CEOs: Being Remote-First Is A Competitive Advantage— 16 Reasons Why

The view from my home office. No really. Minor photoshopping, real picture.

Introduction

Post-Covid, the battle around remote work rages on. Some CEOs say it was a “failed experiment”. Others offer varying degrees of “flex-time” (which requires employees to live near an office, even though they only go in once or twice a week). There’s also “remote-first” companies that offer “100% remote” positions that literally don’t have an office location except for accounting purposes. Covid pushed us into the experiment, and now many CEOs are sliding back into their old habits, thinking that more authoritarian control is better for their companies. It is almost certainly not, and remote work offers numerous competitive advantages to stay agile, find the best employees, and produce better products than the competition.

Below, I offer 16 reasons why being “remote-first” is a better business strategy and the way of the future for a large number of business types. This is followed by a ‘discussion section’ that covers: why you might have an “office-fetish” problem, whether some types of work will never be remote, and why remote-work is likely positively correlated with innovation.

Reasons To Be Remote-First

#1 — Decrease Office Leasing Costs

Unless you happen to be lucky enough to own your own office space, rent is an ongoing worry that scales up as you grow the company. Take that money and spend it on some additional engineers and designers. Get your product to market faster, or increase customer satisfaction instead.

#2 — Let your employees spend time working, not the steps preparing to do it.

• Waiting for your collaborator who is stuck in traffic isn’t work.
• Trying to find a parking spot and paying for it isn’t work.
• Waiting for a late train or Uber isn’t work.
• Waiting in line at the cafeteria isn’t work.
• Walking to the meeting room isn’t work.
• Waiting for the previous meeting to clear out of the room isn’t work.
• Contacting IT to deal with complex office infrastructure isn’t work.
• Badging in, or resetting your entry codes isn’t work.
• Getting to the airport, flying to a client, renting a car, dealing with tickets or accidents, buying meals, expensing everything you did — isn’t work (or at least it is mostly unnecessary busy-work).

A great deal (perhaps 50+% by my guess) of job-related time spent by in-office employees is not work. Most of that wasted time falls on the shoulders of the employee, and takes relaxation and family time away from them. However, a lot of that wasted time actually happens at the office, when supposedly “work is being done.”

#3 — Avoid Wasting Time To Be In-Person

A huge amount of time is spent in transit, be it the car or walking to the meeting room. There is also a lot of waiting for other people to move around as expected. This is largely wasted time.

#4 — Culture-building and bonding can be done virtually or occasionally in person.

• Companies can easily and inexpensively fly everyone to a resort once or twice a year for workshops and meeting in person (it’s cheap because it’s once a year). It’s a great idea. Ironically from my experience, “in-office” companies (with staff in multiple offices) rarely scheduled these due to “the cost of getting everyone together in person.” Take that to its logical end — and you don’t have an office.
• Maybe in the 1960s you had to be friends with everyone at your work because you lived there and they “treated you like family” with a pension and a company gym. Those days are long gone. Now you might consider making friends at the local coffee shop, or joining a meetup group on a topic of interest, which frankly is much less artificial than meeting co-workers that were chosen for you.

#5 — Better Creativity

• Employees are happier and their brain works better when they are getting exercise. That doesn’t happen in cubicles and in meeting rooms sitting around in chairs.
• I am personally on a treadmill or stair-stepper for at least half the work day. I take a short walk at lunch and listen to podcasts on the latest in AI news, tech and analysis which helps me make better design decisions for my job.
• I noticed the quality of my design ideas, my analytic abilities, and my motivation levels all went up once I got a treadmill and a standing desk. Sitting in a sedentary position all day long in an office is not helping you get ahead of the competition.
• The “spark of inspiration while bumping into someone at the water cooler” is largely a myth. When you have that epiphany while taking your morning shower, you can go slack the right person about it immediately and develop the idea, while still in your pajamas. Many random interactions at work are formulaic, tedious, and distracting — not epiphanies. This is confirmation-bias at work — you remember the one time you have an epiphany, and ignore the thousand other times you said “How are you today?” and they said “Good” (and that was it.)

#6 — Hire The Best People Available

• By definition, the best people you could hire don’t live within an easy commute-distance of your offices. This means either you hire people who are not the best, or you force those people to up-end their lives, sell their houses, have their kids change schools, require uncomfortable commute times, and live in places they don’t like or can’t afford.
• Why would you ask that of your employees when it doesn’t bring a large benefit? The best candidates will want the perks of remote-work and increasingly it will be sub-standard candidates that agree to being in-office, simply because they don’t have other options. Get ahead of the curve.

