Startups & Remote-first Culture
The acceptance of remote-work culture has been accelerated in the time of COVID-19 across a spectrum of industries, but where does it have longevity beyond the pandemic?
Before luxury Valley brands like Facebook and Twitter made the decision earlier this year to offer remote work in perpetuity, companies like GitLab, PagerDuty and Stripe had been successfully blazing that particular trail. Last year Stripe published an excellent post on their move toward remote-first for engineering teams. A few days ago they followed that up with an outstanding “year of” review hitting on several great topics - particularly, retaining and hiring talent.
Let’s first clarify: “remote first” doesn’t mean remote only. To me, a remote first approach is about two things. First, remote first treats remote employees as first class citizens. A great example of this is having all in office employees call in separately to Zoom meetings rather than having all on-site folks in a single panel. This twitter thread from GitLab’s Sid Sijbrandij mentions this example and others. While being remote works for me, I also have plenty of teammates who prefer working in an office. Our remote first culture allows our team to thrive regardless of where any given person is physically located.
Second, remote first simply means offering expanded options for both employees and the company. For employees, more asynchronous work means greater flexibility in your schedule. Personally, this has been huge for my productivity and job satisfaction. Having more control over when I start and end my day lets me schedule longer stretches of focused, uninterrupted work. Saving hours a week in commute time reduces the stress and pressure of a normal 9-5 style work day, freeing me up to spend that time in ways slightly more rewarding than riding up and down the F line.
Additionally, unbinding teams from geography provides even greater possibility to introduce more diverse voices to the team, especially when working on a product intended for use beyond purely metropolitan areas or your own continent. In an industry famed for a lack of diversity across the board, the ability to attract and hire this way is a huge positive. Getting to learn from and work with colleagues with a broad range of expertise, problem solving approaches and lived experiences has made me a much better person and engineer.
For employers, this means greater choice on the hiring side and increased financial flexibility. Building a great candidate funnel is difficult for most companies. Artificially constraining your candidate pool to whatever metro area the founders happen to live in shrinks it even further. Embracing a remote first culture allows companies to widen the net and draw from a more diverse population of talent, while having flexibility on typically exorbitant operational costs. You can invest more per head without also having to budget for outdated per-person perks that no one really needs and that frankly don’t really motivate top talent anyway. Goodbye, commuter bait.
Coming back to Sijbrandij’s thread, the GitLab CEO argues that companies that fail to embrace a remote first approach will start to leak talent to companies that do. While I generally agree with Sijbrandij here I think there are some exceptions particularly on the edges of the market. Luxury brands like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. will be fine no matter what approach they take. Just as brands like Hermès don’t lose as many sales during a recession as your high street retailers, luxury tech brands aren’t going to see a shortage of candidates if they fail to embrace a remote first work culture.
Additionally, very early stage start ups that sell candidates on a meaningful stake of equity and the opportunity for real ownership will see a degree of stickiness when it comes to finding and retaining talent. Anyone drawn to the level of risk and amount of work it takes to be the first engineering hire at an early stage start up isn’t necessarily going to be super motivated one way or the other by remote first.
The companies facing the biggest risk of leaking talent are mid and late stage start ups. Talent acquisition and retention for companies in this band is already a challenge. The combination of below market rate salaries and undifferentiated technical challenges forces these companies to really leverage existing talent and culture to keep the funnel full and the team growing. Remote work allows companies such as these to regain a competitive advantage. Those that fail to embrace remote culture will see talent both from inside the company and within their recruitment funnel flock to competitors, while those that embrace this brave new world will drink everyone else’s milkshake.