My Hot Take on Remote Work

them currently. So this episode is all about how you stay firm on working in office, what the perks of working in office are, and how you get the best team members who want to help you work in office and crush your goals. Let's dive in. The first reason

CEOs are done with remote work. It kills momentum. It is so tempting to work remotely, I get it, there is nothing that sounds nicer than being able to have a pile of laundry that's actually getting done while you're on a call and moving certain initiatives forward, but what I found is that remote work actually slows your progress.

It doesn't make it faster, because all of a sudden, that laundry list of things that you had to do, you start slowly chipping away at those things, but you don't ever get any one thing done to the full extent. Your brain is scattered in multiple places and you're solving multiple problems all at once. You're solving home personal fitness problems,

all while you're also trying to solve financial problems. If you really want to make a lot of money, you should spend the majority of your brainpower focused on your financial related problems. Not trying to be more effective at home, not trying to be more productive. Not trying to have this perfectly run household. None of that makes you money

and it also slows you in your career. So if you are feeling slow, unmotivated, or disconnected from your passions and your goals, it might just be because you're working remotely. Get back in office. And I have a feeling that all of a sudden you're going to make progress on the most important things and the things that don't matter. They don't matter. Next is number two. CEOs know that the secret to company culture is actually having people show

up and listen, I have tried. You see, I do a daily team call every single morning, and this daily call has as much energy as it can possibly have for being a zoom call, but it doesn't replace real in-person interactions. You don't make best friends. You don't run up against people on a zoom call. You just see

them as screens. And sure, you may learn a little bit about them just by them being in their home and you being able to see different things that they're interested in, plans that they have, books that they have. We started our business in 2019, and the moment that Covid hit, we moved to a remote work environment. And what I can tell you is that as soon as we went remote, our team members figured out ways to

meet in person and to do work in person. Not because we forced them to, but because they wanted to. People who are high performers want to be around other people who are high performers. They met in person because in-person matters. And the more that we move into a digital age with AI generating images, which are very difficult to determine whether or not they're real or fake, the

in-person contact for high performers changes everything. You can see energy, you can see the tone, you can make eye contact. And that is really hard to replicate virtually if you've been feeling disengaged or uninspired at work. The missing ingredient might be the proximity to the culture and fun energy of the place that you work. I am so passionate about this topic that I actually wrote an entire book about it. It is called Start the Work and if you go to start the work, I can get you

a free copy. Now back over to number three. Next is number three. This is the one that CEOs never say out loud. Remote work makes it way easier to quit. You see, the number one reason why people stay in an organization is because they have a work bestie. There's somebody at work that they enjoy spending time with. They enjoy hanging out with and having that in person person allows the team to be more cohesive and gives a reason to people to stay, especially when times are tough.

There's a contraction. There are issues in the business. The people are what make the business actually work, and the people are the reason that your best people stay. When we made the shift after quarantine was over from remote to in-person, there were definitely some employees who chose to leave, and they chose to leave because they didn't have people that they were connected to. But those who stayed, they thrived because of their relationships and the personal connections that

they had with team members. You see, CEOs rely on empathy and connection and employees, motivating each other to create a working environment that attracts and retains top talent. The best workplaces are the workplaces where you feel like you're rubbing shoulders against people who are high performers, people who you can learn from. So if you work remote and you feel disconnected or unfulfilled, try to form new relationships with your coworkers in person if you can. Next is

number four. Leaders can't fix what they can't see. Countless problems go entirely unnoticed in a remote environment, and it's very challenging for a senior leader to see what's going on when the problem is not really visible. I remember a specific team that I worked with when they were remote, and the senior leader was confused as to why their

team members weren't actually hitting results. And week after week, the senior team member became more and more frustrated because their junior team members weren't doing what they wanted them to do. And I said, have you looked at where they're spending their time? And he's like, what do you mean? How could I look at where they're spending their time? It's like, well, pull up their calendars with them and their one on ones and ask them where they're spending

their time. And when he did this the following week, he was shocked to find out that the team members were prioritizing two things taking approximately 50% of their time that they didn't even need to do, which was causing a significant lack of productivity. But you see, the senior person couldn't see that this was happening because they couldn't see that people were actually meeting about some project that wasn't germane to what they were supposed to be doing.

