7 Reasons Why Your Startup Should Be 100% Remote
For years I dreamed of creating a fully remote company in which employees were treated as first-class citizens. Five years ago, I founded a software development company. Since then, not a single employee has worked a day in the office, and over the years we’ve perfected our process and made our work enjoyable, efficient and productive. I’ve been trying to convince other companies that I know to try this approach because remote work makes job satisfaction and work efficiency go through the roof, but without any success. Going fully remote is just too scary an approach to consider for companies with a traditional mindset.
I thought my team and I were the only ones making remote work core to our company culture. But it seems like we’re not. It turns out that GitLab, a company that runs a web-based DevOps tool, published a remote-only manifesto recently. Since being published, more than 40 companies have been added to the manifesto. Here are some of them:
- InVision, one of the largest digital product design platforms
- Buffer, a social media management app
- Zapier, a web app integration service
- Podia, an online course platform
- Discourse, forum, and mailing list software
- DuckDuckGo, a search engine with an emphasis on privacy
- Hubstaff, a time tracking, and staff monitoring app
Here are my top 10 reasons for why you, too, should consider making your startup fully remote:
1. You’ll have happier employees. While remote work isn’t for everyone, those who work remotely often enjoy many benefits that make their lives happier. Just eliminating the need to commute daily during rush hour can change one’s lifestyle dramatically. Add the elimination of distractions and interruptions by co-workers, better food and the freedom to relocate and travel, and your employees will never want to leave your company.
2. You can hire talent from all over the world. Talent acquisition is the second biggest problem for startups after customer acquisition. A remote-only policy not only opens the whole world for you in your talent search, but it also makes the work for remote employees efficient, no matter where they are.
3. Your team can enjoy the benefits of a 24-hour workday. When your team spans multiple time zones, you are no longer limited to a 9 to 5 workday, and you don’t have to encourage working long hours. All you need to do is create a process where one team can pick up the task of the other team. While it’s not always possible to do it with development teams working on the same feature, this works perfectly with planning, analysis, and QA.
4. You can communicate asynchronously. Working in an office often comes with a lot of distractions. It’s so much easier to come to someone’s desk and ask a question — distracting the other person and everyone around her — than it is to formulate a question and send it via Slack with some screenshots attached. With remote work, it’s easy to turn off distractions and answer questions at your own pace.
5. You focus on taking care of your business, not your office. Managing an office full of people takes a lot of time and money. By eliminating the office-related expenses and activities, you can focus on what really matters — making the lives of your employees and customers better. It’s especially important in the early stages of a business when it’s easy to get carried away with tasks that are not important.
6. You can document everything. When working remotely, you don’t have access to everyone whenever you want. The only way around this is to encourage public communication. That means that work-related discussions should be logged in one way or another so that they’re easily accessible to anyone. This kind of discipline allows you to track down every decision and make sure that nothing gets lost.
7. You spend less time on meetings. Meetings are the biggest time-suck for any organization, from small 10-person teams to a large Fortune-500 enterprise. The more complex a process is, the more people are needed to make a decision. Remote work encourages fewer meetings because more communication happens asynchronously in writing, and decisions are made without the need of gathering everyone in the same meeting room.
How People Perceive Remote Workers Today
I wrote some time ago that during the last 15 years, I’ve worked in an office for only one day. I happen to be the kind of person who doesn’t enjoy working in an office. For a lot of reasons: primarily because I’d rather not waste an enormous amount of time on commuting, and I prefer to avoid the inevitable distractions that come with working in an office where multiple people are seated near each other. (For that same reason, I’m not a fan of co-working spaces, either.)
During my career, I worked in a number of teams before starting my own business. Every time I joined a company to work remotely, I was the only one (or one of the few people) who was telecommuting. The rest of the team was usually working onsite and enjoyed all of the benefits of close proximity to each other, like having unplanned meetings and making decisions by just coming to someone’s desk. Because of that, remote work felt kind of…well, remote.
As a remote worker, I had quite some trouble explaining my friends and family what I did. My family thought that I played games all day, and my friends thought I had found some sort of bug in the system where I could just make it look like I was working when really, I was doing nothing all day. Interestingly, banks that were refusing to give me loans had a similar understanding of what remote work was, despite the fact that I was a well-paid professional with a proven credit history. I just wasn’t fitting in.
The World Is Changing, And So Should We
There’s still a lot of confusion surrounding remote work. A lot of people still think that this approach is inferior compared to traditional onsite work. A lot of people still think about working remotely as some kind of relaxed and independent work style that doesn’t make sense for complex processes. In reality, even remote workers need to collaborate with each other and communicate frequently. Even with flexible working hours, it’s important that the hours of people who work on the same team overlap. Yes, the focus in remote teams is not on hours worked or on a physical presence, but on the final outcome and the value produced. With the automation and robotization in store for our planet, it doesn’t matter how long and where you work anymore — it’s about the value you produce.
