A New(ish) Frontier - Why I Embrace A Remote Future

Before you spend your valuable time reading this you need to understand I wrote this as a love letter to what was and what influenced my thinking towards a remote future. While I feel like I have read an endless stream of articles and research around the topic - you won't find a data dump to persuade you one way or the other here. I believe the ongoing debate on what is most beneficial for businesses and the people who make them is so much more complex than a conversation about working from home or in-office. It's messy and it impacts local communities and livelihoods.

To anticipate the future I'm a believer you need to understand the past. So lets rewind...

Nearly four years ago Dirigo Collective moved out of my home kitchen and into a small portion of the historic Sparhawk Mill in Yarmouth, Maine. As our company grew we continued to expand, eventually occupying half the mill and we've made it our own since. The space originally was what you'd expect from a mid-19th century mill building... completely open space, beautiful bones but low light and pretty barren (picture below of my little dude walking around our main floor before we started work on it). You can still see the tracks in the floor from where old machines once stood. We built walls, splashed our values over them and we turned this tired mill into a buzzy factory of ideas and innovation once again. The energy... palpable. Fast forward to March 2020 (three months after we closed on a new floor in the mill) the world, including our own in many ways, forever changed overnight.

Like most folks when we left our vibrant culture a lot of us thought "well this will be a fun little two week vacation from the office." Cute to think back on, right? How could any of us expect that those two weeks would turn into two years of radical change and self discovery.

We learned a lot about ourselves, our colleagues, and our business. We did everything in our days of lockdown to remain connected. We had daily virtual coffee chats to kickstart the day, virtual happy hours, breakout push-up challenges through our group gchat channel, and we would find ways to get together outside for volunteering opportunities.

We tried to bring people back together in the office as cases of covid-19 went through it's valleys, which in hindsight I think was really more exhausting than beneficial but hey... we tried. In January of 2022 we declared a hybrid model. What that looked like was Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays in-office and Wednesday's and Fridays were to be optional remote. Most people took the optional remote days to work from home.

When we came back together in early 2022 I couldn't help but feel that we were trying to put a genie back in the bottle. We were trying to recapture what was, but what we didn't consider was that so much of who we are as colleagues, friends, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters... as humans have changed.

Since the inception of Dirigo Collective we have strived to be different from the traditional agency grind, priding ourselves on setting expectations with our partners to allow our team to have a work/life balance. That means no excessive late nights and weekends working. What we found in the two years working predominantly remote is that while challenging at times it actually provided the best balanced lifestyle we could have ever imagined. Parents didn't need to sweat getting home in time for dinner because of a long commute, folks on the team without kiddos could sleep in a few extra minutes longer, and our teammates who were already remote working in other states were able to feel more connected because the organization was together committing to a more inclusive virtual environment. Furthermore... our productivity skyrocketed. We found that Thursdays turned into the new Friday's because everyone was CRUISING through work because there were fewer sporadic distractions, and interactions became intentional. It allowed people to be heads down when needed, and for the soft skills of our work, we found that we were able to be in a more clear head space which lead to more meaningful interactions.

The decision to go remote in April of 2022 was met with a little melancholy for me personally. These walls represent memories. Also, so much of what we do in media lives in an intangible universe, but this physical space makes the intangible - well, tangible. It's the embodiment of what the manifesto I wrote in my journal nearly five years ago before leaving my corporate media job is all about. As the quote from Walt Disney says on one of our walls, which we now use as a studio space, "we keep moving forward opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity leads us down new paths." I guess you could say a part of my decision making is just that. Curiosity.

Growth comes from change. I firmly believe that after the last two years of loss and new found loves that what we learned about the human condition is wasted if we try to re-create the past. No doubt we expect challenges that come from being a remote organization, but more challenging than being remote for work are the challenges of being human and working on prioritizing mental health. Doing good work and working with good people means sacrificing comfortability sometimes for creating a more balanced life.

Some members of our team have already begun creating their own dream home office, while others are plotting their weekend roadtrips across New England so they can setup shop out of co-working spaces with other like-minded folks in our field. I see the world opening up for our team as a way of opening doors for our organization and brand partners.

Our idea has always been to be so much more than a marketing and media company. Our purpose is deeply rooted in contributing to the communities we serve in a positive way. We have no intention of letting go of our physical manifesto that resides out of the Sparhawk Mill, and I'm excited to be announcing what that looks like in the next few weeks. Until then we'll be dreaming up new ways of remaining connected for our own team and beyond.

Be kind. Be Patient. Take care of each other.