In recent news IBM is following Yahoo in putting limitations on remote work. They said: “it’s really time for us to start bringing our teams together, more shoulder to shoulder.”. I cant see why this would be a good move.
To be clear, when I use the word remote here I don’t mean just working from home in the same city, but from anywhere, any timezone. It should also be noted that I see video conferencing the same way as I see live meetings — to be avoided and used as a last resort.
I think a system where you can do everything remotely — or even asynchronous — serves people onsite just as well as remote workers. Working remotely in a decoupled way and having less dependencies will improve everyones’ life. You will have less meetings, less busywork, less waiting, better papertrails, more flexibility, better spread of information. These traits are good for almost every company.
Awhile back we’ve started pushing Kisko to be a remote first company:
- We will keep an office as a base of operations
- Ideally there will be no hindrance on working from anywhere / anytime
- This means we need good tools, but more importantly good processes
- We wrote earlier about the pros, cons and improvement of remote meetings
We are in good company with this approach. We were inspired by Buffer’s move to go all in and they are now a remote-only company. Basecamp wrote similarly about Calm company.
What do you think? Do you like to come to the office or work remotely? Should you be able to choose?
Tweet at @kiskolabs or @salantsa.
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