Remote work is the future of technology.

I first wrote about my feelings on remote work on the third post on this blog. Since then, I’ve only become more convinced. Remote work continues to be extremely desirable to the technology workforce. A survey that Zapier ran says that 74% of people would be willing to quit their job to take a remote one.

COVID has thrust us all into a remote-work experiment, but clearly some organizations are going to do it well and others are going to fail at the important concepts.

So, what’s it like working remotely for a company broadly recognized to be doing it well?

Remote means that you can hire from anywhere

While this statement is obvious, it’s the only place to start. The fundamental competitive advantage to an all remote company is the quality of team that you can assemble. I’m perfectly willing to admit that a specific group of people, working co-located, is probably more effective in the short run then that same team working remotely. However, it’s not realistic to assemble the same caliber team in any single city as you can when you hire from anywhere.

Problems like losing an employee when their spouse needs to move, losing someone great because the commute is too long, or having a great person to hire that’s in another city are common at work. None of those things happen with a remote team. You can find the best people in the world to do the exact thing that you need them to do.

But timezones cause headaches

When you’re looking for the best people, you may not even find them in the same timezones. For me, in US Eastern time, it’s extremely difficult to have any overlapping hours with Singapore, India, and Australia. While we can make it work occasionally, it’s not realistic to expect it to happen often. That means that many decisions that need input from people around the globe require minimum 24 hours per iteration. There’s no doubt that this is slower than everyone working in a conference room together (or even on a zoom call).

Generally speaking, you can overlap EST with much of Europe, all of the Americas timezones together, and PST with APAC. But if you have EU, US, and APAC all on the same team, it causes a burden. We haven’t yet grown large enough to consider siloing our teams into overlapping-timezones-only. Even if we went that route, it would cause other types of communication problems. This is a continuing challenge for any global organization.

Remote work forces smart communications practices

Zapier focuses on written communication. From early in the company’s time, lots of things are written down. Because realtime communication happens mostly in slack and “more official” comms and documentation happen in other written tools (Quip, Google Docs, Coda, or Async, our internal blog) there’s often a much better historical record of decisions, events, goals, targets, and strategy. Certainly there remain times where we wish that we had more written down, but in general if you search all of those tools, you can probably find something interesting on the topic you’re considering.

But knowing how to find the information you need is correspondingly a huge challenge

As we’ve blown past Dunbar’s Number it’s increasingly difficult to know where to look or which tool has particular bits of information. Google Drive’s folder organization is bad. Historical Migration between tools (hackerpad->Quip->Coda trial for us) means that the thing you’re looking for may be split across a bunch of different tools. You probably need to go search all of them. Quip’s folder structure and organization feels better than Google drive, but it’s somewhat of a dead product after the acquisition. We’re increasingly hearing on internal surveys that information centralization is our biggest opportunity for organizational efficiency. This challenge is so big because for a company our size we have a ton of documentation.

That said, this is a net win. I regularly go back and pull from research and experimental results published years ago (sometimes even from before my time at Zapier!) which means that at least my searches work just well enough. I think that we actually need to look up towards more enterprise companies to learn how they deal with this issue, since it’s not unique to us or to remote companies. Once you reach a certain size organization, information retrieval becomes a huge challenge. We have lots of learning to do.

Go all in, or fold.

I’ve worked for co-located companies, half-remote companies, and fully distributed companies, and I continue to believe that for remote to work best, you need to either go for it, or give up on it. Perhaps there are other organizations doing better at the blended setup than I’ve seen, but it seems extremely difficult for anyone remote on a team where many things happen in person to build the same types of relationships needed to be successful. When the entire company is remote, everyone is on the same playing field, and everyone works on relationships in similar fashions: zoom calls, on company retreats, and in your 1:1s. When half the team can go into a conference room and chat, and the other half can’t, I think it’s fundamentally unlikely for the remote folks to get equivalent recognition. Even with everyone acting in good faith, it’s just unlikely to be able to build relationships that way.

The most interesting thing that I’ve seen in this space pre-COVID was Stripe’s recent announcement of remote-as-a-location. By clustering the remote folks into their own “hub” I think that they might be able to overcome some of these downsides. I wish them the best and look forward to seeing how it goes! That’s not an option for most small companies, though, and the risks with a half-and-half approach make it troublesome to me.

We are going fully remote first at Quora. Most of our employees have opted not to return to the office post-covid, I will not work out of the office, our leadership teams will not be located in the office, and all policies will orient around remote work. (1/2)

— Adam D'Angelo (@adamdangelo) June 25, 2020

Quora seems to be the biggest player I’ve seen so far make the post-COVID-remote-first switch with great messaging. But they will leave an office open, too, for now. Adam’s post is extremely thoughtful, and you should read it if you’re interested in this transition.

I remain skeptical that the half-remote thing will work in any significant way.

If you want to see the official Zapier resources on running effective remote organizations check out the Remote Work Guide. And if you want some recommendations on my favorite work-from-home accessory, check out this post on headphones!