Fully remote work is here to stay, even if it does not become as ubiquitous as it was in 2022. While there are many companies out there that have fully returned all their employees back to the office for fully in-person work, there will always be a market of employee and employees that will prefer to reach a working agreement that is location agnostic. This might not be possible to achieve for all companies across all industries, but I firmly believe that remote work is ultimately better than in-person work for most companies that mainly perform business over the internet.

For the employee, remote work offers something that even the most lucrative and prestigious employers cannot, the ability to work where they would want to live instead of a life revolving around work. For the employer, remote works gives them access to a diverse talent pool of workers distributed across cultures and timezones. Remote work allows brilliant workers to contribute to the company goals even if they are caretakers, physically disabled, or unable to relocate for any reason whatsoever. Remote work also shortens commute times which is one of the biggest predictors of mental well-being, which translates to less tired and more focused workers during peak productivity hours. These are not concessions that the company makes on behalf of the employee for altruistic reasons, these are mutually beneficial agreements between two parties that recognize that the location of where the work is performed has no bearing on the actual business outcome of the work.

So if remote work is presented as a win-win for both the employee and employer why are so many companies pivoting back to in-person work while I remain bullish on remote ?

Well, mainly because it’s really hard to make remote work, well… work; unless you grew up in a world where asynchronous and remote communication was the norm.

The main challenges that are typically cited when advocating for a return to office culture are:

  • Difficulty collaborating and innovating without face to face interaction
  • Difficulty building a culture without being in the same place
  • Difficulty in building transparency when you cannot see people work

The reasons while sensical, kind of ignore the existence of the many open source projects and internet communities that have been cultivated by people who have never seen each others faces in real life. Some of the biggest feats of engineering are maintained by developers that exclusively communicate via open threads in the public internet. With communication technologies like slack, and discord, as well as the many collaborative white-boarding tools like lucid, figjam, and miro, and the many SaaS tools like JIRA that market themselves as tools that explicitly solve the problem of transparency across distributed teams working asynchronously, you’d think that the ability to collaborate remotely has only gotten easier with time.

These technologies have only existed for a short time compared to how long humans have existed as creatures that communicated mainly through close proximity, so it’s no surprise that many would argue that in-person work is more natural to them than via a webcam. However, seeing this as a communication preference instead of as a requirement for collaboration allows oneself to ask questions about what are the actual communication requirements of the individual employees with each other and what are the preferences.

Ask yourself:

  1. Do people need to be in constant communication to get the work done, or can they update each other asynchronously ?
  2. Do people know in advance when collaboration is expected, or is it intended to be ad-hoc ?
  3. Who needs to be aware of what and when ?

As you start asking these questions you can figure out what are some working agreements that different teams may need to be succesful. For example, a team where most people are individual contributors that mainly work asynchronously may get away with having project specific slack channels and a commitment to give each other updates at a given cadence. However, a team that needs more ad-hoc collaboration may agree to set up “working sessions” where they work with their webcams on and simulate being in a virtual office together. Your mileage may vary depending on the individual dynamics on the team and the type of work, but if you allow the teams performing the work to agree on how to work best together, you will find that location was never the bottleneck.