In 2022, a few months after the COVID vaccines got broadly available, we decided to return to the “old way” of working, initially 4 days a week, and a few months later 5 days a week in the office. It was a highly controversial decision by the time, you may remember that social media was full of “office shaming” content, most companies were still trying to recruit talent by offering a variety work-life balance perks, and some companies even experimented with 4 and 3 day work weeks as an attempt to retain their team. In such an environment it required high conviction to tell your team that your company will not go with the mainstream - but we haven’t regretted it since then.
I don’t want to “defend” being office based, and I don’t think that remote working or hybrid is “bad”. As a matter of fact, remote workers exist for centuries, we just used to call them contractors, and for certain tasks we preferred to work with contractors, while for some others we typically preferred to work with employees. However, I do believe that for certain type of companies, that are truly ambitious, that want to build a generational, industry defining company - like we do, at Shapr3D - the odds of success is just higher if they default to work from the same physical space on a daily basis. Is it hard to build a company this way? Yes, it is. But for the most ambitious companies, this will be the smallest challenge that they’ll need to overcome, and eventually the long term benefits will outweigh the short term drawbacks. It’s always tempting to go down on the easy path. However, if you want to control the outcomes that you want to achieve, you should adjust your tools to your goals and not the the other way around. And one of the most important tools that you have when building a company is the way you work. It shapes the culture, the people, the product, the sales processes, everything. So here is how we think about it.
1. We want to work with missionaries, not mercenaries
Building a generational company takes time. For that you need incredible resilience, as during a longer period of time, you’ll face unimaginable challenges, ups and downs, periods of growth and stall, success and failure. Over the years I’ve found that the people who can handle these challenges are the ones who truly understand and believe in the company. They are the ones who’ll push your company through the barriers, solve the hardest problems, and will keep the morale high even when times are hard. They’ll tell everyone about your company, they will understand in an instant if someone is a good fit to your team or not, and they’ll be your best recruiters. As a matter of fact, most of your best people will be recruited by them. They are true missionaries. And because they understand your company so well, they won’t panic when times are hard. They will actually enjoy the hard times, because they know that soon they can harvest the fruits of it. They know that your company will succeed, it’s just a matter of time. Ideally most of your team, especially in the early stages, should be missionaries. And missionaries just want to spend time with other missionaries. They understand that they can push things forward faster if they do so. They want to be with their team to make it happen, to ship that feature earlier, to close that deal today and not tomorrow, to hire that key person this quarter, not in the next. Because they see the prize, they enjoy the journey, and want to get there as quickly as possible. They want to build. They want their team to succeed. Which leads us to our next point, which is…
2. Because we want to work with people who value their team’s success over their personal comfort
I get it. I really do. I worked from home for two years. Being able to put in your laundry to the washing machine during the day, not having to commute is very comfortable. And I think that a lot of people commuted way too much, no one should commute 2+ hours a day. But… Whenever someone talks about why they like to work from home, every benefit starts with “I” and none of them starts with “We”. And I get that… But we want to work with people who value their team’s success over their personal comfort. And of course, comfort is important - but there has to be a delicate balance between the level of comfort that we optimize for, and the effectiveness of our team. If you want to achieve something truly great, you should optimize for the latter. And yes, some people claim to be more effective and focused when they are working from home, and some of them probably truly are.
However, a team’s outcomes are not equal to the sum of the individuals outputs.
I feel that we tend to forget this quite often. Maybe you write more code, have more sales calls, write more emails when there are no people around you. But activities are not equal to outcomes. Hard problems are solved in cross functional collaboration, not in isolation. Does cross functional collaboration require heads down focused work? Yes it does. But rarely in a regular, pre-scheduled way that “hybrid” work offers. And when there is need for focused work, a well designed office should be a fantastic place for that as well. Offices should be a space that help teams achieving their goals. When they need to collaborate, they should be able to collaborate, and when someone needs to do focused work, they should be able to do it from the office. Not on every Tuesday and Wednesday, but when it's necessary and when it improves the outcomes. And typically it's necessary on an ad hoc basis, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes it's not necessary for 2 weeks. The way we work should reflect that.
3. Because the real perk is flexibility, not remote or hybrid
Flexibility is a key aspect of why some people prefer hybrid and remote work - and they are right. Flexibility is important. Flexibility is great, flexibility is the opposite of rigidity, and flexible systems are always more resilient than rigid systems, because they are more adaptable. Flexibility is important for me as well, I have a (and very soon two) little boys, and kids are sometimes sick, sometimes you have to pick them up from school, so I need flexibility to succeed in my personal life too. However, even before the pandemic, most great workplaces were flexible - yet by default everyone worked from the same place 5 days a week.
Flexibility is about adapting to unexpected situations.
Is your health and family more important than your professional life? Of course, no professional success is worth it if it costs your health or family. Do you need to go to the doctor? No problem. Do you need to stay at home because your kid got sick? No problem. Many of our team mates have little kids (just last year 6 babies were born at Shapr3D, which is not a small feat for a team of 120), and all of us need to manage our personal life as well. Yet, we do this in a way that it never blocks our teams, we carefully plan ahead, and when we can’t plan ahead, because shit hits the fan - well, then we just adapt to the situation, and that’s fine, because that’s life, isn’t it?
Some of you may wonder that “oof, these guys must have a really hard time hiring great people”. Not really - actually I think this is a great tool to find the best people! If you look at the numbers: 3 out of the 10 rejections that we get are due to not being remote/hybrid. However if we look at the numbers for those whom we really, really wanted to hire, then it's closer to 1 out of 30. The reality is that for the kind of people that we are looking for, working together is a boon. For the missionaries, it’s rarely an issue. They just want to build something great.