Why we went fully remote

We’ve found that, even if a client is office-based, they want to engage with us online.

There's research that says people prefer face-to-face meetings, but I’m sceptical because that hasn’t been our experience for most types of meetings. The simple fact is that most organisations we work for continue to have a large amount of remote work going on, so meeting in person just isn’t practical.

The exception to this is our roadmap workshop. We find this really benefits from being in person because it is highly collaborative, “deep” work, and there is no real substitute for being in a room together, so we just make that happen.

A lot of people I talk to about remote work assume that a key benefit is not paying for an office. This is true, but down the list of benefits. Sure, an office is an overhead, but there are other costs that come from managing a remote team.

The greater efficiencies come through streamlining our overall operating model by focussing on remote work approaches.

One simple example is cybersecurity. Going fully-remote has just happened to coincide with a renewed focus on our cybersecurity stance. We've found that during this process, the ability to take a "one size fits all" approach has made the whole process more streamlined, reduced the complexity of this work, and allowed us to do more with less management overhead.

This principle applies to most areas of our operations — culture, project management, delivery, etc. We have lower management and admin overheads than when we were hybrid, and this has created a tighter overall delivery model that has allowed us to remain really competitive in a difficult market.

A lot of organisations are still ‘negotiating’ their position in relation to remote or hybrid work. They have a current operating model, but when I talk to people it is apparent to me that there are still conversations taking place about the future of remote work.

People make big decisions based on whether their work is hybrid or remote. Any changes to our stance on this (i.e. 'evolving' our thinking) has the potential to impact some staff a lot and, importantly, some more than others.

A benefit of going all in on remote is that we've given total clarity to our team that we’re a remote company. This has meant that people can plan around that, with the most obvious impact being that some have moved away from the city, knowing that they don’t need to be within striking distance of an office.

I don’t want to give the impression that there aren't any challenges. There has been a lot of learning because, like most organisations, we’re still adapting to new ways of working. And we’re a specific type of company too - what works for us may not work for others. More than a third of our work is with Australian businesses, so we work with them remotely by default!

And we don’t know what the future holds. But for us, moving to a fully remote model has given us a clarity of purpose and allowed us to focus on being the best we can be.