Why more companies don’t do remote work (and probably shouldn’t)
Photo by Cristina Cerda.
By Johnathan Nightingale
The Sun never set on the Firefox empire. In my years at Mozilla one of our secret weapons was our global community of volunteers and employees. It allowed us to release Firefox in 80+ languages at once. It meant we could hire the best people wherever they were in the world and not have to end every job description with the tired old:
Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco.
When it worked, it worked really well. We had lively, 24/7 newsgroups, IRC, and bug chatter. We were early adopters of multi-way video conferencing rigs. We alpha-tested telepresence robots. We wiki’d our meeting notes. We made heavy use of the world clock meeting planner. Our systems forced us to write down decisions and maintain single sources of truth because the default assumption was that your colleagues weren’t local.
As an individual member of the team, I think it looked like it mostly worked, most of the time. I bet the me of 2007, giddy with what our community was capable of, would have agreed with a tweet like this:
Yes, well.
Hindsight is a hell of a thing.
I should say, before elaborating on what changed my mind, that this is a pretty uncomfortable spot to be in. As I hinted at in subsequent tweets, the essential right-ness of remote work is a given for many tech folk. We put a high premium on nomadism, as a community. Asking people to show up all together in a physical office feels campy and outdated, like asking them to work regular 9–5 office hours or to dress in business suits. It’s a dusty, old person thing to want. It makes me sound 👴🏻.
What’s worse, someone who attacks remote work is implicitly engaging in all kinds of privilege enforcement. Compared to working in an SF (or NY, or Toronto) office, remote work is cheaper, more flexible, and more accessible to people with disabilities that make commuting a challenge. When you demand in-office work, you give advantage to people with wealth, mobility, and a lack of outside commitments. Why on earth would you make the decision to do those things?
It’s obvious: you’re either pro-remote, or you’re a monster.
I am not a monster.
There are three reasons, three categories of reasons, why I no longer see things that way. I want to be clear though, so clear that I just bet I’ll repeat it at the bottom of this post: remote work, done well, is great. I’ve got no quarrel with the concept.
But shaming companies who don’t do it doesn’t sit right with me any more, even given the arguments above.
1. Remote Work Exacerbates Performance Problems
I know it is possible for remote workers to succeed because I have watched many of them do so. Some of the people I know with the most impact on their projects work out of coffee shops and basement offices and they are well integrated team members the whole time. Great work can happen anywhere.
But among the people I’ve seen struggle, a disproportionate number are remote. When I see a pattern like that, it’s clear to me there’s a structural issue at work. In some cases their managers and colleagues need better training. In others their communication styles don’t mesh with their team properly and so expectations aren’t communicated well, hand-offs are missed.
All of that can be fixed. Great remote work is never an accident, it’s always a product of the organization and the employee working at it and making it better. In many organizations I’ve lead or been part of, we have done that work, and seen great results. But I forgive a company who feels like they lack the bandwidth to do so, or the expertise. Telling them they ought to, that not doing so is a sign that they have “trust issues”, seems like it sets them up to fail.
2. Remote Work Often Creates Two Tiers of Employee
The dominant remote-work context is a hybrid model — one or more fixed offices with significant in-person attendance, and then a remote workforce spread out geographically, but collaborating with those offices. In a company like that, remote work can also hit problems around giving employees opportunity for growth.
Even well-meaning managers will fall victim to human frailties like availability heuristics when evaluating their team. A team member that you share office space with will inevitably have more interactions with you, be more visible and, as a result, more top of mind for new work.
Remote employees may be fine with this arrangement. I’ve had candidates volunteer in interviews that they expect to advance more slowly as a result of being remote, but that the lifestyle trade is worth it for them. It’s not fine with me. As a leader, I don’t want to force feed anyone opportunities or career paths they don’t want, but I also really don’t like the cultural expectation that office workers get the good stuff and remote workers swing the hammers.
It’s worth mentioning that some organizations side step this by going fully virtual, no offices. 100% remote. Creative Commons does this (disclosure: I sit on their board) and, while this has its own set of costs, it certainly puts people back on a flatter plane when it comes to visibility.
3. Marginal Drag Matters
I consulted for a while after leaving Mozilla and I’m sure I will again in the future, but the truth of it is that I’m not made for consulting. I really like operating. I think there’s a time for strategic planning and chess games, but the days I enjoy the most are the ones when we’re just getting work done in smart, focused, efficient ways. And that’s what makes this piece the hardest to dodge:
That’s exactly it. It doesn’t happen very often that Marc Andreessen says something I agree with completely. But the other day someone was asking him about remote work and he said it more succinctly than I’ve ever seen elsewhere.
A company can choose to open themselves up for remote work. It can bring a wealth of new talent and skills and ideas. They can train themselves up to manage the performance management aspects and ensure they have good development processes in place. But if doing all that introduces drag, particularly for the first few years while they get good at it, particularly if they’re a startup on a limited runway: the math just doesn’t add up.
Refrain
Remote work is a wonderful thing that’s more possible than ever before. I love that. If you run a company that is seriously looking at opening up to it, and you’re ready to make the investment, I hope that you will. If you go international the labour laws are an absolute nightmare but even so the diversity of perspectives and talent you’ll be able to attract is really exciting. I’m rooting for you.
But if you run a company that’s not ready yet, you won’t hear me call you out. I hope you’ll get there some day. In the meantime, I wish you luck. It’s hard to build a thing, and as long as you’re working hard to do right by your people: I’m rooting for you, too.