Benefits of Being Fully Remote

Being a fully remote company comes with benefits far different from those of fully in-office or hybrid company models.

Diversity & recruiting

Problems of diversity are really challenging to solve when you have to bring people together into a single office space. This is because different represented groups are clustered throughout the United States [1] [2]. The reasons for this are highly political, historical, and controversial but suffice it to say that if you care about diversity, you have a few options (not many of them very good, honestly):

• Establish your offices in diverse locations. If you plan to do this by putting your offices in several locations, you're either going to be creating natural silos at each location (which doesn't help the actual issues around diversity) or you're going to be splitting up your teams across offices, which—again—creates silos. If you plan to position your single office in a diverse neighborhood, you may have the micro-diversity that matches that location (think race, gender, sex, age, etc.), but lack macro-diversity of cross-country/international relevance (think Bostonians vs Utahns).

• Migrate your workers to a single office. This is largely the strategy of most Silicon Valley tech companies: they have offices in California and hire people throughout the US and beyond with the gotcha that you'll need to pack up your life and move. This not only takes a considerable amount of resources to achieve, it also starts to fall apart when migrants are being displaced, want to return to their place of origin, or—say—a pandemic upends everything and no one wants to live in expensive California anymore.

• Be a partially or hybrid remote company, where some of your employees are at an office and some are fully remote. This allows you to hire employees wherever, but it also creates silos as those employees that can work in the office will have an advantage over those who cannot. Water cooler talk will not include remote team members. If your manager or other team members are in the office with you, you'll have a closer relationship with them than those that work remotely. Meetings will take place in conference rooms with some people calling in, which always presents them with a disadvantage. The list goes on and on, and most people (especially leaders) in the tech space know this list all too well as they struggle to find an appropriate hybrid work policy.

• Be fully remote! When you can hire anyone from anywhere without the need to relocate them, a lot of doors open. As long as you foster a positive remote culture, you can easily mix those Bostonians and Utahns as smoothly as if they were cream and coffee.

Flexibility of lifestyles

Many people are taking off the rosy sunglasses of office perks, realizing that many of the benefits are not for your own benefit, but rather a means to keep you working longer and harder. True, for those fully devoted to their work, it's a mutual gain for you and the company. However, I believe that this trend of putting the employer first is largely waning as people leave for companies that pay better, have more flexible hours, and better support families. This is especially true for parents of children who want to work and have limited care options or for those who have exceptional accessibility or disability needs.

Remote work allows for lifestyles other than that 9-5 grind. You can engage with your family, run quick errands, relax without your coworkers watching, and otherwise own your life. If you want to move to another state or city, then move!

If your company happens to be a fully remote company, you get the added benefit of sans-FOMO and pro-empathy: everyone else is in the same virtual boat as you. Meetups and community are—by default—virtual, banter is done on Slack, sharing photos about your dog is totally acceptable because your team is craving social opportunities.

True, with flexibility comes the challenge of turning off work, but that can be achieved (which I'll cover in another post). In short, provide flexible hours for deep work and core business hours for meetings, turn off Slack and other communication channels, and be respectful of your peers. In long, it's actually a lot more complicated than that and you should really read the article.

No commute

That's 40+ minutes (if you're lucky) of commuting you cut down each day. Plus, saving the planet. It's a no-brainer!

Reduce costs

Now that you don't have an office—and all the office perks like ping pong tables, snacks, lunch, etc.—you have more cash in your pocket. Be smart with those extra savings: they came directly from removing perks that your employees enjoyed. I highly recommend you put them back into benefits for your employees: have more regular or extravagant "offsites" and virtual activities, give out gift cards during virtual lunch and learns, help pay for home office equipment or Hotdesk workspaces, etc.

Nurture independence

This requires the right team, right strategy, and right company mission, but if you have the right formula a fully remote team will do a much better job of deep, meaningful, valuable work than office work. For example, I firmly believe that I am a better engineer because instead of immediately turning to my coworker for answers—and interrupting their workflow as well—I thoroughly beat my head against the problem first. Practicing independence and autonomy (and likewise when you should turn to others for debate or answers) is an incredibly important skill to have in this skill-focused industry. Being a fully remote company makes it that much more difficult to bug someone for an answer. That little moment of hesitation realizing it'll have to be a meeting on a calendar or a lengthy Slack message is usually just the motivation you need to find the answer on your own.

