Going Hybrid Pt. 1: The downside to remote work

It's been a crazy couple of years for all of us, bringing a lot of change to our personal lives and how we do business. One of the numerous significant disruptors was the normalization of remote working on an unprecedented scale.?

In the wake of the pandemic, hybrid work models are cropping up everywhere and are the subject of hot debate among many a founder. With this in mind, I'm weighing in on the topic, which I'll split into two articles that debate on-site work versus a dream come true for most employees - the wonder of working from home.?

Cutting to the chase, after a great deal of deliberation, we're implementing a hybrid work model at DESelect. However, coming to this decision wasn't anywhere near as easy as my announcement.?

The homework experiment

Running a startup means you have to be prepared to take risks and run experiments. Regardless of our punchy risk appetite, our leadership team was extremely hesitant to adopt a hybrid work model. Actually, if I'm honest, the number one hesitator was me, which makes me feel a little guilty since this is in stark contrast with our core company principle, trust. After all, why wouldn't you let your people work more from home when you trust them, right? Well, that makes sense in theory, but I still had huge reservations over this.?

I like to think that I'm a hard worker, but I'm only human. The simple fact is I know that I don't work as efficiently or effectively when I'm at home. For example, perhaps I have lunch—I make my lunch, but there's a TV staring at me, so I might sneak an episode on Netflix just while cooking. But I keep watching since I'm not quite done, and the second episode's already started. I've spent an hour in front of the TV before I know it. Sure, this is not exactly a disaster, but how does that compare to a day in the office? First of all, I'd have a shorter lunch and would return to my desk sooner. But in that half-hour, I'd talk to colleagues and find out how they are and what's happening in their personal lives. I might discover that some other team had a great idea or someone's frustrated, so in that short time of interaction, as a CEO, I can better understand what's going on with my people and my business.

Sitting at home, I'm missing out on that. Nevertheless, I realize there's a good argument to say that good people can do their job working remotely. I'm sure there are some quantifiable or at least reasonable qualitative metrics. Either way, we can evaluate a person's work even if they're not in the office. Output's easy to measure like that. But that's not the point, and most leaders recognize this. The real magic of coming on-site is not that you deliver just what's in your job description. By being close to team members, you go beyond. Such interactions make things happen faster. Is that necessary from 9-5, Monday to Tuesday? Perhaps not, but there’s a strong case for ensuring that team members share the same physical space at least at some point during the week.?

In sharing space with colleagues, you're likely to share ideas; thus, you might see when a colleague has a better way of solving a problem, so interacting actually helps you become better at your job. Or there might be some material conversations that lead to more creative solutions—to a better idea, or maybe Carla from sales overhears Jochen from customer success talking about an ecstatic client, inspiring Carla to reach out for a referral. Sure, we can tackle a lot of this remotely, communicating on Slack or webinars, but isn't it much more challenging?

What we have here is a failure to communicate

Then there's the psychology. The Journal of Management Information Systems published a study observing the effect of communication frequency and channel richness between CEOs and their teams. You may already know this, but media richness theory (MRT) is a long-established framework that observes and compares media channels' various pros & cons to establish clear, effective, and healthy communications. Depending on the criteria, one channel is richer than another. So, the text message I send you is less rich than you hearing my voice because my voice carries tones that help you detect my emotions.? And if you see me face to face, you catch a lot more than a Zoom, for instance, as we also have these things called 'micro-emotions'; idiosyncrasies like a twitching eye or a mouth movement. While they may only last a few milliseconds, they can indicate how another person feels about something. But your typical web conference latency will likely ensure that we miss one another's micro-emotions. This hidden layer of communication is critical to good intuition about what's going on with a person. Does a hybrid workplace model get over this? Not entirely, but perhaps we could schedule those important meetings for when people are on-site, thus creating a symbiosis with a hybrid model.?

Lest we forget, even though we work hard to foster a culture of candor and transparency, not everyone is comfortable being so, especially if they're from a background or culture where this is not typically allowed—or upon which it's frowned. Therefore, we might be more reserved with our words in remote situations.?

So remote work degrades the richness of our interactions. We're missing out on how people genuinely feel about certain things, whether in their personal life or something work-related.?

My first job

Since my first job working at a Big Four consulting firm, I've always been very tentative about time off. In that role, it was always frowned upon if we needed to go to the bank or a car repair shop or leave the office to do anything that wasn't essential for work. Now, of course, this kind of inflexibility is ridiculous, and no doubt even the most rigid employment cultures have had to adapt over recent years. I may be conveying a "back in my day" sort of grumpiness, but then I also remember a time when I worked from home and didn't know what was expected of me or what to do with myself. So I played Guitar Hero (that's a video game for those of you currently scratching your heads). Is that rare? Or do all employees find themselves similarly distracted when working from home? These are the questions.

