Remote is not the future of work, it is the past

All great civilizational-scale institutions throughout human history were built working remotely.

The Founding Fathers created the United States of America while working from home—they mapped a blueprint for this country primarily by exchanging letters to each other’s homes in various locations across New England.

We know this because the letters they wrote formed the foundation of political thought in this country from the beginning. The Continental Congress did not convene in a fixed location¹ and rotated their “offsites” in different cities.

The Qing Dynasty governed 450 million people across a vast territory covering what is now China, Mongolia, and parts of Russia—with no Wi-Fi, Slack, email, or phones. Despite each region speaking different dialects; by implementing one writing system, officials from different provinces could easily communicate while working remotely.

If remote work is good enough to build a country, it’s good enough to build a tech company.

Despite messages carried on horseback, these large bureaucracies throughout history were no less effective at governing their millions of citizens—and today I can instantly beam what I’m saying straight into your eyeballs with the Internet.

Why is remote work so effective?

Because it allows room for deep thinking. A non-writing culture cannot think as seriously or deeply as a writing culture.

A modern interruption-driven office keeps your brain from reaching its full potential. Emails popping up on the corner of your screen, a co-worker tapping your shoulder to whisper about the intern across the room, or your supervisor asking you if you have “a minute”—you’re just drowning in constant distraction for eight hours (perhaps more), and your cursor is still stuck in the same place.

Remote work allows you to set up a distraction-free workspace that promotes quiet, focused, uninterrupted thinking and allows you to personalize your schedule for peak productivity.

Remote work is where you’d end up anyway

If your company doesn’t start with remote work from the get-go, it might get stuck with outdated in-person habits as it grows.

As your company gets bigger, it becomes impossible to have face-to-face meetings with everyone.

If you had a 10-minute meeting with each employee every day, you’d only be able to meet with 48 people before using up your entire 8-hour workday, and that’s assuming no moving, bathroom breaks, or time to get any actual work done!

You’ll eventually rely on written communication to manage everyone, even if they all work in the same building. You’ll end up communicating the same way as you would with remote workers anyway once your company gets large enough.

Highly effective small teams work remotely

While it’s true that a small startup team can iterate faster in-person before they’ve found product market fit, this doesn’t mean that you’re not working “remotely”.

Even in a job that seems purely in-person and requires real-time communication, like a small team of Navy SEALs going out on a dangerous mission, it’s only the small squad that is “in-person” with each other. They maintain satellite uplink communications with their command center at all times. The SEALs would be much less effective if they didn’t have the force multiplier of a vast logistics network of outside support at their fingertips.

Your startup is not just about who you see working with you in-person. It also includes everyone who helps you from the outside, like your contractors, investors, vendors, service providers, and various cloud software services that you subscribe to. Getting good at “working remotely” with all of your external service providers is a crucial skill to making your whole company more effective.

All these external teams and tools play a crucial role in making you more effective and efficient, even if they’re not physically present with you.

Remote is better for creativity and serendipity

You might think that in-person is better for sparking creativity via random encounters, but we know that brainstorming is more effective when you use the nominal group technique—combining the ideas of individuals who work alone—rather than having everyone work together.

Who has more diverse and unique ideas? 5 employees from different cultures living and working in 5 different countries, or 5 employees from the same culture living in the same neighbourhood and working in the same office?

We hold an unconscious bias against creativity. Even when it is desired and expressed as an explicit goal, people still resist ideas that are truly innovative or unconventional.² You’re more likely to unconsciously succumb to peer pressure in an in-person group setting just to fit in and go along with what everybody agrees on. That’s when groupthink happens—people start developing a fear to express fresh ideas which dulls your creative juices and restricts the possibilities you’re willing to consider.

Creativity requires incubation, a relaxed time when you make unconscious connections through divergent thinking. But this doesn’t “look like work” in an office environment—you certainly don’t “look” productive taking a short walk to come up with new ideas, even if that’s the most productive thing you could do.

This doesn’t mean we should abolish working together as a whole. Collaboration is just as important, and the Internet makes it possible to meet a wider variance of people online compared to who you can meet in your immediate physical area.

As long as you’re careful to seek new connections outside of your algorithmic echo chamber, you can connect with almost anyone in the world, no matter their background, expertise, or ideology. And I think that’s the greatest gift the Internet has given us.

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Footnotes

1. The Capitol building wasn’t constructed until decades after the founding, and only because they didn’t yet have Zoom. ↩

2. Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., & Goncalo, J. (2011). The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas. Cornell University, IRL School. Retrieved August 29, 2024, from DigitalCommons@ILR ↩