Going Remote Part I: How I Learned to Embrace Remote Work

Hi everyone 👋. I’m Dan and I run a sport and fitness technology company called Volt Athletics. We make a workout app that delivers highly personalized workouts to coaches, athletes, soldiers, firefighters, police officers, and everyday people anywhere in the world. If you’re interested, you can learn more about what we do here.

And I used to LOVE working out of a physical office.

Eight weeks ago, if you had told me I would be publicly advocating for the transition to a fully distributed workforce, I would have laughed. Probably pretty hard. Even though we build software, which is a classic use-case for remote work, I never considered it as a realistic possibility for our business.

Yet here we are. The world as we knew it is no more and we are all navigating a new set of challenges and opportunities through a very different lens.

A few days ago, I announced to our 25-person team at Volt that we are committing to remaining distributed through at least the remainder of 2020. We are giving up our physical HQ in Seattle (we had the luxury of a rolling 3-month lease) and will be fully embracing the remote work experience going forward.

Like many other companies, we were compelled to start working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Seattle was hit early in relation to other parts of the country, so we quickly shifted to remote work in the second week of March. This forced experiment has shown us that not only is remote work viable for our team, it may actually be preferable.

Since other startup leaders are contemplating similar moves, I thought it might be helpful to lay out our thinking in making this call.

We made two critical, foundational assumptions that laid the groundwork for the decision:

• That a return to the office before a widely available vaccine would require masking, physical distancing, and sanitation measures. This makes the physical office experience substantially less appealing. When speaking with employees about the potential for returning under those conditions, the unanimous feedback was that it would be preferable to continue working remote.
• That demand for office space will decrease significantly over the course of the next 12–18 months. As companies downsize or shift entirely to remote work and leases start to expire, we expect there to be a glut of commercial space, especially in construction-happy Seattle, meaning that a potential return to a physical HQ down the road would likely be more affordable. So, in the event that the ongoing remote work experience doesn’t seem to be the best thing for our team, we are confident we will be able to find a better space than we’re currently occupying, for less money. This escape hatch takes some of the finality out of the decision.

Given those assumptions, a few of the key factors that went into our decision include:

• Productivity. We’ve been very productive as a remote team since the pandemic hit, arguably producing at a higher level than when we were together. This has genuinely been surprising to me and a major catalyst for our decision to continue working remotely. Considering we have done little to optimize for a distributed team, I am confident that our productivity will continue to climb once we put the right supportive processes and structures in place.
• Flexibility. Our team has really enjoyed the flexibility and autonomy of working remote. It enables them to spend more quality time with their families, handle issues that come up around the house, exercise during the day, etc.. The output of the work becomes more important than time spent in the office, which is freeing from a time-management perspective.
• Savings. The obvious savings here is rent. Leasing a decent commercial space in Seattle in a desirable location is not cheap. Less obvious is 80–120 hours our team will collectively save by not commuting. That’s a lot of time to be able to give back to our employees! When you start factoring in gas, tolls, wear and tear on cars, and parking, the savings in time and money really start to add up. Bonus: the reduction in carbon emissions is an obvious win for the environment.
• Buy-in. This one is critical. We surveyed our employees about their experience working remote so far and their support of a potential longer-term remote work experience. Over 86% of the responses were supportive of continuing to work remote, even after stay-at-home restrictions were lifted, which was a strong indication that we could continue to thrive in as a distributed team.

And a few reasons we chose December 31, 2020 as the anchor date:

• We wanted to give our team some certainty, at least in the mid-term. We briefly considered an indefinite remote work policy, but with uncertainty swirling around us, we thought that anchoring on a date was crucial. It helps the team feel confident in making other decisions knowing they can count on working remote at least through a specific date.
• We wanted enough time to observe the course of the pandemic. There are serious concerns about a second wave of infections and we liked the idea of putting our anchor date far enough out to observe the trends, especially through the fall.
• We wanted enough time to really embrace the remote work life and optimize it for our team. This means rethinking all of our systems, processes, tools, and meetings, which were primarily introduced to support work at a physical HQ, through the lens of a distributed workforce. We expect this process will take considerable time and will require several rounds of iteration.

We still have a lot of questions left to work through, and our team is looking forward to rolling up our sleeves and solving them over time. We’ve had a lot of success as a remote team so far and I am excited to see what we’re able to do once we really start optimizing for a fully-distributed workforce.

If you’re interested in learning more about our process or our decision, please don’t hesitate to ask questions in the comments or reach out to to me directly on LinkedIn or Twitter.