, the need to reduce talent and real estate costs, and tech-driven companies’ growing interest in secondary markets. The way we worked during the height of the pandemic revealed that people want greater choice in where they live and work. The discussions about lifestyle and economics as people moved to new geographies temporarily has, for many individuals, become a permanent, personal decision.
To get the best results when addressing the location stack, companies need constant optimization with data-driven decision support. BeyondHQ enables companies to do just that. Our real-time, collaborative SaaS platform helps HR, real estate, finance, and individual teams evaluate where, why, and how to source talent or open offices. Using a single user interface to access trusted market data, our proprietary technology informs collaborative “what-if” style scenario planning with customized recommendations based on a company’s specific needs, priorities, and culture.
Want to address your company’s location stack? Here are the five key drivers you need to know about for optimal results:
1 — Talent Capacity
When assessing what talent capacity includes, look at areas of occupation availability, talent density, and the presence of educational institutions (broader than just ‘top universities’).
BeyondHQ allows decision-makers to weigh criteria like occupation availability in the areas of technology, finance, SG&A, HQ functions, and life sciences.
2 — Workforce Characteristics
Workforce characteristics include current population and future projections, size of the workforce, changes in unemployment rates, and related considerations.
3 — Cultural Landscape
When an organization considers cultural diversity in a location, what are they honing in on? At the moment, we weigh diversity using factors including a cultural diversity index and international in-migration as a percentage of the total population.
4 — Business Environment
The Business Environment driver includes factors such as the state of the startup ecosystem, the potential for incentives, and broadband coverage — all elements that are favorable to setting up an effective business location.
5 — Location Attractiveness
You might think of Location Attractiveness as subjective, but we break it down extensively. Some factors can be weighted more heavily than others depending on your company culture and objectives. BeyondHQ includes factors such as metro walk score, AllTransit performance score, and direct flights frequency from San Francisco Bay Area and New York City.
Want to learn more about making talent and location decisions as you consider new distributed Hub-Spoke-Node models of work? Visit BeyondHQ at www.beyondhq.co or contact the author at madhu@beyondq.co.