Nurture collaboration

Although offices are very very good for collaboration with your direct peers and desk neighbors, it tends to isolate teams to their respective spaces. Collaborating with another team either requires that you meet in a conference room, squat in their team's territory, or have a remote meeting. When everyone is fully remote, it requires the same amount of energy to engage with your direct peers as it does with any member of the company. Remote work often better enables cross-team collaboration than office spaces or hybrid spaces because it strips away cliques or turf.

Added security

Without an office, there's no more office security training or key cards, and if there's one thing I learned from Better Call Saul, it's that office security is pretty poor anyway. You may think that by having a fully remote company you now have new security concerns when your employees are at home, and that may be true, but no truer than if you ever let your employees work from home or give them access to your work resources from home. So save yourself one more unaccountable variable and ditch the office.

All together now

Lastly, and somewhat already called out, although hybrid work seems like the best compromise, it typically creates more division than it is worth. Some people really want to be in the office. Some people really want you to be in the office. Some people are going to have a hard time ignoring that bias when working with you (peers) or writing your performance review (boss). When you work from home, but you have an office you could be working at, there is always that pressure to be at the office and it's impacting your ability to thrive at home. With a fully remote company, everyone is home, everyone wants to be home, and everyone wants you to be home. You're all in this together...thousands of miles apart!

Cautions of being fully remote

Rather than focusing purely on the downsides of being a fully remote company, I want to present them as cautions: obstacles that can be overcome with appropriate strategy. The strategies I will focus on in the next section, but as a precursor to that, know that being a fully remote company comes with many challenges. Many of these challenges are fairly novel issues in the industry that lack thorough definitive research and tactics. It's a road unpaved and there's a lot of learning, listening, and flexibility required to find the right solutions. Fortunately for you, I've been down this road before.

It isn't for everyone

A fully remote company is not a good fit for everyone. But that shouldn't come as a surprise or limiting factor. A carpenter—no matter how skilled and successful—likely is not a good fit for a software company. You will inevitably have to pass by some incredible individuals that don't like your model, but you'll find just as many qualified candidates who have been looking for fully remote work if you have the right recruiting strategy.

It isn't a money saver

Just because you no longer have to pay for office utilities, amenities, and rent does not mean there are no other comparable expenses. Surprise surprise: it isn't cheap to keep up the morale, team building, and productivity of a team regardless of the distance.

I know. I know. I just finished stating above that being a fully remote company reduces costs, and I do believe that for most companies, it's still significantly less costly than maintaining an office space. However, it's important to not pinch pennies with your remote workforce. What you were saving from the office should be expended on outfitting your remote employees, virtual team engagement activities, tools, and services, physical get-togethers, and growing the team. Want to skimp on all those "extra" expenses? Watch your company's productivity, retention, and camaraderie plummet harder than the LUNA currency. Just because your company is remote, doesn't mean you should skimp on reinvesting your dividends back into your internal operations.

It's a loss of sense of control

It's much easier to be under the illusion that you, as a leader or manager, have the ability to control the productivity of your team in an office. When your direct reports are all under your watchful panopticon care, you may believe that they are remaining busy. I highly recommend avoiding this mindset. Here's why:

[M]anagers and leaders may not trust employees as much as we think, which explains why so many are pressing employees to return to work and “be seen” in the office. It is of course ironic to assume that someone who is not sufficiently engaged or motivated to work from home will somehow become hyper-productive because you force them into the office, unless the plan is to have them under close surveillance or micromanage them, which have never been optimal strategies for boosting productivity... [M]any managers and leaders are not very good at measuring employee performance/output clearly, so they focus on input instead. This means valuing presentism over actual productivity, which inadvertently promotes pretending to work rather than actual work, and political maneuvering over value creation or merit.

The Challenges of Hybrid Work, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Forbes

Even if you can avoid this mindset, not every manager that you hire may be so easy to mold. I have found that most seasoned managers strongly dislike the idea of remote work for this reason. Be careful about what kind of managers you bring into your company to lead your teams.

It's an unproven social experiment

I'll dedicate an entire section to this point as it's perhaps the most challenging yet important challenge with fully remote work. With fully remote work being a fairly new paradigm, and the impact of social media, the internet, and other virtual activities still hotly debated and ambiguous [1] [2] [3] [4], you'll be pursuing aspects of business that may generally lead to higher levels of depression, loneliness, disinhibition, and isolation from your employees. Not all of it is bad, and there are great ways to combat it, but you should be prepared for a hard long battle against an ill-defined and misunderstood giant-of-a-problem.