Remote work is not the problem
An office doesn't fix company culture
Remote work doesn't cause disconnectedness, loneliness, and disengagement.
A culture that encourages people to work on their own does.
Collaboration doesn't "just happen" – it needs an environment that makes it the easiest choice.
With Bolt having introduced a return-to-the-office mandate recently, I find myself having this conversation more often – so it’s better to share these thoughts in writing.
Having worked in low and high team-spirit environments, both in-person and remotely, I've come to see that these two things have a tenuous connection at best.
You can work in an office, five meters away from people you never talk to – strangers in the same room.
You can work remotely, from anywhere, talking to your colleagues every day – friendships made possible by technology.
You can work in an office, not noticing how time passes because you are engaged in relevant and exciting discussions with your coworkers in front of a whiteboard.
You can work remotely, on your bed, and get depressed because you forget about basic hygiene.
It’s not about remote or office work.
A strong culture forges strong bonds
It’s about culture.
Yes, getting everyone into the office will create a culture.
But if that’s all you are relying on, it’s a gamble – will all the people involved come up with a culture that serves the company’s needs?
Needs that include “employee well-being”, as well as “output”.
Like a garden, a culture needs to be tended to, bringing the vision of the gardener to life.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “culture” as:
the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization
The keywords here are shared and practices.
“We go to the office 3 days a week” is a practice.
But so is “all projects have at least two people working on them”,
Or “every morning, we gather and share our plans for the day”,
and “every Friday, we take turns sharing things we’ve learned”.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see that “We go to the office 3 days a week” is far removed from individual teams’ goals, let alone the company’s goals.
Unless “Spend a lot of money on office real-estate” is part of the company strategy.
Some people will be better at living these practices when they are in the office, next to people who do the same.
Others will be better at enacting all of this when they are in an environment they control.
Or when they have the freedom to work from Bali for a month – removing the tension between fulfilling your dreams and working a job.
We’re talking about the wrong thing
The “office vs remote” discussion is a false dichotomy and a distraction from the real problem.
It’s much easier to pick a side in this argument than to stop and think about difficult questions like:
What are our goals and which practices serve these goals?
How do we introduce these practices to newcomers?
How do we create closed feedback loops to make these practices stick?
Without a closed feedback loop, behaviors don’t stick.
Compare these two scenarios:
Office: open feedback loop
Action: you arrive at the office,
Reaction: none – so you go the kitchen and get yourself a coffee,
Reward: the coffee (and in the long term: you don’t get fired)
Office: closed feedback loop
Action: you arrive at the office,
Reaction: a coworker sees you and asks for help – you start working on solving the same problem, together
Reward: you feel good about helping your coworker, and having solved a problem (ideally)
It is the reward at the end that makes the behavior stick.
Without rewards, it’s hard to reinforce behaviors.
Relevant rewards reinforce beneficial behaviors.
These are simplified examples of course, but they should encourage you to think about shared practices in terms of “action/reaction/reward” guiding you to designing feedback loops in your own environment.
It also makes it easier to spot what ingredients are important to achieve useful practices.
In the example above, the reaction to “coming to the office” was “a coworker engages with you”.
Well, what other triggers could lead to spending time together to work on problems?
Does it have to be “physical presence?”
What about “a calendar invitation”, “writing a welcome message on Slack”, or “getting a phone call”?
Why you should care
So by now, we’ve established that the problem is not “office vs remote” but “conscious culture”.
That leaves the question of: why even care about remote work?
Here’s my claim:
The feasibility and enduring success of remote work are crucial for resilient societies.
Remote work allows us to collectively
prevent more communities from dying because people move away from rural areas but nobody settles there in return,
allow more people to own their home, because real estate is affordable further away from big cities,
which in turn reduces the economical distance between the haves and have-nots, leading to less polarization in society.
Put differently, it allows most people to have their cake and eat it too:
live on a farm in the countryside but have intellectually stimulating work that’s well paid? No problem!
travel the world without saving up money for a year and then quitting your job? You can do that now!
working from a café in the morning so you can hit the gym reliably every day? Yes!
These are great possibilities that people just 30 years ago could only dream of.
If you are running a company, thanks to remote work:
you can save money on expensive offices and instead spend it on bonding experiences,
you have access to talent all over the world, allowing you to save money on salaries or get exactly the skillset you need for the task at hand,
you have lower attrition rates: if people are forced to choose between their dreams and their jobs, at some point most people will choose their dreams.
What you can do
If you are an employer, think about what culture you want in your company, and which shared practices are crucial for this culture to work.
Then base your remote work policy on that.
If you are an employee, think about what shared practices exist in your team and whether they enable engagement, collaboration, and communication.
Is there a feedback loop that you need to change?
Cogently put, and very relevant at the moment.
I personally feel that hybrid environments are the best for an employee, but from a business perspective the most expensive as you have to pay for the rent regardless. I think layering in the understanding that it’s a culture that people gravitate to, allows for a company to make the most out of hybrid work.
Which in essence I think is Bolt’s attempt, although I admit I dont the exact nature of how the 3 days are enforced.
Also a top down approach such as this may not have been the best, as perhaps individual teams could have their own requirements based on their unique needs.