So you've probably had a lot of experience working from home over the last twelve months, and if you're like most people, your boss has probably asked you to come back to the office at least for one or two days a week. But what you maybe didn't realize is that the one or two days a week you spend at the office means you have far less flexibility than if your organization was a true remote first company. So how is being a remote friendly company different from being
remote first and why does it even matter? My name is doctor Romantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work. On today is my favorite Tip episode. We go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. So in today's show, I go back to my chat with job Van Dervoort, who is the founder and CEO of
remote dot Com. Job was previously the vice president of product at git Lab, so he knows a thing or two about remote work.
I think there's two very strong forces that will make sure that remote working will only continue to grow. The first one being is the need for talent. It's it's simply there's simply not enough talent in the neighborhood around the office to ignore remote work, right. You know that. Now, if you're an employer you want to hire the best person, you can just find them by saying, well, it doesn't matter where you live or where you want to live, we will hire you. And so that's the first one.
It's like the hard need for talent and the need to just look outside of the direct vicinity of anybody particular offers. And the other one is because of the pandemic and many of us were forced to work from home, the secret is out that you can actually do most jobs from home or do them remotely. And so independent of what an employer might decide to do post pandemic, they might say, well, everybody has to go to the office.
Each individual knows that remote working is a thing that is possible and it is a thing that you can do.
So even if your current employee forces you to go back to the office, you know that, well, if you like this, or if you see the potential of hey, if I work remotely, I can move somewhere else, or I can travel well working, then you are going to think to yourself, well, maybe I'll look for a different job, and there will be plenty of jobs, because again, the need for talent will make it so that employers will try to do what is what people actually want, and many people want to work remotely.
It's interesting what I'm seeing happening in Australia is that a lot of organizations are encouraging their staff to come back to the office, which is actually the opposite of what we've done at Inventing. In my consultancy, we have gotten rid of our Melbourne and Sydney lasers and we
are now officially a remote first company. But you know, is there a difference between being a remote first versus just a remote friendly company where people can work from home but they're kind of encouraged to come into the office at least a couple of days a week.
Yeah. Absolutely. I think it starts by the fact that in one of these two scenarios, if you're remote friendly and you still encourage people to go to the office, you take away the freedom of living anywhere, right. I think that's I think there's a large component. I always think that remote work fundamentally and remote First, companies give
you more freedom. And so if you are going to restricted freedom by saying well, you have to be in a particular location, that immediately implies that you also have to work in particular hours. Because most people work during the day, like I do, between nine and five, nine and seven or so, so you immediately restrict that and immediately limit that. And then if you also require them to actually come into the office, it means that they can't actually move anywhere. So I don't think it's remote
friendly if you like that. I think it's about encouraging or requiring people to be closed to the office. That that is the real problem here. And then if you don't allow people to actually far away and fully work remotely, you're not remote friendly. You just want a business that
sometimes people can work from home. And lastly, of course what happens is that your company culture will not be asynchronous, it will not fully embrace remote work because people are going to rely on their moments to being together in the office. It's a natural tendency that we have because communicating in person is much easier than communicating through a computer, and so it requires much less work for you to
just talk to me rather than writing something. It requires much less work to just walk over into the office rather than setting up a meeting when I'm remotely. And so if part of the company or all of the company regularly meets in the office, they are going to lean into the time that they're in office and using that to communicate and using that for meetings. And it will essentially means that if you work remotely, work isolated.
It's a bad idea to work like that. Okay, I think you don't have to accept like everybody works remotely all the time and it happened to be offices where you can sit and work some of the time, or you have to say, well, we are just not a remote company.
That is it for today's show. If you are into what this show is about, you might want to follow me on the social networks. So you can find me on LinkedIn if you search for Amantha Imba. You can find me on Twitter at Amantha, and you can find me on Instagram, which I'm starting to be a little bit more active on at Amantha. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios. The audio mix for today's show was done by mardin
imba who makes everything sound awesome. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.