Does requiring in-office work produce better collaboration and productivity than remote or distributed work?

Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023

Physical proximity is massively underrated and underappreciated as a driver of team effectiveness

The fastest-moving team is one person with all the skills; next best is a small intellectually diverse team of six with a senior member so osmosis learning happens; beyond that you want everyone on one floor, or failing that one building

Scope: ideal is a team small enough to fit one floor plate in a single city

22:49 20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality

Harry Stebbings · Jul 21, 2023

In the speaker's view, disagreeing with his interlocutor, remote employees do not work as hard or as well, feel less cultural togetherness, and remote work fundamentally changes a company's creativity and retention fabric

Attention is fragmented, idea sharing is different, and the in-person camaraderie that makes someone say 'I love working with you' over a drink is what keeps people from taking LinkedIn recruiters' offers

Scope: across functions including marketing and sales

20:01 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai

Harry Stebbings · Oct 9, 2023

Nearly every CEO he speaks to now says privately that in-person work is much better for engagement, collaboration and culture, and there is a real binary flip back to the office

Consistent behind-the-scenes reports from CEOs he interviews

Scope: reported as what CEOs say behind the scenes

29:04 20VC: Atlassian Co-Founder Scott Farquhar on The Biggest Lessons Scaling Atlassian to $50BN Market Cap; The Four Roles of the CEO, The Funding Round That Net Accel $6BN, The Regrets of Omission and Commission & The Honeymoon Cut Short

Mike Shebat · Nov 27, 2023

Company culture should be in-office because the real magic comes from working alongside teammates rather than practicing alone

You could technically become a great baseball player hitting balls alone in the cage, but the magic happens practicing with teammates to prepare for the big game

6:12 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Keith Rabois · Nov 27, 2023

Traba's decision to be in-person only, six days a week, was incredibly contrarian and courageous three years ago, and more people now recognize it as the correct way to build a startup

At the time there was a consensus view, reinforced by COVID, that people could work remotely and distributed

45:58 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Harry Stebbings · Dec 1, 2023

There is no role that is not made better by being in person, including engineering

Even developers work better together because building product is a team activity

45:35 20VC: HelloFresh CEO on Why When You Raise VC You Only Have Two Options, Why Your IPO Price is Irrelevant, Why Timing is So Important in Going Public & Why D2C is Not Dead with Dominik Richter

Tom Blomfield · May 13, 2024

The in-person YC batch experience is dramatically better than the fully remote one

In-person office hours, group office hours and even cooking and serving dinner to founders create an emotional bond and trust, whereas a twenty-minute weekly Zoom is transactional and empty; after four or five months in person he genuinely knows the founders

Scope: some remote elements are worth retaining

24:13 20VC: Behind the Scenes at Y Combinator: The Interview Process | What the Best & Worst Do in the Program | Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | Why the Value is in Application Layer AI with Tom Blomfield

Mark Goldberg · Oct 25, 2024

Being in the office every day is an important tenet for a new firm

A new team is a startup and needs to work shoulder to shoulder

Scope: framed for a new/startup team specifically

34:17 20VC: The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms; Why Portfolio Services are for VCs not Founders | Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | Why Reserves are Bad for Founders & How Boutique Firms Will Win with Mark Goldberg @ Chemistry

Zachary Bookman · Dec 6, 2024

Going fully remote, virtual and distributed in 2020 was a mistake; in-office work is decisively better for collaboration and productivity

Having reversed course, the difference in collaboration and productivity in the office isn't even close; work requires whiteboarding and talking, not sitting alone in a room cranking

Scope: acknowledges the return to office is very painful

63:11 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov

Max Levchin · Feb 5, 2025

Sufficient in-person together time is entirely non-optional, and anyone claiming teams can be fully remote and never meet in person is kidding themselves

Forming relationships, understanding each other's decision-making styles and breaking bread together only happen in person

34:33 20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap

Doug Leone · Sep 14, 2021

The hardest part of leading Sequoia is people and personality issues, and COVID has worsened them by leaving non-investment staff feeling less close to the investment team

