Face to Face vs. Remote? It Depends What You’re Optimizing For.
When the world shifted to forced remote work during the Covid pandemic, there was initially a massive drop in productivity while we all figured out how to adapt. Houses were reorganized, home offices were added on, and after a few months, productivity largely returned to normal while the world’s office buildings remained startlingly vacant.
Nearly half a decade later, this phenomenon has become permanent for large swaths of American knowledge workers. It is remarkably difficult to return this toothpaste to the tube, as most companies don’t want to risk turning over their now-sprawling workforces to achieve the goal. Those that do believe it is worth the pain are experiencing worker pushback, petition drives, press leaks, and massive turnover.
The burning question is: if productivity is back to normal levels, why shouldn’t every business embrace a remote workforce? If businesses are getting the quantity of work they expect, why not just enjoy lower real estate costs and expanded geographical range for talent?
There are three reasons — and none are about the quantity of work.
- Innovation. In the living, breathing organism that is a company with face-to-face workers, a thousand little interactions every day spark the discovery of new ideas, the blending of two perspectives into a new concept, and the aha moment of finding a better solution to that nagging problem when whiteboarding it out with a coworker.
- Collaboration. Technology has done a lot to bridge the collaboration gap and make remote work possible, but there is no denying that collaboration is harder with distance. Stopping by someone’s desk to chat about something for two minutes has been replaced by calendar bingo looking out two weeks to find 15 minutes for a Zoom call. There is substantial collaboration that simply gets skipped because it is hard.*
- Culture. While strong cultures can persist for a long time across the Zoom screen, all the soft aspects of culture fade over time and feel forced in that environment. No amount of virtual happy hours can replace the impact of one in-person dinner with teammates. And while there are examples of great cultures being built in the first place online, they are few and far between.
The hard truth is that these three factors aren’t due to any lack of dedication or exertion on the part of the employees involved. They can’t be solved by workers “trying harder.”
They are just realities of human interaction.
My next company will choose to optimize for innovation, collaboration, and culture by building a face-to-face workplace culture. We will invest in creating a headquarters space early on, and designate most roles as HQ roles.
Of course, we will give people the flexibility to work remotely on occasion with manager approval — when they have a repair tech coming, or a delivery they need to sign for. We will generally expect people to be productive when working, and take vacation when not. But we won’t offer regularly scheduled remote days in a normal working schedule. The expectation is that all HQ roles are in the office every workday, unless a manager has approved the rare exception.
We will occasionally designate a role as remote when the talent we need isn’t available in our HQ region. If our workforce needs dictate, we will begin to build talent centers in other cities, where those roles are initially designated as remote, but every hire is aware that at a certain point, we will open an office in that city and their role will become face-to-face.
And we will embrace the fact that we’ll miss out on some percentage of the talent base that won’t consider working for our company because of our philosophy on face-to-face work.
But we’re confident we won’t miss out on the best talent, because elite business athletes love doing great work alongside other elite business athletes.
* Pre-Covid, this was incredibly apparent when a company had multiple offices. The advances in our collaboration tools have made this better than it used to be, but it’s still nowhere close to parity.
