Four-day work week. Open-plan offices. Work-life balance. Remote work. There are endless ways to set up your team and company for success. And there’s evidence for and against all of these scenarios.
Take remote work for instance. Owl Labs reports that 44% of global companies don’t allow it. While Gallup reports that 43% of all Americans work remotely at least some of the time.
So what’s the right answer? Well that depends on what your goals are. But no matter what, the important thing is to make a decision and stick with it.
Because no matter what decision you’re making – personal, professional, big or small – it’s important to commit 100%. And when that decision is likely to impact your company’s culture for years to come, you better hope to get it right.
So when Buffer’s co-founder and CEO, Joel Gascoigne, decided to close down one of their offices, I gave him one key piece of advice. Commit to either placing the entire team in the remaining office or establish a 100% remote workforce. Both scenarios can work, but a mix of the two will only set you up to fail.
When everyone is remote, that becomes one of the defining characteristics of a company’s culture. People have no option but to get their work done and collaborate virtually. And an entirely remote culture can both draw in candidates attracted to this way of working and remove those who know they won’t be able to thrive working remotely.
But when you have an in-person culture with only a handful of people working remotely, the remote workers start to feel like second class citizens. It’s not so much a boon, but a burden. Inevitably, they miss out on key information, don’t fully appreciate the culture and aren’t able to easily relate to and communicate with their co-workers.
There is no in between.
Image via Getty Images / Anya Plonsak
At Drift, we have a very “in-office culture.” It’s intentional. And we plan to keep it that way. For the type of company we’re building and the speed at which we’re hoping to do it, my co-founder, Elias Torres, and I decided on an in-office workforce.
And that doesn’t mean the teams aren’t distributed or that team members can’t work from home when they need to. We have our headquarters in Boston, with offices in San Francisco and Seattle and a work from home policy baked into our benefits.
This flexibility and offices in three locations help us build a diverse workforce and establish a presence in important markets. And the energy and spontaneous ideas that come from co-location are irreplaceable.
While Drift is 100% in-office, I’ve experimented with a hybrid approach. At Lookery, a company I founded in 2007, half the team was remote and the other half worked together in an office. This led to problems like the ones I alluded to above.
No matter how hard we tried, the remote team members always ended up feeling second class. There were hallway conversations and sidebars that never made it back into our chat rooms or wikis. It just didn’t work, in spite of our best efforts.
So while I am against any hybrid approach, an entirely remote team can work if you’re fully committed. And relying on the right messaging and video tools can make 100% remote work not just possible, but profitable.
So the argument isn’t so much “is remote work good or bad,” but more about committing to one or the other. Especially since the jury is still out on whether working remotely or working in an office makes for happier teams. Take the following for instance:
- Remote workers are at a greater risk of feeling personally and professionally isolated, according to research from Cornell. And social isolation has been associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Not to mention things like depression and trouble sleeping.
- On the other hand, according to data from Owl Labs, companies that allow remote work experience 25% less employee turnover than companies that don’t allow remote work.
- Then again, when you work from home, you never really “leave” work. Sure, office workers are liable to take their work home with them, Slacking or emailing well outside of 9 to 5. But they’re able to physically remove themselves from their place of work. When your home is your office, this just isn’t possible.
- But data from Fundera shows that employees who work from home are more productive.
- Even still, in May 2017, IBM made the decision to call its remote workers back to the office. Aetna and Bank of America followed suit. The reason? These companies believed greater productivity would result from workers who were physically colocated.
So you see, there just isn’t a right or wrong answer. It’s more about the culture you’re hoping to promote and what your long term goals are. Either way, you need to commit.
Image via Getty Images / alashi
Take Zapier for instance, one of the fastest growing private SaaS companies around. They’re also 100% remote. For Zapier, remote success is derived from their obsession with transparency and “oversharing.” If something important needs to be shared, they do so multiple times via multiple channels.
To make this set up successful from day one, Zapier CEO Wade Foster made it a point to bake transparency into his company’s culture. As he told Hacker Noon,
“Remote workers are happiest when they feel connected to the business. We kept that in mind when we developed one of our core values, which is ‘default to transparency.’
The tradeoff of having a distributed team is that you have to be disciplined at documenting decisions and major changes, so no one gets left behind. When people have accurate, well-documented information in front of them, they can make smart decisions and they can be self-starters.”
Ultimately, some entrepreneurs, and frankly people you’re trying to recruit, might find the whole concept of a distributed team a bit scary, or impossible. But so long as employees default to transparency, and you have the tools and technology in place to make collaboration not just easy, but natural, remote teams and companies can flourish.
So before you decide to go remote, make sure you’re asking yourself the following:
- What type of company am I trying to build?
- Will a remote or in-office workforce help me get there faster?
- Do I have the tools and technology in place to make remote work successful?