Remote != OK

The phrase “remote work” carries with it a connotation of being away from the central team. You’re remote, they’re not. The remote control is the small dumb piece of electronics that is there to serve the larger and more important TV. “Remote” in the context of islands usually mean isolated and disconnected.

Perhaps this is why when I posed a question on Twitter & Facebook to gather arguments about “Remote Work,” that people seem to fall into the camps of those who love it for the isolation and those who hate it for the isolation.

Building a startup is hard. Deciding how to build your organization is something you end up doing in stages (inception, rapid growth, stable growth) or you run the risk of losing everybody and appearing indecisive.

Some really sharp guys like Jason Fried, Joel Gascoigne, and Wade Foster have blogged about “remote” work repeatedly and even written books on the subject.

I’ll argue that they are right, using the wrong word to describe the work scenario, and that most of the arguments against “remote” work are imaginary.

At the inception stage a company is traditionally broken into those who are “out” hustling and those who are “inside” building. The outsiders spend a lot of time selling, raising, meeting, interviewing, evangelizing etc… The insiders spend a lot of time with their headphones on cranking out code/designs/systems/marketing.

Insiders tend to be the ones who need isolation to focus and to be effective. Outsiders rarely need an office because if they are doing their job they shouldn’t be there very often.

At a previous startup I ran, we were a team of four. Two were developers, two were business. The two developers preferred working from home like most developers do but we had made a conscious decision to have offices and build that “team spirit” that theoretically grows by being locked in a room for hours on end.

I was one of the business people and 90% of the time I was out having meetings. The other business person was on site about 50% of the time and as an early riser had a 7am-4pm official working schedule.

Any guess how this worked out?

The two developers found themselves feeling resentful that they had to go into an office from 8:30–5:30. They had to battle rush hour. I tended to work from home until about 9am when my first meetings usually kicked off at various locations around the city.

The developers didn’t see the other business person arrive early because they weren’t there. Instead what they saw was one guy who always left “early” and one guy who was only there occasionally.

The insiders felt isolated. They felt “remote” but ironically they were the ones in the office.

If we were a team of 40 people rather than 4, then the varying schedules and absence of outsiders might not have been damaging to morale because there would be enough “inside” people sitting around each other to not feel isolated. In our case though, the morale problem was palpable and it felt like I needed to babysit as a solution.

I’ll say it again because I think it’s important:
The people in the office felt remote.

The other issue at the inception stage is the ephemeral nature of the startup. The only thing you know about a forecast is that it’s wrong, we just don’t know in which direction. When you commit to office space you are forecasting and you’re committing to fixed costs that are almost 100% guaranteed to become something you have to “deal with” later on.

Growing faster than you planned? Congrats now you have to sublet and try to find new office space, this almost certainly requires an office manager so now you’ve got multiple offices and an added payroll item to manage it.

Things going badly? Need to pivot? Need to cut expenses? Congrats, now you have to sublet and downsize.

In either of those situations you’re going to devote important mindshare to a situation you could have avoided. Anything that distracts you from your core business (imho) is a waste.

Finally, there is one consistent argument against “remote” work that I’ve seen everywhere and heard in every conversation and it goes something like this:

You just can’t collaborate well remotely. Watercooler conversation is impossible to replicate. That creative environment and the ad-hoc meetings with a whiteboard and a latte just don’t happen if you’re remote!

You know what else people used to think was impossible? That a guy in a Prius with an app would displace the well trained taxi driver. Seriously though, count how often those amazing, productive, creative, ad-hoc meetings actually happen.

Anybody taking up the ad-hoc meeting above argument likely reminisces about their teenage years fondly, has great memories of their ex, and remembers raising kids as a fun and relaxing experience. In other words, making that argument means you’re primarily imagining things. Raising kids is hard, your ex is crazy and made you miserable, everybody’s teenage years sucked, and you almost never found ad-hoc meetings to be productive or amazing.

So what is the solution for offices at the inception stage? I can only speak for myself and my company. I won’t pretend to be prescriptive about how you should run your company but here is what we are doing and it feels right:

1. Everybody we are hiring is local.
2. We don’t call it “Remote Work”, we call it “Work Anywhere”. When I work from home I’m rarely alone. When I work at a coffee shop I’m far from isolated.
3. Most of the time we communicate by Slack and audio/video chats.
4. We maintain month-to-month hot-desks at local co-working facilities so that the team has access to conference rooms and work spaces when we need to get together.
5. Getting together to riff off of each other's ideas, whiteboard, and grab lunch can happen once or twice a week, collaboration doesn’t mean that you have to sit at a desk waiting for those fleeting moments to occur. We’re all in the same city after all…

Eventually as we grow I expect we’ll need to centralize somewhere and become more structured, but at this early stage the flexibility and comfort of Work Anywhere sure beats feeling Remote.

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