The economy is gradually re-opening across the country. However, the virus is not going away any time soon. Tech companies will need a mixed strategy in the short term that carefully weighs which teams need to return to the office and which should stay remote. This period of extra caution might last a really long time, depending on the availability of effective medical treatments and vaccines. Companies will be forced to decide what the right long-term strategy is: returning to normal or evolving to a remote work model. In my opinion, the decisions will be made based on the results of remote work across five dimensions: productivity, hiring, cost, management, and security.
Although several companies have already announced their plans to allow employees to work from home permanently, it’s unclear how soon the vision of a full remote work model can be realized. There are many challenges to building an effective remote team at scale. The design and implementation of remote work policies and processes will lead to very different results for each company, causing them to eventually adjust their decisions on the ratio of remote workforce, the remote plan timeline, a rollback of their current plans, and so on.
Productivity is the key to determining if remote work will continue. No matter which option a company chooses, strategies supporting higher productivity will eventually survive. The traditional model, where everyone works in the office, has had a lot of advantages on boosting productivity in the past. For example,
- the synergy while working together in person contributes greatly to productivity and idea generation;
- companies can optimize shared environments to improve overall efficiency and effectiveness for everyone;
- there is much less overhead for communication when people can quickly chat for a few minutes anywhere in the office, compared to scheduling official meetings;
- providing IT support for daily business operations is much more efficient in person; and
- in-person meetings are often useful to kick off cross-function initiatives, build new business partnerships, and so on.
This is not to say that remote work won’t catch up. With continuous investment in better tools and processes, companies may find new solutions to achieve this same level of synergy among remote teams.
For example, I can easily imagine a future meeting app that will enable impromptu meetings for people to join and leave at any time, rather than the 30-minute standard ad hoc meetings nowadays. This might also be merged into a video product.
Leaning towards a remote-first model may bring companies many opportunities to innovate and thrive to become more effective and scalable. Some of these opportunities are as follows:
- with a decrease in offline communications, companies can standardize their processes and promote a more transparent culture for communication and collaboration;
- companies will be motivated to integrate more advanced solutions, including task management, online meetings, desktop sharing, and other collaboration tools; and
- although some overhead is created for communication among people who used to co-locate, remote work might lower the psychological barrier for communication among parties that were not previously that close.
In the end, it’s up to companies to design the right plans for themselves and prove their effectiveness through the market.
Hiring will be completely different for the two paths ahead. I find it hard to imagine the different incentives companies might come up with, how people will react to these options, and how the talent market will be changed by those interactions. More broadly, it’s even harder to predict how this will play out across the global economy.
Regarding the hiring process for technical roles, on-site interviews have been an effective format for introducing candidates to the company culture, working environment, and future coworkers. It takes extra effort to show candidates the culture through video conferences. However, I do believe remote work will eventually create more benefits. For example,
- allowing remote work will definitely increase both the size and diversity of the candidate pool for tech companies; and
- without heavily relying on impressions of in-person contact, the interview process will become more objective and less biased.
My main concern is for the onboarding of new hires and interns, who rely on casual situations in the office to meet people and get involved. Generally speaking, any type of isolation benefits workers who are experienced on the job by saving their time from disruptions; this is less beneficial for those who are new. This may be the main challenge for companies testing whether remote options will improve hiring or slow it down instead.
Costs might increase by shifting to a hybrid remote model, unless the trend becomes so widespread that pay and rent are significantly lowered in big cities and popular areas to work, such as Silicon Valley. It’s more cost effective to provide employees a shared infrastructure, including equipment, software, and office supplies, instead of customizing everything for individuals. There will be a trade-off or shift between hardware costs (including physical space) and software costs (such as new collaboration tools). It’s hard to predict how these costs ultimately compare, but hardware costs are now counted as assets the companies own. In the short term, I do think this will add to the cost for companies choosing to scale their remote workforce.
However, the market dynamics might change over time. First, companies may adjust employee compensation to local standards for remote workers. For startups in the Bay Area or New York, that can be a large portion of their costs. For bigger companies, as the candidate pool increases while competition reduces, the average cost per hire can be largely decreased. Companies in those hot areas may save a lot of money from renting fewer or smaller physical spaces. This will in turn significantly lower the rental costs in those places and drive compensation for tech workers down.
Management will be redefined under a new, remote model. Right now, it’s much easier to manage a co-located team than a remote one, due to increased face time, shared office hours, stronger team bonding, peer-based culture, and first-hand experience of an individual’s behavior and performance. Teams will feel a stronger sense of belonging to the team when there are social opportunities beyond work interactions. Office space is also designed with a consistent style and shared common areas to foster the culture the company is trying to build.
For a remote workforce, the management process needs to be reimagined. Managers will lack direct insight into the team’s daily routine, interpersonal dynamics, and individual behaviors, compared to before. Companies need to become more goal-driven by focusing on output and objective measures. Traditionally, proximity facilitates communication but also adds bias. Normally, this gives an advantage to people closer to leadership (e.g., at headquarters) than people working remotely (e.g., at remote sites). This dynamic will be challenged if the company becomes fully or largely remote. Will people still choose to work in the office and have better career opportunities? What will be the new path for ambitious remote workers to get close to the decision chain?
Security is an important topic that can be easily overlooked. In general, it’s much easier to protect a shared physical space than fully distributed personnel and company assets. There is a great deal of current infrastructure for security, including cyber security (e.g., wifi and printing services), built on top of a shared physical space. There needs to be a lot of innovation to support corporate security in the new model. However, once security has been established, distributed teams have a more resistant structure against systematic risks like natural disasters.
Overall, it’s still unclear if the remote work model will survive and become popular. There needs to be a lot of innovation across these areas to scale effective remote models. It’s hard to keep a distributed workforce connected. That said, this is an opportunity for some of the most audacious companies to innovate, evolve, and shine. I really look forward to seeing what that future looks like.