đź’Ş Remote teams are more innovative

Inside: public transit deficits, a misleading scientific journal headline, Olipop's WFH success, storytelling while remote, and more.

Author

Remote Source
January 02, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Happy New Year!

There’s a phrase that goes through my head often when thinking about remote work the last few years.

Companies have been operating remote policies on “hard mode.”

The building blocks of most modern businesses - in terms of real estate, policies, and software - were not designed for remote-first environments.

Switching to remote and hybrid policies out of necessity in 2020 was, for many organizations, like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.

  • It wasn’t natural to tell a company spending millions on real estate to let everyone work from home

  • It wasn’t natural to tell veteran people managers that they needed to hold all their meetings virtually

  • And it wasn’t natural to expect Zoom, Slack, and other collaborative tools to be as vital as they have become for daily operations

But over the last few years, we’ve seen changes:

  • Companies have reduced their office footprint, sometimes giving up their leases entirely

  • Managers have been adapting to remote policies, learning to trust employee outputs instead of attendance

  • There are dozens of new software solutions built specifically for the remote and hybrid workforce (Gable, Scoop, etc.)

And now we can ask ourselves: if we know remote work actually worked during the last few years, what will it look like on “easy mode” with all this new support?

…this is why I’m incredibly bullish on the growth of remote work.

Remote Source Job Board

Featured companies:

AmerisourceBergen: 154 remote jobs
Hinge Health: 15 remote jobs
Instabase: 13 remote jobs

Need to Know

đź’Ş Employees have the upper hand in labor markets
The unemployment rate has been below 4% for the longest stretch since the 1960s (currently 5 months; this article says 4 but was written in November). Further, the percentage of prime-age workers who are employed is at an all-time high. While I’ll stay away from giving negotiation advice, consider these facts if you want to ask for more remote work. (Axios)

🧑🏼‍🔬 A very misleading headline, clarified
Nature, a prestigious scientific journal, published a paper titled “Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas,” which analyzed millions of scientific breakthroughs over time and whether they were made by remote scientific teams or in-person teams.

Before 2010, there were more scientific breakthroughs by in-person teams than remote teams. “No shit,” you’re probably thinking to yourself. After all, cloud file sharing, instant messaging, and other remote-enabling technology was barely in existence then.

The follow-up paper, by the same author, shows clearly that innovation is actually higher for remote teams than in-person teams after 2010.

But for some reason, a recent Business Insider article only mentions that first study. Unfortunately, its readers and many Nature subscribers may see this misleading headline, and falsely assume that remote work leads to less innovation.

Nick Bloom explains this in much more detail in his Twitter post. (Twitter @I_Am_NickBloom)

🚌 Public transit tries to avoid a “death spiral”
We’re written before that public transportation has taken a hit; this article provides a deeper look into what these organizations are facing.

The general manager of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said that lower passenger revenue has prompted them to consider substantial service cuts, which could lead to a “draconian” outcome.

As it stands today, they expect a $750 million deficit in 2024. And they’re not alone - the transit authorities in LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are also in similar predicaments. (NPR)

🥤 Olipop founder has always insisted on remote work
Ben Goodwin, the co-founder and CEO of Olipop, has kept his company remote since it was started in 2017, and has no regrets. There are over 100 employees, but they’ve never worked from any physical office spaces.

But in 2018, there were friends and investors who strongly encouraged office space in order to facilitate more collaboration. And the co-founders “begrudgingly” considered getting offices, but ultimately declined - and they have no regrets.

Generally speaking, I believe work location is not going to fix hiring, culture, and leadership issues. If you need to be looking over someone’s literal shoulder to make them do their job, there’s a much bigger alignment problem, often on both sides of the fence.

Ben Goodwin, co-founder and CEO of Olipop

The company communicates “seamlessly” with today’s easily available remote technology, and they hold regular offsites to meet in-person. Remote work has been a core part of their culture, and as expected, is a big draw for top talent. (Fortune)

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