Place and proximity to your team matter. People thrive when they are working together, executing a clear vision, working toward a meaningful mission, driven by set of relevant and important values. All the while feeling that they are part of a strong and purposeful company culture.
Building such an organization is never easy. Doing so with a remote workforce is fraught with pitfalls and additional challenges. To begin with, it is difficult to sustain consistent results and company culture with a remote workforce. Distractions are a reality: small children, other household members, household activities. Some team members need the structure of an office environment to do their best work.
More importantly however, there is a subtle energy that drives culture when people are in proximity to one another. Small and midsize companies are especially impacted by this change in proximity to their team. Leadership can walk around an office and feel the energy of their team. There are dozens if not thousands of micro-clues that indicate if your team is working effectively, on-track, happy, innovating. As human beings we are finely tuned to pick up on subtle cues to gauge what another’s state of mind, focus and performance is.
Let’s, for a moment, fantasize and imagine that we could have the perfect remote workforce and all of these issues could be overcome. The unintended consequence is that we would have a population of truly free agents in a free market place. It is likely that those free agents would then be on the constant lookout for better jobs with other companies. Allegiance and retention would become the next crisis that we'd face. There are many benefits of a remote workforce but it is not a panacea.
Remoteness will become a much larger part of work structure but it will not ever entirely replace a physical place for teams to come together to execute company purpose. Office will become less dense, cleaner and more physically divided. Remote work will be part of everyone’s experience but will not replace going to an office.