The Virtual First Company a Vision
28 Mar 2021
2 min read
A year ago, we moved cities for work, lived in prime locations to optimize for our commute and now Covid-19 makes us challenge these "non-negotiables".
Many of my friends have escaped the city to go digital nomading in Cape Town or on paradise-like islands.
It is as if our dream to live by the sea "when we have enough money" all of a sudden becomes reality and without our doing (at least for me, I am still not at the "enough money" state, you?)
That's crazy scary.
Because location used to be a key boundary along which we would strive and optimize life for, but now we don't have to anymore. How do we optimize then? Would we move our families to smaller cities, but larger houses and work remote? Would we live in places we always dreamed of?
As I think of how and if I let my team come back to the office, I have some core beliefs:
Productivity: I believe productivity does not go down with remote work, quite the contrary, it can actually go up, especially as less distraction and less commute exist. At our company, we probably have had more impact in the last year than the six previous years combined.
Personal Happiness: In my view, remote work has had the biggest positive impact on personal happiness, as people can decide for themselves what kind of work set-up they'd like to have.
Team Collaboration: I think this is the one thing that is taking a toll with remote work. People start loosing the feeling of belonging to the company. Fantastic collaboration tools, such as Miro, cannot substitute the trust and social glue created through actualy interaction on a day-to-day basis.
And based on those core beliefs, I have a pretty radical view on what I will tell my team, and it comes from thinking about a virtual-first company:
The Virtual-First Company, A Vision
We will have an agnostic, long-term subscription for all co-working spaces to work literally from anywhere. We may even become more creative in our work as we cross-pollinate with other companies in those spaces. Instead of making work hours mandatory we end up making physical team events, parties and quarterly outings a mandatory thing, so that social glue and team spirit can be formed.
I actually think, this is very much where we are heading to, so in my view, it's good to start preparing for it early on.
Many of my friends have escaped the city to go digital nomading in Cape Town or on paradise-like islands.
It is as if our dream to live by the sea "when we have enough money" all of a sudden becomes reality and without our doing (at least for me, I am still not at the "enough money" state, you?)
That's crazy scary.
Because location used to be a key boundary along which we would strive and optimize life for, but now we don't have to anymore. How do we optimize then? Would we move our families to smaller cities, but larger houses and work remote? Would we live in places we always dreamed of?
As I think of how and if I let my team come back to the office, I have some core beliefs:
Productivity: I believe productivity does not go down with remote work, quite the contrary, it can actually go up, especially as less distraction and less commute exist. At our company, we probably have had more impact in the last year than the six previous years combined.
Personal Happiness: In my view, remote work has had the biggest positive impact on personal happiness, as people can decide for themselves what kind of work set-up they'd like to have.
Team Collaboration: I think this is the one thing that is taking a toll with remote work. People start loosing the feeling of belonging to the company. Fantastic collaboration tools, such as Miro, cannot substitute the trust and social glue created through actualy interaction on a day-to-day basis.
And based on those core beliefs, I have a pretty radical view on what I will tell my team, and it comes from thinking about a virtual-first company:
The Virtual-First Company, A Vision
We will have an agnostic, long-term subscription for all co-working spaces to work literally from anywhere. We may even become more creative in our work as we cross-pollinate with other companies in those spaces. Instead of making work hours mandatory we end up making physical team events, parties and quarterly outings a mandatory thing, so that social glue and team spirit can be formed.
I actually think, this is very much where we are heading to, so in my view, it's good to start preparing for it early on.