Remote Work and Company Culture

I keep reading that company culture will be difficult to maintain with remote working. This is nonsensical because if culture is important, the most important thing is to have the right culture, and remote work shouldn't be an impediment to building or maintaining it, but rather a big enhancer of the many things that are valuable in company cultures.

I would appreciate your help in writing a generic, open letter to company leaders about remote working. Here is a draft. Feel free to make suggestions, please. Feel free to use this to write your own company letter! 

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Dear Company Leaders,

You say you care about our company culture and you want us all to come back to the office so we can safeguard it. But our company culture, as you have previously explained it, is to care about profits, the planet, and people—not an office building—and returning to an office is against our company culture, as I hope to explain.

Our company says they care about:

Racial and Economic Inequity 

Hiring only people that can live near-enough to our office building is one of the worst forms of systemic inequity. An office in a rich area: a) excludes poor people in these areas from earning a decent wage at our company, and b) prevents poor people with a decent income earned in our company from enriching the areas where they live. 

Studies have found that intergenerational mobility is enhanced in a neighborhood simply by having public transport stations nearby because the poor could then work in richer areas. Imagine the positive effect on these neighborhoods if people from poor urban and rural areas had easy access to much more work and higher-paying work. 

Let's not wait for more studies to come out. We should hire remote workers from disadvantaged areas, and use remote workers in disadvantaged areas to find other potential employees.

[And, we should use whatever political power we have to get broadband adequate for remote work installed universally.]

Gender Inequity

As long as women continue to be the primary caretakers of children and the household, working from home will continue to be an outsized benefit to them. Women can keep working longer into pregnancies, return to work sooner, and care for infants better and longer.  Remote working, specifically working from home, could bring and keep more women in the workplace and our company.

Working from home allows parents to be there when the kids leave for school and when they get home. They can integrate the needs of their kids into their workday. The end of the pandemic will see children back in school and daycare and the productivity of remote workers who are caretakers for children will increase even more. Some parents would not have to decide between schooling their children at home and returning to work in our office. Some parents may be able to avoid the cost and complications of day care.

And, it’s more time-efficient for all people responsible for households to be able to throw a load of laundry in and take it out between meetings, or tidy the home while waiting for the next meeting to start. 

Differently-Abled People

Remote work gives people including those with visual, auditory, and physical impairments, as well as those with non-neurotypical minds a much more equal footing. Via remote work, they can completely avoid all sorts of physical, sensory, and social barriers. 

And, many ‘typical’ people can benefit for the same reasons. Some individuals—perhaps our most productive contributors—are much more productive when concentrating in long, uninterrupted stretches, and/or more productive outside typical working hours. For them, remote working has been a big boon to productivity, but their performance is going to suffer if moved back into an office full of distractions. 

Most people have enjoyed the structure necessitated by remote work, for example being judged on their results, rather than being judged on the smartness of their attire, their daily arrival & departure times, the cleanliness of their desk, and their ability to chit-chat convincingly about sports. They should not be ignored or punished. The company should not have to lose the productivity they have gained by moving them back into the office.

Safety Culture

The most dangerous aspect for office-based staff, car accidents during commuting hours kill about 10,000 people each year in the US. Our company believes we should avoid unnecessary loss of life whenever possible, so let’s use remote working to avoid commuting.  

We can also avoid having people who feel a little sick in the morning coming into the office. They can stay home and keep working, if they find they are able. We will avoid the issue of the sick and contagious from coming to the office and spreading it, or riding public transportation and contracting it or spreading it. Remote work will prevent a substantial number of sick days in our company, as well as reduce illnesses that spread through families and the community. 

People who are immunocompromised, weak from chemotherapy, recovering from surgery, etc. can start to get back to work sooner, safely. And, in doing so, if they like, they may avoid some mental health challenges associated with missing work while they recover.

Would an unnecessary move from remote work back to an office result in liability? A court might want to weigh a company's decision.

Work/Life Balance

The freedom to work from anywhere is a valuable gift. Many people select a job based on a combination of a specific climate, cultural activities, outdoor activities, family location, choice of schools, safety from crime, affordability, healthcare options, and to be near particular amenities.  Also, they are looking for a short commute to avoid losing hours of their life every day. 

Offering all these gifts, and being able seek talent much more broadly, is a definitive advantage for a company. Are we seriously going to try to compete with companies offering remote work using “casual Fridays”, “pizza-party Wednesdays”, and our office’s faux-leather, multi-use, lounge area?  

Climate Change

Transportation is the largest emitter of GHG in the US (29%) and in the EU (15%). Zero commuting for remote workers can eliminate a huge fraction of that. Uniquely, remote work comes with a savings in costs to individual people and the planet, rather than yet another cost that must be paid to mitigate climate change.

And, to further cut GHG emissions, we can avoid building unnecessary buildings (most of which are glass and steel, and therefore climate-costly). We can avoid heating and cooling offices while at the same time we are heating and cooling our houses and apartments. We won’t have to install and use twice the power, water, and sewage utilities, either. 

Remote work is much more sustainable than office work.  Our carbon footprint will be a fraction of what it was when we were in the office.

Profit

Profit is up. Productivity is up.  Earnings are up. But, it is early days for remote work. There are many more organizational advantages to be discovered and even more technological innovations to be created in the new remote work world. Some of the tools we found during remote work are much better than what we used in the old days (e.g. the Mural.co app, recording of meetings for later viewing). Remote work gives us access to new, huge supplies of untapped talent. We could use it to distribute sales and support. Properly harnessed, remote work will be an ever bigger profit-booster as we continue to learn. 

Company Culture

Remote work can be harnessed to help us grow and build a stronger culture. It will require more explicit methods, but explicit methods like discussion groups and one-on-one meetings done remotely can easily be much more effective than spreading culture via people hanging out around the coffee machine, and seeing the bosses in the hallways every once in a while. Our new hires will need more specific instruction, concrete processes, and more one-on-one time, but we should have provided those things anyway to onboard them faster.

With the savings in office costs, we can physically get together for conferences, seminars, special training, or special occasions. But, we can get together in great locations, with much better amenities. Then, being together will be very special. We can make every second physically together count.

The office building itself was never part of building the company culture. Our culture was built, with varying success, by our direct supervisors and our managers. If our culture is really important, we should train them in how to build and instill the culture our company really needs. Remote work made that obvious, as well as the need to train our supervisors and managers about managing remote workers.

Of course, in order for our culture to be worth anything, we must demonstrate through our deeds that our company culture is something we live by. I hope you agree that remote working directly supports our company culture in many important ways. 

Summary

A company is not its office buildings. Let’s not lose the progress of the past 15 months by returning to ours. Instead, let’s keep the progress we have made, and look for ways to improve our company processes to take full advantage of this new way of working.

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 What do you think?

 Am I wrong about something (please link to the data/study, if possible)?

 What am I missing?

 Cheers,

Burney

Burney Waring is an almost-completely retired global consultant engineer, and Director of Retirement Testing at the Waring Retirement Laboratory.