Why “Remote-First” is Actually a Dangerous Mindset
About 1–2 years ago before I made the jump to join Owl Labs, I considered a substantial marketing role at a highly respected growth tech company. I’m not going to tell you who they are (because, well, I said no to them), but there’s a good chance you’ve heard of them before.
It was the real deal — an awesome opportunity with seriously respected people that would significantly level up my career. But I didn’t take it.
Why? Because it was a fully-remote position, and I couldn’t imagine myself working that way.
Don’t get me wrong. To work remotely is a dream for many. Just not my dream. For me, I was afraid the isolation would damn near kill me. I’m a person who gets her energy by interacting with others, and I discover my best ideas in groups. Being on my own could completely stifle my creativity, which sounded like a recipe for marketing failure if you ask me.
Flash forward, and today I lead marketing for a great company called Owl Labs. (And yes, proud to say I indeed found my dream job.) Here we are a hybrid team, which means we’re a mix of fully-remote and in-office employees and thus we have an extremely remote-friendly culture where work location is a personal choice. Sometimes I work from the office. Sometimes I work from home, usually for focus time on reporting or writing. (At this moment, I’m working from an airplane!)
It turns out remote work is growing at a rapid clip. The recent 2018 Global State of Remote Work found that 56% of companies around the world allow remote work. Of those, 40% are hybrid companies. Overall, 52% of employed people work remotely at least once per week.
There is a major shift happening in the world to accept remote work, and frankly it’s wonderful. While it may not be right for me (in long stretches, at least), it’s about time we recognize that flexibility shouldn’t be a novelty — it’s a requirement for any growth-centric organization who wants to competitively hire, retain their folks, and let people work successfully while living their lives.
However, this progress has led to two substantial problems.
First, this rise in remote work has unveiled some extreme imbalances between how in-office workers and remote workers are treated, enabled, managed, you name it.
To say it bluntly, in many orgs where remote work is “allowed” there is still not one ounce of support for those who do work remotely.
Second, when there’s inequality, there’s backlash. And the backlash for remote work inequality is the “remote-first” movement. And this, my friends, is what worries me.
If we can all agree that the movement toward remote work and flexibility is an inevitability, I want to hit home that even those who are supporting remote work … still have a very long way to go.
Leaving People Out Never Works
Before I piss off too many people, I want to clearly state that many extremely respected organizations are going “remote-first” and the intention is very, very good.
However, here are my issues:
1. Putting anything first will create a dichotomy by setting a prioritization of whose needs matter more. And while I acknowledge that the collective working world needs to seriously get their shit together and make things better for remote workers, I have to believe there’s a better way to achieve this than saying “right now the needs of the remote workers are more important than anyone else’s.”
2. We also can likely agree that being in-person is more effective for communication than being remote. (While posing a major obstacle for remote working, it is obviously true.) When the proposed solution is a remote-first world, we’re solving the problem by resolving to the lowest common denominator. It’s a short cut.
Take the group meeting. A remote-first practice is to have everyone sit at their desks and join the call individually so everyone’s on the same playing field.
That just sucks. I’m glad we’re thinking about the remote employee’s experience, but why do we have to reduce communication fidelity to achieve the equality we need?
3. We’re sacrificing a new group while trying to solve for the other. It forces those who would rather not be remote (or worse, can’t do it successfully) to occasionally act like a remote worker regardless of their preference. I would fall into this camp.
Why enforce a practice that could stifle anyone’s creativity or impact? That’s not a solution. That’s causing a new problem.
Perhaps this Pendulum Swing Will Get Us There
I see the remote-first philosophy as a well-intentioned pendulum swing.
These are patterns we’ve seen before. The pendulum swings too far in one direction (optimizing for the in-office worker over the remote folks) and then far in the other direction (solving for the remote worker over those in the office), then lands somewhere in the middle.
Pendulum Theory is the idea that in politics or art, the pendulum swings to one side until it reaches a threshold, then swings back. Theresa Funke, an entrepreneur, even relates this theory to sales, saying that sales reps can get too caught up with booking prospect meetings that they forget about closing deals, then they swing back to deal closing and forget about prospects. You get it.
The good news is it eventually leads to progress. And the lesson and opportunity for us here is to innovate and build policies that are inclusive to all work styles.
Level up remote communication to feel just as cohesive as sitting in the same room.
Utopian in concept? Maybe, but I’m an optimist. What do you think?
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