Remote-first companies, once an odd side-show with few household names (Automattic is likely the best known), has now become a daily topic with major companies like Shopify, Twitter, Square, most of Facebook, and more announcing that they’re moving to a remote work model permanently. The world was slowly moving this way, and Covid-19 accelerated it by 20 years — that’s a good thing.
Now, I’m not a fan of the name “remote work” to explain that employees don’t have to work in a corporate office, but I understand the rationale. Other terms like “work from home” don’t capture the freedom of being able to work anytime, anywhere (wanna work from the beach? go for it!). Shopify’s CEO, Tobi Lutke, calls it “digital by default“, which is interesting, but too difficult to understand for it to win the naming game. My favorite choice: work.
Work is work, regardless where you want to do it. “Work” becomes the default and “office work” is going into the office to do work. We’re already working at home, at the coffee shop, on the train, etc. even if we have a traditional office job. Work has been detached from an office for years.
With work moving away from being office-centric, how do offices fit in? Offices are still critically important. Only their size and design needs to dramatically change. Face-to-face collaboration is superior to digital collaboration, but most collaboration doesn’t need the overhead of in-person meetings. Office space, whether shared or dedicated, becomes primarily for collaboration, meetings, and the subset of employees that don’t have access to a high quality work setup (e.g. poor internet connection or kids at home).
Some companies will want dedicated offices that have their own style and feel. One CEO described it as wanting to have 10 cities each with one floor of office space instead of having 10 floors in one building in one city. Employees still don’t have to be in one of those 10 cities. Work is work. If an employee does like going into an office (hello extraverts!), plenty of cities are available.
Co-working spaces are going to get even more popular. As companies move to the modern work arrangement, and away from traditional, dedicated offices, co-working fills the space need for in-person meetings and collaboration, but in a way that is 10x more flexible and affordable. Need five desks for employees that have a six-month project? Done. Need an event center to have a 100-person all-hands meeting once a month? Done. The company’s needs are met with lower cost and greater flexibility.
The human-to-human connection has never been more important, yet now has to be more intentional than colleagues sitting together in the same place.
Remote work is now just work. The future has arrived and we’re better off for it.
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David Cummings, Khareem Sudlow
