Remote work: picking the right tradeoffs for your organization
In writing about remote work best practices for an upcoming talk, I took a step back and thought about remote work from the highest level. How we initially set up our organizations for remote work determines both the challenges we will face, and the viability of implementing any practices we might read on a blog post or hear on a podcast
So instead of listing off a bunch of practices without any context of your organization, let's spend some time thinking about how to think about going remote.
What do we even mean when we say remote?
Remote has become a loaded word in our work environments. Almost everyone has a different idea of what "Remote Work" means. That's because like many things in life, going remote isn't a black and white decision. Instead, I find it more useful to think of remote being on a spectrum from "fully on-site" to being "fully remote".
GitLab has done a wonderful job defining 10 models of remote work spanning this entire spectrum (In fact, if you are looking for a comprehensive guide on going remote I can think of no better resource, free or paid, than the materials GitLab has developed).
If you are like me, you may ask yourself "Great, now I have 10 options for remote work, how am I going to decide which one to do?", and then immediately follow that up with "How am I going to justify this choice to leadership/my boss/my teams?"
My approach
Remote may be a new-ish problem, but there are some familiar problem-solving frameworks I like to draw from:
- Since I'm an engineer at heart, I'm going to tackle this as a system design problem.
- And since I am an organizational leader, I'm going to look at this through the lens of organizational design.
System design tells me that there will be tradeoffs to manage, rather than right or wrong decisions. Organizational design (which is really a subset of system design) tells me that we aren't just creating a new set of disconnected policies, but rather we may be making a significant change to our organizational structure and processes. And that in turn can impact the people we hire, the tools we use, and even the strategy of our company.
What tradeoffs?
While there may be many options for your setup, I find there are just 3 key decisions that will help you decide on your remote implementation:
- Office first vs Remote first
- Regional vs Global
- Asynchronous vs Synchronous
There will be other decisions to make along the way, but these ones will determine the challenges that your management and teams must overcome in order for your teams to work together effectively.
Let's talk about each of these choices why they are so important.
Office First vs Remote First
Office First means your staff is still centered around working in the office. Some staff are allowed to work remotely sometimes, but none are fully remote. Staff are required to conform to office processes and may need to "catch up" after a day of remote work. Examples:
- Remote work is allowed for a few set days a month for the whole organization
- Staff may work from home as needed for personal reasons
Remote First means that you are switching to make remote the norm. Processes are designed for a remote work force. People can use offices if they want, but are generally not required to do so, with the possible exception of occasional on-site meetings. Anyone who works consistently in an office does so "as if they are remote".
| Office First | Remote First |
|---|---|
| Minimal change for on-site staff | All staff must change how they work |
| Can make use of existing offices | Staff must have a work setup at home |
| Hiring must be constrained to the office location and local rates | Wider hiring pool of people who must work remotely or don't live in expensive metros |
| Difficult to move to full remote if required by world events | Easy for everyone to work from home if needed |
| Technology only needed so support special cases of remote work | Requires technology investment to support meetings, documentation, communication, brainstorming |
| Easier to do high bandwidth collaborative creation | Easier to do deep individual work |
| Office space required for all staff and they all have a workstation | Office space is optional and offices need less space and fewer workstations |
While this first choice may seem trivial, I think it is important to show that remote work isn't a clear win in a world where you have an existing office and co-located staff.
Can some teams are Remote First while others are Office First / Office only?
Yes… but the organization has to be well designed. Specifically, your Remote First teams and Office First teams should not have to regularly communicate or work together. It is best for this to division to be made at a corse grain level rather than team-by-team so teams with dependencies share the same work style. There are 2 natural places to make these splits:
- By business units or departments, where teams with the same mission have the same remote policies.
- By teams that have regulatory or logistical ties to a locale. Functions like IT, Legal, Sales and Customer Service may all need to be Office Only or Office First.
You still incur some overhead with this setup, but it ensures teams work that together don't run into bottlenecks and only have to learn to work in one way.
It is still possible for some to feel that there is a "class system" in this setup, but keeping well defined boundaries and having attentive and supportive leadership enables this to work.
Are Office First and Remote First just types of Hybrid work?
Definitions vary, but the key difference between my definition of Hybrid and the ones above is that in Hybrid setups, both the Office and Remote are treated as first-class work environments and are fully supported by the organization. In contrast, both Office First and Remote First have a single first-class work environment. This creates issues that I talk about below.
Regional vs Global
When your staff work remotely, you have options about how remote you want your organization to be.
Regional: Staff share the same time zone, country and/or working hours. If you have decided to be Office First, then your staff must be regional.
Global: Staff may be located around the world, spanning more than 3 time zones and/or work in off-hours.
| Regional | Global |
|---|---|
| You can hire within a large region | You can hire from anywhere in the world |
| Pay structures only need to consider few locales and countries | Pay structures and laws become complicated |
| Can work with either synchronous or asynchronous processes | Requires asynchronous practices or teams to be internally restricted to regions |
| More difficult to support global customers who speak different languages and have different waking hours | 24 hour coverage becomes easier, local teams may support local users |
| Synchronous work is easier since everyone has a similar work day | Synchronous work between teams becomes difficult due to limited overlap |
| In person meet ups are easier and cheaper | In person meetups may require longer travel |
This is a common "un-decision". When you first go remote, most staff will be near the existing office. Over time teams may disperse and managers may begin hiring from different geographies. Without proper planning and infrastructure this can cause huge bottle necks in productivity.