They were meeting without the senior team member even knowing about it. So the ability to see what's going on in your environment when you're a leader allows you to have instant feedback of whether or not somebody is spending their time, right, or if they're spending their time in the wrong places. And as you grow a business, it becomes more and more important for your team members to be solving the right problems. So this real time feedback is the missing component. If you feel like your career

is not going anywhere. It's likely not because of a lack of skill. It's a lack of visibility. Nobody knows that you're solving the wrong problems, and nobody's guiding you to solve better problems and more important problems. If you're early in your career, embrace going into the office and looking for an in-office role. You will grow so much faster than your peers who think that it's really convenient

to have a remote job. Sure, it might be convenient, and it sounds nice and it's the sexy thing to do, but I can assure you they will not progress as fast as you will. If you pick the right place with the right team and take a lot of action in order to make sure that you're moving the most important things forward. Next is one of the biggest secrets CEOs won't admit. They build beautiful offices because they understand that your work environment shapes your dreams. You see, behind

me is one of our many beautiful office spaces. I have meticulously picked out every color, every surface, every texture inside this office. And I did it for two purposes. The first, I wanted to give our clients an experience. When they walk in the office. I wanted to represent the quality of the work that we do. But the second reason was to give my team members access to something that they could touch, that they could feel that they could be a part of every single day that

made their dreams feel like they're possible. When I first started my career, I dreamed of having The Devil Wears Prada moment, where she walks across the big entryway in some gorgeous New York building, and she goes up this beautiful elevator, and she's entering these glass doors with the Vogue logo behind a very chic counter. And the office just looked inspiring. It looked like someplace you'd want to work and spend 12 hours a day or 14 hours a day, because it was actually a cool place to be.

And when I was creating this office, I wanted that same experience for my team members. And this is what great CEOs do. JP Morgan just spent tens of millions of dollars on their most recent build out, so that they could have restaurants and different types of food, and all sorts of different services available to their team members to optimize their ability to work. Now, we've done this in small ways and are continuing to iterate on this for the sole purpose of having our team members have

an experience that they enjoy. Because your environment subconsciously reinforces identity, and walking into a polished, high aesthetic space elevates your standards. If you want to level up your output. Start by working at big companies where you can feel the inspiration and the energy inside that environment. That brings us to the final insight, which is CEOs know that in office work provides more job security for employees. You see, here

is the real data remote. First, startups grow 30% slower, according to the Startup Genome report, and they are 40% more likely to fail after early fundraising. And office based companies are twice as likely to hit major growth milestones, according to Crunchbase. So data never lies. It is so easy in today's society to think that remote work is just the greatest thing, and that this is the new

era and that this is what makes sense. But I promise you that working remote is the fastest way for you to get confused, for you to get insecure, and for you not to make the progress that you want. Now, there might be a handful of people out there who can make remote work for them. I am not one of those people. I need to interact with leaders. I need to create energy. I need to see what is happening in my environment, and I want to be around

people that are pushing me to the next level. That's what nobody's talking about when they talk about remote work. You in your bedroom, you in your office, you working at your kitchen means you are stuck inside your existing environment. There is no you going outside the environment outside of your normal day to day routine tasks like going to the grocery store, getting gas at the gas station so you're not going in places that are going to make

you more money. You're in the exact same places, making the same amount of money that you already make. In order to make more money, nine times out of ten, you have to leave where you are in order to go someplace new to be uncomfortable, to connect with new people. And you're not going to do that while sitting comfortably in your home. In fact, you're going to get so comfortable that it's going to be even harder for you

to go out and feel confident talking to people. It's going to be even harder for you to go to the networking event, because you have to change out of your pajamas and everything feels like you're just not ready for it, because you aren't actually ready for it. You are compromising your growth for your comfort when you are working remote. If you're in a certain phase of life that requires you to do that, okay, cool, that makes sense.

But don't complain about not making more forward progression at the same time as you're actually choosing comfort, because the lack of forward progression is quite literally because you are not putting yourself in uncomfortable situations with new people and forcing yourself to do something over and over again that you likely don't want to do in order to get

a great outcome. You see, when people choose to show up in office and they work hard alongside other people who are working hard, who they feel inspired by, their chances of success increase remarkably. If you want job security. You probably shouldn't work remote because those companies are more likely to fail. So moving into a city in your 20s where you work for a big corporate company is

something that I strongly recommend. You'll not only connect with people and make friends, but you'll have more job security than remote work can ever give you, and you will create more confidence in yourself by doing something that you are incredibly uncomfortable doing. If you enjoyed this podcast, you are going to definitely not want to miss out on my new newsletter. It just dropped. I just started creating

this content and I am obsessed. Every single week in your inbox I am going to send you business and which is exactly what it sounds like. How do you fit business and all of the other things in.