Why Companies Hate Remote Work (and what to do about it)

callum adamson
Nov 6 · 4 min read

…as a remote team member


No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen. — Epictetus

The TL;DR: Baby steps.

Every company is now a technology company.

This is the reason that there’s a huge and growing talent shortage in Software Engineering and Data Science.

This is also the reason you’ll have seen a growing interest in remote work and distributed teams. Because of this talent shortage businesses are having to do more to attract and retain the talent they need, and having to try new methods of working to compete within this talent shortage.

This is great for talent, and proving to be tough to manage for some businesses.

I spent a few hours looking through business publications and gathered he most common objections to remote/distributed teams, I’ve stacked them below with commentary next to them.

1. It’s harder to communicate

My opinion:

The clarity provided by asynchronous communication (email, text, chat) is far better than any other method, and that’s without bringing video calls into the discussion, saying that’s it’s harder to communicate when working with a remote team is really just saying, “I/We communicate with each other poorly”.

- What to do about it as a remote team member?

In an office setting, it’s not easier to communicate, it’s easier to interrupt.

That’s what most people mean when they say that it’s harder to communicate with remote team members, so rather than trying to change human behaviour immediately, start with letting everyone interrupt you.

  • Sign up to: https://whereby.com
  • Create a custom URL: https://whereby.com/remoteftw
  • Leave the call open in a tab on your browser (video off if it creeps you out)
  • Let your team know they can click the URL to talk to you whenever they want.

Top tip: (Whereby has an app too, so if you’re in the bathroom or at the shop, you can ping them an immediate chat saying you’ll be on video in a minute)

2. It’s harder to know if people are actually working

My opinion:

This means you’ve hired people you don’t trust, and you might want to re-think your recruitment strategy.

- What to do about it as a remote team member?

“How do I show people that I’m actually working!?”, I hear you think.

The simple answer is to show your team progress — regularly.

You can start off in a simple list format like this:

Priority:

  • Fix the API

To-Do:

  • Figure out why the API is broken
  • Figure out what I need to do to fix it
  • Do that stuff

Time Est:

  • 2 days

Update the list every morning with progress and send it to your team on email, Slack, Teams etc. This, and the previous video chat suggestion should give even the most paranoid line manager peace of mind.

3. It’s harder to collaborate

My opinion:

Collaboration is about working together to achieve a goal, whether that’s on a product idea or a problem to solve, I’d argue that in-person collaboration feels better, but actually takes longer to, “get the thing done”, than remote collaboration.

- What to do about it as a remote team member?

You have to become the facilitator. There are hundreds of online/offline collaboration tools that you can use to enable collaboration, none of them will be of any use if there is nobody setting the aim of the session or the required output (do that — and you’ll notice attitudes change).

4. It’s harder to create/maintain company culture

If your company culture relies on people being in the same room you don’t have a culture, or maybe you do and it’s just really fragile, either way, not a good sign.

- What to do about it as a remote team member?

Culture is a verb, it’s a, ‘doing’, word, and as long as the company has established a set of values, it’s easy to use them, this is how a company’s culture is created.

As a remote team member you can try setting the values as your desktop background for a while so that you can not only, ‘live’, them, but also reference them during interactions with your team.

5. It’s harder to develop team member’s skills

Your team and their individual development is a shared responsibility, a team that want to develop, will proactively seek opportunities to develop themselves, enabling that doesn’t ever need to be done face-to-face, it only requires asking and enabling.

- What to do about it as a remote team member?

If it’s your job to develop team members I highly recommend reading this blog post, and then implementing a similar framework to suit your company and it’s culture (this framework can be super effective for remote teams).

If you’re a team member and you’re looking for better career development — try raising the issue (and the above framework) with your team lead, at the very least, it will be the start of a conversation that should lead to movement in the right direction.


None of these are, ‘remote only’, problems and the main crux of the argument against remote/distributed teams seems to be that it makes these common issues, “harder”, to solve for.

Businesses know that they are in a war for talent, and that war will most definitely last for the next couple of decades.

Rather than say to businesses, “well, you’ll just have to try harder”, I say that it’s our job (the teams building products that enable working with distributed teams at scale) to make these things easier than they are when working in the same room/building as your team.

At Distributed, our mission is to ensure businesses can work with global teams as easy as their local teams.

Stay informed on the world of Distributed Teams — join the community

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade