Remote Work is Eating the World

The most prescient foresight of the previous ten years was penned by Marc Andreesen in 2011: Why Software is Eating the World—and it has. Software has slowly permeated every part of our existence in ways that seem barely imaginable in retrospect. The 2010’s witnessed the world being eaten by software, the 2020s will be consumed by remote work, decentralization, and access to opportunity. Remote work, NoCode, and Fractional Payment/Ownership will be the paradigm that emboldens this evolution. Nothing is eating the world more quickly, or growing in the minds of the general public faster or more fully than the opportunity to have more control and increased flexibility in our lives in parallel to work. Product Zeitgeist Fit is an in vogue term used to identify trends and opportunities beginning to resonate in the collective consciousness. Remote work, in many ways, is still Pre-Product Zeitgeist fit. With the benefits on both sides of the working relationship — companies and workers — being so great, the rise of remote work is inevitable.

Why Remote Work is Eating the World

Every day I hear another company is transitioning to offer remote work. From the world’s largest enterprises to the earliest startups, companies of every size are awakening to the fact that remote working isn’t going away and are embracing it before they are pushed. This is a revolution being driven by world-class people demanding more trust, control, flexibility and autonomy in their lives. Where companies don’t give it to them, they will move to their biggest competitors. Historically, disruption has come from external threats: remote work has the potential to kill companies from the inside. Death by a thousand cuts, bleeding your best talent as your competition grows in power. 

Remote working isn’t new, telecommuting has been part of work vernacular for at least 10 years if not the previous 2 decades. The problem is that tech hadn’t progressed enough to make it seamless. Lack of ubiquitous super-fast internet connections and software that made communication, collaboration and access to data and documents easy created friction. That problem has been solved by a large number of different companies today. 

Problem two is that offices are great for specific demographics terrible for others. Talk to certain people and they will champion the environment and culture; this is typically due to the fact that everyone there is exactly like them. Promotion decisions are made on the basis of who you drink beer with out of hours rather than your level of performance. Time spent in the office is still the KPI for many companies rather than output. That’s before you even consider the problems offices cause with respect to companies lacking diversity. 

Much of the debate about whether a company will offer remote work still revolves around trust . How can we know our workers will do what they are meant to at home? In reality, the opposite is usually true, the challenge of remote work isn’t people not working enough, it’s them working too much and burning out. Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows what offices are: distraction factories where people struggle to pad out an 8 hour day. A collection of headphone-wearing workers desperately fighting for the focus and isolation to get shit done.

Slowly companies in every industry recognize what has been obvious for at least 5 years. Remote work lets them slash real estate costs, leads to happier workers, higher engagement, lower turnover. The companies making the transition first are smaller tech startups who no longer want to compete for talent in big cities with large tech enterprises who monopolize talent. Over the next 10 years, I expect every industry to be disrupted by remote work, with companies moving first having a key advantage to retain their best people and expand their hiring pool globally rather than a fixed 30-mile radius around the office.

Another guarantee. The hottest private equity trend of the next decade will see funds buying companies and making them fully remote. 

Since the rise of the office at the end of the industrial revolution, the office has deteriorated to the point of becoming an adult kids club. Having begun as the optimum space to focus and get work done in isolation, it’s devolution from everyone having a private space to open plan everything is complete. The only reason this has not become more apparent is that tech has made it so easy to do so much more work than was previously possible: productivity decreases haven’t been noticed. As we begin to hear platitudes of offices being critical to collaboration, and that a lack of water cooler chat is an existential threat to the business, ask yourself why people are really concerned by the transition? As far as I’m aware, polio wasn’t eradicated by co-workers shooting the breeze waiting for the kettle to boil.  

It’s Already Bigger than you Realize

Over 20 million people work remotely in the EU and USA today, up from 9 million a decade ago — that number is projected to grow to 40 million people by 2029. Eventually, any of the 255 million desk jobs globally will be able to be done remotely. 4.5 billion people now use broadband internet globally. Every single one of them has an opportunity to participate as a cloud-native worker in a decentralized global economy. 

