Remote is the new glass ceiling
We have a new norm, there’s no doubt about that. Most knowledge work will soon be done from home. But there is a catch. I believe remote is not a good thing for the remote workers. Here’s why — and it has nothing to do with jobs going elsewhere.
Take the tech jobs like software engineering and graphic design that are leading the work-from-home trend. Most parts of the work fit the remote arrangement well. More focus time, more flexibility. Especially the tasks with well defined outcomes. But there are also other things that can take an unhealthy amount of zoom calls to get resolved. These aren’t well-defined tasks. The calls tend to be about what to do rather than how to do it. This resembles the good old wasteful meetings problem. Except that when the team is back in the office there are somehow way less meetings, and things move along much faster. Why?
The root cause is uncertainty. More specifically, the “collective uncertainty” — the kind of uncertainty that cannot be resolved by one individual. The work that has a lot of such uncertainty seems to be hit hard by remote. The reason is that face-to-face in the same physical location is an unbelievably high-bandwidth channel. Most of the information transmitted has nothing to do with the words said. The non-verbals like body language, the spontaneous kitchenette conversations, the subtle clues from who talks to whom — all of that is missing in the remote setting. Without these a shared understanding takes much longer to develop. And so figuring out which problems need to be solved and which should be ignored takes a while.
But this is management, one may say. As an engineer I am way more productive working from home! Sure, and no, this is not about management. If anything management, especially middle management in a typical organisation, isn’t hit too hard by remote. Leadership becomes much harder though, at all levels. Because leadership is about ownership, which in turn is about uncertainty handling. High ownership means taking charge of the uncertainty, getting the job done despite the unexpected. Low ownership is the opposite — making excuses to avoid dealing with uncertainty. People who demonstrate high ownership become leaders and quickly progress in their careers.
A new kind of a “glass ceiling” is created by remote working. The likelihood of growing into leadership is lower because it is much harder to learn and practice high ownership. People in the office have a head start because they have an easier time absorbing the context. And this is a self-reinforcing dynamic. Over time the remote part of the organisation gets less and less high-uncertainty problems to solve. Less and less decision power. Just tasks to do. This makes career progression even harder for remote workers.
But what about those successful remote-first companies, like Gitlab? Well, no one said it is impossible. Just harder. They made it despite the additional challenges introduced by remote. They acknowledge that there are in fact challenges. And they pioneered great frameworks that minimise the negative impact of fully remote.
I believe that early-stage startups that go remote are particularly at a disadvantage. Because until a startup achieves product-market fit, uncertainty is all there is. For the startup to survive every team member needs to have extremely high ownership. Time is the scarcest resource. And the hard part isn’t even building the product. It is realising that a different thing needs to be built, over and over again. That’s not just the founders’ job — it is part of everyone’s job in an early-stage startup. With remote this job becomes harder, because learning from the market takes longer.
Worth noting that after achieving product-market fit the equation changes. It is now clear what problems need to be solved, but time is still scarce. Hiring becomes the bottleneck because the org needs to be scaled as quickly as possible. And hiring in one geography can’t be quicker than all over the world. So going remote-first actually makes a lot of sense for startups that have successfully found their PMF. This doesn’t remove the disadvantages of remote for the employees, but it is good for the business. And from a career perspective it is still probably a good idea to join a scale-up on a breakout trajectory, because the downsides of remote will be offset by sheer pace of change that is hard to find elsewhere.