#7 — Be the place “everyone wants to work”

Google, Apple and Microsoft used to be those places. Now many people (including myself) don’t even bother applying. Why? Because they don’t offer “100% remote” options. These large companies are letting their “office-egos” take priority over their goals to “hire the best people and produce the best product”.

#8 — No Free Lunches

Employees already have a free lunch available. It’s at home. Stop making your employees pay out-of-pocket for restaurants, wasting time (not working) waiting in line at jammed lunch times, or funding expensive cafeterias.

#9 — No Janitors, No Secretaries, No Office Managers, No Plumber, No Landlord

Why would you want the extra stress, complexity, and cost of having to hire so many extra people and deal with a landlord raising the rent or complaining about how you use your space. Why would you want to worry about water leaking through the roof and a stopped toilet, when you should be thinking about how to build the right product for your future customers?

#10— Less IT Support Staff

I used to marvel at the fact that my home Internet was always up, but the work Internet always had problems, sometimes resulting in me needing to go home to get my work done. This happened at multiple companies.

#11— No More Meeting Room Problems

• From my experience, the meeting room you want to use tends to already be in use when you most need it (murphy’s law). This is irrespective of whether you reserved it in the calendar booking system or whether you have a fancy “smart-office” setup with digital plackards showing whether it is occupied or booked in advance.
• From my experience, if a C-level executive had the room before you, they will always run late and will typically making a “move along” gesture if you try to claim your room. The presumption is that whatever they are doing is more important than whatever you are doing. Maybe they are right. Maybe we shouldn’t be using physical meeting rooms at all.
• Virtual meetings are rarely “already in use” when you get there.

#12— Less Distractions and Downtime

• Workplaces are known for their noise levels, random drop-ins with questions, temperature problems, IT problems, and waiting for other people to show up. If a proper time-series analysis of the typical in-office workday were conducted (perhaps they have) it would find a huge amount of time spent not working, despite being in the office.
• Home offices (with a door) can offer unparalleled levels of focus, freedom from distraction, and being “in the zone”. There is a reason that C-level executives in companies with open-plan layouts still had offices or commandeered a meeting room for their own personal use — it’s because some privacy and controlled space are needed to work at high efficiency.

#13— Bring Your Pet To Work

This is already available at home. Offer a perk for free! Pets reduce the need to offer mental-health assistance programs, and make employees enjoy their jobs more (think: less turnover).

#14— Physical Fitness and Safety

• It is possible to use a treadmill, stair-stepper, or lift weights during various activities such a large meetings, watching training videos, or other passive activities throughout the day. I am able to walk on the treadmill and do design work simultaneously. I have found that my work output actually improves, because my body and brain is energized instead of settling into a stupor in an office chair all day. I rarely use a chair at all anymore. Offering a half-hour of “free yoga” or a “free gym-membership” doesn’t really solve this problem. The problem is a sedentary lifestyle in an artificial office environment or commute for many hours a day.
• Driving a regular commute in rush-hour traffic is both draining and somewhat dangerous in the long run. Traffic accidents happen all the time. If you live your life behind the wheel, you will eventually get into one, not to mention increased stress levels and heart attacks.
• Many offices are in dense urban areas with crime. Employees seeking to pollute the environment less take public transit and walk through areas with drug addicts, people shouting obscenities, and people harassing them (I’m talking about YOU San Francisco, but it applies to other cities as well.) Twitter HR at one point advised employees entering the building on foot to use one street versus another street for safety reasons. This is a red-flag that in-office work can be a legal liability and an ethical concern.

#15 — Less Work-Related Lawsuits

Work-related lawsuits are common and expensive. From sexual-harassment, to people falling over in poorly-designed office chairs (true story), to people getting hurt in rental cars on business trips (true story), to chronic back pain associated with sitting in a chair all day — there is no shortage of risk. I would guesstimate that going remote-only removes 90% of this risk.

#16 — Contribute To Your Carbon-Neutral Goals

• Employees driving hours each day in ICE cars are polluting the planet, producing unnecessary congestion, and increasing the number of parking lots and freeway expansion.
• Even if these employees are all in electric cars and commuting by electric train/subway, it still produces an unhealthy level of congestion in cities, traffic-jams, and unnecessary lines at the local deli. “Rush-hour” is not a normal distribution of human movement — it is largely a bi-product of CEOs demanding a 9–5 schedule in one physical location.

Bonus Reason — Your “in-office” employees mostly work remotely already

Most big companies have many offices, often in different time zones and countries. One large company I worked for in San Francisco initially insisted that I work in-office. The only employee I regularly worked with in that office was my boss. Most of her employees were in other offices. All of my actual project work was with different teams in Seattle, Canada, Finland, India and the East Coast. With each new project came a new set of remote employees to work with. Most “in-office” employees already can’t do an after-work happy hour, or chit-chat at the water cooler. Those days are long gone.

