Remote Work Isn’t Broken. Your Culture Is.

As I sat doom scrolling LinkedIn for the umpteenth time that day, I stumbled across a recruiter’s post: “YOUR NOT GETTING JOB OPPORTUNITIES BECAUSE YOU WONT GO INTO THE OFFICE”.

Who, me? I mean, they were right about one thing, I wasn’t getting job opportunities. But because I won’t go into the office?

I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked somewhat remotely since 2019 and fully remotely since 2020. Six whole years* of not having to go into an office. You can put some of that down to that thing called COVID where we all hid from each other for two years, but the rest of the time life was fairly normal.

I often see posts from people claiming remote work is broken, saying their team is unproductive or disengaged. My first thought is always the same: that isn’t down to remote work, it is down to your culture.

Your team is unproductive because you are not setting them up to thrive in a remote first environment. You are taking the culture of in person work and trying to make it fit online. Having Slack and a 9:15 daily on Hangouts is not a remote workplace, and neither is a #watercooler-chat channel.

Establishing a remote first culture is not rocket science either. Some of the biggest tech companies in the world have people working remotely in every corner of the globe. Their people love the business, love the culture and there are thousands of them.

I am not an expert and I am not going to tell you how to fix your remote culture. I have not grown a company to hundreds of remote workers, but plenty of people have and there are brilliant resources out there for anyone willing to learn.

For me, if you put the right tools in place, hire the right people, empower them and give them ownership, you are already most of the way there.

A peer of mine recently asked how remote work had affected me as a parent. Their kids are grown up now and they admitted that for most of their childhood they were at work 9 to 5. They missed school runs, Christmas plays and all the little things you only realise are important when you look back.

For all of my eldest’s childhood, I have had the choice to walk him to and from school. I can count on my fingers the number of times my dad picked me up as a kid. That is not his fault, it is just how it was then. Plus, you cannot exactly commute to an oil rig and back in a day.

After 2020 we had the chance to make it better. Yet here we are, tearing each other down on LinkedIn because we will not go into an office in a city 75 miles away, spending £40 on a train ticket, only to join a Hangouts call with someone sat in their home office elsewhere in the country.

This is not to say in office work is bad. It has its place. You cannot engineer a rocket or test software on prototype hardware from home. But I do think we have lost sight of what matters most in life. Our families, our friends and the social connections we build outside of work.

We had a chance after 2020 to reset the balance and make a new normal. In less than five years we have slipped back into the old ways, and people wonder why productivity is falling and why so many people feel disconnected from their work.