Wade Foster
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Video and messaging enable remote work. But is it right for your company?
David Cancel is the CEO and founder of Drift. He is a five-time founder, two-time CEO, podcast host and best-selling author of Conversational Marketing. Follow him on Twitter @dcancel.
More posts by this contributor
Four-day work week. Open-plan offices. Work-life balance. Remote work. There are endless ways to set up your team and company for success. And there’s evidence for and against all of these scenarios.
Take remote work for instance. Owl Labs reports that 44% of global companies don’t allow it. While Gallup reports that 43% of all Americans work remotely at least some of the time.
So what’s the right answer? Well that depends on what your goals are. But no matter what, the important thing is to make a decision and stick with it.
Because no matter what decision you’re making – personal, professional, big or small – it’s important to commit 100%. And when that decision is likely to impact your company’s culture for years to come, you better hope to get it right.
So when Buffer’s co-founder and CEO, Joel Gascoigne, decided to close down one of their offices, I gave him one key piece of advice. Commit to either placing the entire team in the remaining office or establish a 100% remote workforce. Both scenarios can work, but a mix of the two will only set you up to fail.
When everyone is remote, that becomes one of the defining characteristics of a company’s culture. People have no option but to get their work done and collaborate virtually. And an entirely remote culture can both draw in candidates attracted to this way of working and remove those who know they won’t be able to thrive working remotely.
Powered by WPeMatico
Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub
Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility.
There are two trends to unpack here. The first is startups that are fully, or almost fully, remote, with employees distributed around the world. There’s a growing list of significant companies in this category: Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier all have from 100 to nearly 1,000 remote employees.
The second trend is nomadic founders with no fixed location. For a generation of founders, moving to Silicon Valley was de rigueur. Later, the emergence of accelerators and investors worldwide allowed a wider range of potential home bases. But now there’s a third wave: a culture of traveling with its own, growing support networks and best practices.
You don’t have to look far to find startup gurus and VCs who strongly advise against being remote, much less a nomad. The basic reasoning is simple: Not having a location doesn’t add anything, so why do it? Startups are fragile, so it’s best to avoid any work practice that could disrupt delicate growth cycles.
Powered by WPeMatico