The twist

Amidst my monologue, I ought to confess that we allowed remote working from the very beginning of our company. It was a natural consequence of having zero funding and utilizing a program that provided interns from all over Europe. Initially, they would work on-site, then often return to their home countries to continue working for us remotely.

We mainly had engineers managed by my co-founder Jonathan in the early days. Remote work suited them as, being coders, they preferred peace & quiet. Unlike me, Jonathan never had an issue with this. Of course, he had a point. Being somewhere quiet allows focus, and it's great when you're in a flow-state like that; you can just code without interruption. I get it.

Our go-to-market team members (sales, marketing, etc.) came along a wee bit later, and from my perspective, the home-working debate is totally different for such functions. There's a need to collaborate more often. Again, strictly speaking, you can handle these interactions via Slack, and if you have all the tools and mechanisms in place, that's fine. But in a startup, it's different, so being able to talk with the person across the table from you is priceless.?

So what did we learn from that experiment? Nothing too shocking, if I'm honest. On the one hand, the product team has always been very productive, delivering and collaborating remotely. We were also able to introduce peer reviews, where we had team members inspect each other's code, which naturally led to more collaboration. We would also do this thing at the end of the week where we'd close down what we then called customer or product sprints and review each other's results. It was a good time for the team to get together virtually, and of course, this would lead to informal activities afterward. However, these calls became too chaotic with more than ten people, so they eventually took on a different shape that required less interaction. Also, the product team was able to collaborate because they did daily scrums. So every morning, they got into a call, worked together for 15 minutes, then broke away to get on, and that was that. And so, all of these things helped them work, but it's also true that many of our team members found it hard working from home alone, especially during the pandemic. They were lonely and felt disconnected from the office, and it has continued to be challenging in that regard.?

A more recent data point involves the departure of one of our remote engineers. During her exit interview, she told us she liked the culture, people, pay, etc., but that she didn't enjoy always working remotely. She offered this as one of the reasons she wanted to leave. Keeping members engaged will be crucial to our success in growing our engineering team. With this in mind, I wonder how much further we can effectively drive the total remote working initiative.

On the office-based customer team side, I think that maybe bond better. I saw—and still see—people in our Antwerp office having lunch together, becoming friends who socialize after work and even on weekends. That we're able to create an environment where people build friendships on this level makes me super-happy as a founder. So, the long story short is that I think on-site work helps create deeper, informal bonds. Also, I'm convinced that it improves creativity and overall collaboration.

The result

And so far, this is the result of the experiment; but it doesn't mean we suddenly decided to change one thing for the other. It is a significant benefit, for instance, that we can hire remote team members across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. But how do we keep this growing remote team engaged??

We aim to have a company gathering, bringing together the global team. Our next one would be in our Antwerp office, which admittedly won't be all that exciting for the Belgians. Still, for those team members around the world, it will be quite a thing for them to travel to Belgium and meet people in person whom they've only ever known via digital communication. And maybe visit Brussels, Amsterdam, and/or Paris over the weekend. :)

Last summer, because we crushed our targets, we took the team to the Canary Islands for some yacht and windsurfing fun. It was a great bonding experience for many team members and good for leadership to interact with everyone in this way. I guess that's what I keep coming back to here. Is it when we come together that the real magic happens? Is it the sharing of space and personal energy that makes all the difference to whether a business thrives??

As a founder, I talk with and share points of view with other founders. Aside from the numerous complaints relating to scheduling, micro-managing, and monitoring home workers, I note how some leaders believe that hybrid working is yet another fad. There's some basis for this cynicism, as many companies adopting remote working policies have failed in this regard. Yahoo and IBM famously experimented with remote working models even before the pandemic. They abandoned these plans and brought everyone back on-site. So while I want to create the best workplace culture for my team, where does one draw the line if hybrid working harms the business as a whole??

There's no doubt there are pros & cons to this discussion, and as I said at the beginning of this story, it's a hot topic for debate. So in my next article, I'll try on the other hat—the one that considers all the good things of remote working—and perhaps I'll dive into the space where the company and its team members' benefits align from this paradigm shift in workspace culture. I’ll also talk about what it means to adopt a hybrid workplace model. After all, utilizing this strategy is not as black & white as it may seem.?

In the meanwhile, I welcome discussion and feedback. What are your thoughts?