A global workforce who understands the same software and has access to the same internet-based services means the technical debt accrued in the form of training no longer requires payment. Companies simply add another seat to their existing SaaS subscription and that worker uses the same tool they would use if they were in an office or with a different company. 

The dream of every cyber-visionary may have been possible a generation previous, but this is the generation who will get to experience its full promise. Lower operating costs and ubiquitous access to cheap software that empowers teams to operate from anywhere in the world will empower the biggest workplace revolution in history. The result will be a global economy that is digitally wired and decentralized, accessible to anyone, anywhere, with a reliable, fast internet connection. When you talk about equality, nothing offers greater promise. 

Today, the world’s most innovative companies are moving towards a remote-first or fully distributed model of working. Mozilla, the creator of open-source browser Firefox, is fully distributed. InVision, one of the leading design products on the planet, is fully distributed. GitLab, one of the leading developer repository tools, is fully distributed. Each employs over 1,000 employees. That is scratching the surface. Digitalocean, Figma, Automattic, Graph, Basecamp, HubSpot, Hubstaff, Upwork, Airtable, Github, Elastic, Buffer, Zapier, Auth0, Stripe, Gitlab, Trello, Doist, and Deel are some of the other intrepid visionaries leading the march into a better life-work balance. The world’s largest enterprises are beginning to take note. Large non-technical enterprises like Banks, Credit Rating Agencies, Professional Service Firms, Government Bodies with hundreds of thousands of employees each are leaning in. They have to. 

Remote work faces several huge challenges. The biggest is that we replicate the bad parts of office working in remote environments. There’s such fervor around this space that there’s an increasing number of companies building tools for remote teams who have never worked that way themselves. A fundamental understanding of the unique challenges associated with remote working is needed, not opportunistic development that misses the point. 

Asynchronous working, for example, is something that is a prerequisite of deep work. Isolation is a feature of remote work, not a bug. Yet, many of the tools emerging focus on ‘synchronous collaboration’ and perpetuate a surveillance culture. This may be great for instantaneous gratification and middle managers who think time spent in the office is indicative of performance, but for the people who really matter — the ones doing actual work — it’s an aberration. Distraction is not collaboration, no matter how many different ways you say it. 

Remote work isn’t a silver bullet. There will always be those who believe that there is no substitute for being in an office with a team which, though wrong, must be acknowledged as we move towards better evidence. The benefits of remote work are so great, the negatives of office work so pervasive, that the majority of workers will operate a majority of the time by the end of the next decade. The challenges of remote work will be met because it is far easier to let everyone have a remote office at home and deal with the issues of operating that way (loneliness) than fix office-based operating. Eradicating the commute alone will give the average worker 22 days a year more to focus on things that matter to them. 

Loneliness is real and must be addressed. That being said, should the office be the place that your main social contact occurs? In my experience, this leads to poor relationships that lack breadth and depth. It turns out that your bosses hiring policy as the thing that dictates the people you spend the most time with is a terrible mechanism for developing meaningful relationships. Remote work, on the other hand, has let me spend more time with my friends and family. I feel like I know my partner and I’m there for my kids. It’s enabled me to focus on my self-care, health, and wellbeing in ways I would have hardly believed prior to operating this way. My belief, and hope, is that remote work leads to a renaissance of hobbies, and people participating in their local communities. This will do more to alleviate growing societal ills than working in an office ever could. 

In reality, remote work is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed remotely yet. Work in an office? There’s no difference between being remote on different continents or working on different floors of the same building. In both situations, people use Slack, Email, or pick up the phone to communicate. Convenience will always beat proximity. Similarly, if you answer emails out of hours, take your laptop home to work or respond to calls while you are away from the office you already have everything you need to be a remote worker but your company just doesn’t trust you to be one yet. Remote will first become an expectation. It may eventually become a right, leading to a reimagining of life-work balance.