Discussion and Conclusion

Maybe you need to talk to a therapist about your “office-fetish” problem?

• Steve Jobs and Apple spent 5 billion on the Apple Park and spaceship. It was explicitly designed to “promote collaboration” and random encounters. Now many employees don’t want to work there.
• Salesforce built the Salesforce Tower at a cost of 1.3 billion. A large amount of this space is unused and for lease, after many of their employees found they could work from home equally well.
• OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said that remote work was a failed experiment and “waxed lyrical” about their (expensive) communal stairway design that encourages chance encounters in their swank SF office park. Meanwhile, open-source AI projects and competitors find it possible to produce better products with remote workers.

These are CEOs that irresponsibly spent obscene amounts of money to produce artificial environments where employees don’t like to work. That is the opposite of good UX design (or architecture) principles. Now these CEOs have to justify that expense to the board of directors and shareholders. If you feel the need to provide dry-cleaning, cafeterias, and free massages, that’s because those employees can’t do those things at home — because they’re not allowed to be home most of the time.

Large office-parks and “flex-time” are more about the company’s desire to convey and assert authority and control, rather than being about the best interests of either the shareholders or the employees. It is time to introspect deeply about the source of that problem.

Offices may still need to exist for some types of work. Or will they?

• Some jobs are hands on, and probably always will be. At first glance, it makes sense. Perhaps, for example, car companies (yes, I’m talking about you Elon) and fast-food restaurants need people to touch the door handles and burgers. It seems logical.
• In User Experience Design (UX) (my profession) we used to require “hands-on” work to interview customers for research, do “whiteboarding” sessions in the office, and plaster long storyboards to the wall for review. I was once told off for the amount of printer paper and color ink I was using by the CEO. Much to my surprise, ALL of this is virtual and remote now. Honestly I think that digital tools enable faster and better designs now, and I never would have predicted that 10 years ago.
• It is extremely likely that “digitizing your work” and working remotely is an expanding trend that won’t go away. We will gradually chip away at those “have to be in person” aspects of jobs until they all fall away and leave the core task-flow remaining. Troubleshoot the automotive assembly line robots from home with a telepresence robot or drone? Collaborate with your team on a 3D model hovering virtually in space between your distributed team members? Operate the robot handing burgers out the window to people in cars? All of it seems eminently doable.
• Some jobs, such as health care and teaching, seem to have elements of physically touching and interacting with people that may never be replaced, and which may add real value. That said, I spend less time in a physical doctor’s office now than I did ten years ago, and many aspects of education are moving out of the school-building as well.

Innovate or go the way of Kodak (and perhaps Google)

• Many larger companies struggle to innovate. For example, instead of creating ChatGPT, they spend billions buying 49% of OpenAI. Innovation comes primarily from contact with potential customers, understanding their problems and needs, and then solving them. Google went very far to make searching the Internet very simple, clean and effective — in comparison to what existed before. However, it failed to understand the unmet user goal and pain point: Instead of answering your question directly, it gave you a list of web sites with potential answers. It also failed to let you ask follow up questions and have a conversation about your topic of interest. This made it ripe for disruption.
• In UX-research, we used to take flights to customer sites and do in-person interviews to understand customer pain points — which was mostly wasted time and didn’t scale. Now we do one-hour remote sessions with customers, learn 90% of what we did using the in-person method, and then use the extra time to talk to another 10 customers in the same week for better coverage. In-office and in-person is not agile. It is slow. It is analogous to the pony-express to get a message from the East to West coast. Imagine the increased pace of scientific advancement if Edison, Newton, or Darwin had email to collaborate and share ideas.
• Agile and lean research is now largely remote by necessity. Regardless of whether your company is big or small, you need to be developing tools that solve a large, painful customer problem. You also need to do it rapidly, and spend less time “waiting in line”. If every neuron in your brain slowed down by 10x, everything you tried to do would be that much slower. That is what is happening to your product design, development, and innovation when you force it to be in-person.

Do the right thing for your business, your competitiveness, your workers, and the environment. Give your employees a rainbow. Be remote-first. It’s win-win.

My opinions are my own and not related to any current or past employers. You should make your own design, investing and life decisions. I hope you find my ideas thought-provoking. Yes, I currently (thankfully) work for a remote-first company, which was remote-first from day-one, and has attracted talent which is better and more motivated than other large companies I’ve experienced. And yes, I am probably on my treadmill as you read these words.