Expanding to a global work force should be an intentional step. And requires thinking about the next tradeoff…
Asynchronous vs Synchronous
Moving to an asynchronous work style is by far the most dramatic cultural change you can make. When you combine this choice with the previous one, you really begin to define the shape of your organization and the ways they can communicate.
| Asynchronous | Synchronous |
|---|---|
| Face-to-face meetings require some people to meet "out side" of work hours | Face-to-face meetings are easy to organize |
| People with have day time responsibilities like parents, or those with very different work hours, can participate equally | Your company is limited in hiring people who are willing to work a "regular work day" |
| Actions, decisions and policies are documented by default for communication | Documentation is less likely to be updated since people can receive information in person |
| Announcements must be communicated in multiple ways - video and written | Announcements can be easily made to everyone all at once |
| Your company has a competitive hiring advantage and attracts people who either need or want to be remote | Candidates with in demand skills who want remote work will require higher compensation, or impossible to hire |
| Creative group activities require more time and clear processes, or must be delegated to individuals | Brainstorming and group creative activities can happen quickly in person with hi-bandwidth |
| Feedback loops take longer, dependencies must be minimized and so self-service processes implemented | Feedback loops are quicker and require less planning, ad-hoc collaboration is easier |
| Onboarding processes for new staff must well designed and documented | Easier to hire and onboard junior staff and for teams to support them |
| Favors flat organizations and mature staff must who self-manage | Favors hierarchical organizations and multiple levels of management |
| Leaders must lead with more vision, and less direct control of teams | Leaders can be active participants in team goals and ensure business alignment |
Whether you choose to have Global workforce or a Regional workforce, they both exert what I can best describe as "entropy" on your organizational processes. Regional organizations tend to towards developing synchronous process. Global organizations will tend to towards developing asynchronous process.
If you want to be Global, but maintain synchronous processes then you will need to be intentional with your Organizational Design to ensure you staff is productive and happy. An example of this is to divide your organization into regions. In this setup, it is common to organize teams around "hub offices". For instance you may have an office in the USA and one in the EU. Staff in Europe do not work regularly with US staff, and they may have different missions, products, etc… The key is that teams with dependencies work in the same region.
What you absolutely want to avoid is having team members spread over distant time zones. I've seen setups where code reviews — or any type of feedback -—- take days because an engineer needs to wait for another to "wake up". Then another day passes as the engineer responds to feedback. In this setup you can turn 2 hour task into a week of back and forth and interruptions to your staff's flow of work.
Personally, I like synchronous work - I get energy from collaborating with people around me. I also feel that asynchronous processes forces organizations to adopt lot of good habits — clearer vision, better documentation, more individual ownership — which are better for all.
Summary
So there you have it, you can choose your own adventure!
Do you want to be an office first, regional company who works synchronously? Do you want to be a remote first, global company, who works asynchronously? Something in between?
With the knowledge of potential tradeoffs and challenges, you can pick what works best for your organization. No work style is a clear win. It really depends on your business model and your people. Whatever you choose, you should be intentional and make these decisions explicit. That way your teams can spend their energy leveraging the advantages of your organizational design rather than fighting against them.
TL;DR
But what about Hybrid?
I define Hybrid as: Maintaining an office and permitting staff to work remotely when and where they choose. The office environment remains intact with few changes. Both work environments are fully supported by the organization and people can move between them as they choose (This matches up with GitLab’s definition of “Hybrid-remote”). This setup is a popular choice - maybe the most popular. And why not? After all, you get to use your office, plus your staff have options to work in the environment they like best. Sounds like win-win.
In my opinion, these Hybrid setups are by far the biggest causes of remote work issues. In fact, supporting a Hybrid environment is orders of magnitude harder than Office First and Remote First. And I’m not the only one with this opinion. The reason is clear when you start planning: You have to design not one, but two work environments! Plus you need a way to interface between those environments, and a way for staff to move freely between them.
It is hard for people know how and when to communicate with each other and feedback loops can become less predictable. And the synchronous policies of the office, where some or all of senior leadership are likely based, tend to win out. In these cases, staff in distant time zones may be expected to have frequent meetings outside of work hours. And this make it much more likely for “zoom fatigue” to set in with your remote workers.
The net result is that remote workers tend to feel second class. They find it difficult to participate equitably in meetings with many on-site staff. Critical meetings may happen without them. Important decisions may be made without their knowledge or input. If you have ever been on a team where everyone was on site except one person, you will find these problems familiar.
If your remote policies match this definition of Hybrid and intend on maintaining a remote work force, I suggest having discussions with leadership and reviewing your organizational design. Maybe you can make some changes to make it easier on your remote staff and implement a flavor of Remote First.