All or nothing with remote work

Since there's nothing that starts flame wars more than talking about remote work, hope you brought your matches.

I find myself thinking of remote work a lot when I'm on trains to somewhere new. It means we're saying goodbyte to our old rythms and need to figure out everything from scratch - where to work, where to get coffee, where to work out. In Cascais we solved for some of these by joining a local coworking space.¹ More than 80% were remote workers.

Covid was the largest natural experiment we've seen within the last 50 years. It forced adaptation in places that otherwise see no need to change. And that proved a few things to me:

• Companies can add tech and policies to faciliate remote work. Even notoriously secretive companies (consulting groups, lawfirms, etc) were able to configure remote working tools to their infosec policies. And they adapted very quickly when productivity was on the line.
• Most BigCo executives had never even considered remote work. It's not that they weighed the pros and cons and picked the office. They didn't entertain it as a reasonable choice or the purview of "serious companies".
• People can be equally productive at home but bosses typically trust them less. That can impact career growth especially when you're competiting with people who are in person. There's game theory to the individual choice to go to the office when it's presented as an option.
• The main increase in productivity typically comes from fewer breaks and sick-days. On average people seem able to lock in both in person and remotely about the same.

Some companies jumped the gun a bit on permanent policy changes though:

The company said if employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue doing so “forever,” then “we will make that happen.”

Musk emailed employees at 2:30 in the morning, writing that "office is not optional." In the email, he complained that half of the San Francisco headquarters was empty the day before.

-- Twitter 2020 vs. 2023

Like clockwork, the same arguments are usually raised on one side and the other. I'm ignoring the work-life balance of remote work not because it isn't important in life, but because companies are always going to want to maximize throughput.

Pro Remote:

• More focus and fewer distractions to actually getting work done
• Less time on commute means more time for work
• Better talent when searching worldwide
• Forced documentation of processes and knowledge because it's built into decision making culture

Pro Office:

• People are less productive at home
• People need to be in the office to be creative or collaborate
• People build community in person and a corporate culture helps people stay engaged
• People need to be in the office to learn

What seems clear to me: there's no definitively right answer. Some people prefer the atmosphere of working in person. Some people hate the commute and need the peace of their own space to do their best work. The answer is clear at the personal level. At the organization level, it's impossible to say.

This leads to a tension in established organizations. There's a tug from the management to get back in the office. That's a question of personality (more extroverts in management than introverts) and job description (supervision is easier when you're in the same room). Among people actually doing the work it's a harder question. How much space you need to process information, where do you do your best work, how much deep focus you require, etc?

If a company starts from scratch, it has an inherit advantage. You can choose to recruit from the pool of people who prefer in-office work, or choose to recruit from the people that prefer remote only. If expectations are clear up front you can make sure to hire the right people given your priority set. The difficulty in larger companies is they already have a mix of those people, either from covid where everything was remote or when people discovered their preference was actually working remotely.

Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. You're obligated to be in-person a few days a week, but there's probably a few people on your team that are remote that same day. So you've just sunk time into the commute only to hop on the same Zoom call you would have done at home. One wasted hour of productivity for zero increase in collaboration.

This poses a huge opportunity for startups that make a choice from the get-go and don't waver. They know exactly the talent pools to choose (Github of the best engineers worldwide vs local personal networks) and can build a culture that matches their needs.

Either 5 days in the office or 5 days remote. For me there is no in-between.