The Hidden Cost of Remote Work

I remember a cold, rainy November day in 2011.  

Our team at DoubleDutch was tiny, and we had been grinding, racing towards a January launch. We were exhausted, and needed to catch a breath. Pankaj, Nick and I jumped in Pank’s car and went down to Sunflower Vietnamese on 16th Street, and brought back six steaming bowls of pho ga for the team (randomly, I remember that one of the containers melted and warped in the car, as the soup was so hot!) We jammed into our one, tiny little conference room, drank our soup and ate our noodles, and just hung out. The rain was coming down outside, but we were warm and content.

It was a moment for us.  

A moment jammed in between hard work, scheduled meetings, and the daily grind of startup life. But it was a moment nonetheless; one of countless team moments that I believe contributed to our collective passion, loyalty, and drive for the company, not to mention lifelong friendships.

But today, in 2020, in the face of a global pandemic, these sorts of unscheduled, serendipitous moments have been taken away.  

Many companies have gone Remote First, and many of those might never come all the way back. Office life has been replaced by remote work, and the countless random collisions and conversations that used to happen around the proverbial water cooler have vanished.

This is the cost of remote work. A loss of connectivity, a loss of the glue that holds teams together, a loss of trust, and a loss of humanity.  I suspect that these costs will soon become more quantifiable in the form of increased attrition and lower productivity.

One possible takeaway is that this is just one of the costs of our new reality. There is lots to like about remote work; no commutes, more flexibility, athleisure (!). Of course there are going to be some costs as well?

But if you talk to the folks that are experts in Remote First, they don’t think it has to be this way. I recently got the chance to hear from folks who have been Remote First even before the pandemic; people like Sid Sijbrandij at GitLab, Wade Foster from Zapier, and Job van der Voort from Remote.com.

According to these people, the loss of human connectivity doesn’t have to be a cost of remote work. But, as an organization, you have to be one more intentional about carving out time and space for serendipitous connections to happen. 

Remote.com does “Bonding Calls” with a guided question of the day, multiple times a week. No agenda, just camaraderie and bonding. They play video games together - every employee gets an Oculus. The executives do random pulse checks with their team - informal catch ups with no agenda that allow execs and employees to recreate random encounters that used to happen in the hall or at lunch or via office hours.

The Gitlab CEO believes that office based, IRL networking is a positive (“the ONLY case for an office”) but limited - you tend to only meet the people on your floor, or in your region. If you are intentional about it, digital can be an even more powerful way to connect your people, as you are not bound by geography and space. They have 20 different ways that they attempt to intentionally drive this sort of serendipity, documented in their employee handbook.

So for companies new to Remote First, is there hope to preserve the serendipity of those countless random yet meaningful collisions that happen around and between scheduled meetings?

The good news is that a new breed of remote inspired companies and products are trying to help. Companies like mmhmm and here.fm are fun ways to inject some personality into your video calls. Donut is an easy Slack plugin that matches employees for impromptu meetups. The Go Game and Unlock are building fun virtual activities to connect Remote First teams. Sidekick is building always on hardware to attempt to recreate presence. And my company, twine, is going deep on a serendipity engine to facilitate one to one connections around meaningful topics.

A reset as massive as a Covid-inspired the move towards Remote First and will have many, many unexpected consequences. As many of my most meaningful relationships in my life have come from the workplace, I am eager to see how Remote First companies attempt to preserve the serendipitous moments that lead to these connections.