Everyone has their own needs, and remote work legitimately widened the distance between the investment team and everyone else; his empathy makes him feel each person's pain

Scope: says the non-investment staff are not wrong to feel this

42:05 20VC: Sequoia's Doug Leone on What Has Been Instrumental To Scaling Sequoia Over Generations, How Sequoia Think About International Expansion and What They Learned From China and India & Why When You Lose Pre-Seed You Become Private Equity

Jeff Jordan · Jan 16, 2023

The worst internal change at Andreessen Horowitz is that at over 400 people, and with COVID and post-COVID working patterns, it has become hard to get to know your coworkers

Scale plus remote/hybrid work removed the incidental contact that builds relationships

40:01 20VC: a16z's Jeff Jordan on The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Marketplaces, Two Core Features to Look for in All Marketplace Investments, Why Fragmented Supply is so Important & Lessons from Airbnb, Pinterest and Instacart on What Makes the Best Cohorts

Tom Hulme · May 8, 2024

Being in the office is a critically important learning opportunity early in a career, so it's hard to understand ambitious young people who insist on being fully remote

You learn interpersonal skills, can shadow people in ways impossible on Zoom, and pick up business context from colleagues in other areas — all of which disappears remotely

Scope: cost-driven reasons for remote work are legitimate and should be respected; the objection is to those who believe they are more effective working from their bedroom

65:43 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Remote work has real downsides around human contact, particularly for people early in their careers and those who struggle being alone at home

At some point you need to physically be with people, and for some individuals working alone simply doesn't work

Scope: especially early in career; varies by individual

38:45 20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel

Harry Stebbings · Sep 21, 2022 · hedged

Zoom helped flatten hierarchy in meetings and removed some of the fear of speaking up, because everyone is reduced to a square

43:52 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Remote video meetings are a great equalizer that flattens dominant personalities and gives introverts far more impact than physical meetings do

In physical rooms, seating position and physical presence confer advantage and people cut each other off, whereas the raise-hand mechanic on video gives quieter people a structured turn to speak

Scope: introvert-versus-extrovert is the overlooked axis of diversity

39:11 20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel

Harry Stebbings · May 8, 2024

In-person work makes feedback zero-friction, and juniors would never receive that coaching remotely

The debrief after a meeting — in the taxi or tube home — happens naturally in person and never gets scheduled as a call

66:19 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber

Harry Stebbings · Oct 18, 2024

Remote work harms development because it creates an escape valve that lets people avoid learning hard social skills, and the informal postmortems where real lessons happen never occur remotely

You learn by doing — the lessons are in the cracks, like debriefing a customer pitch on the way home, which never happens in a remote world

40:49 20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel

Harry Stebbings · Dec 14, 2022 · hedged

The hardest part of remote management is having no way to tell whether your team members are actually happy

You don't see them at the end of the day, so you're left guessing

57:32 Remote management obscures team happiness signals

Ryan Petersen · Nov 13, 2023

Remote work makes building company culture very difficult because teams don't form over video conferencing, even though individuals can be highly productive at home

Great things are achieved by teams, and teams form through in-person collaboration where you capture emotion, body language and context and can jam without a 30-minute call limit

47:29 Team culture formation requires in person even if individual productivity does not

Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

Building a remote team in India from the US is a distinct organizational challenge, partly for cultural reasons and partly because leaders can't easily role model behavior at a distance

The team was in India while he and part of leadership were in the US, making role modeling hard

56:45 Cross border remote teams block leaders from role modeling behavior

Noah Desai Weiss · Jun 16, 2023

Hybrid/remote made product reviews better by making them more inclusive — more of the tech leads, designers and PMs on a project can attend.

In a physical room, once attendance passes roughly eight or ten people the meeting stops feeling collaborative and starts feeling like a performance, so teams capped attendance; video rooms can be larger without that effect, and people get context directly instead of via a trickle-down cascade.

14:02 Video meetings enable larger more inclusive product review attendance than in person

Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023

A new company should decide remote vs. one-city by comparing the productivity discount of remote (roughly 10-20%) against the increase in talent density from hiring anywhere

Restricting to one city says no to every other city on earth; the question is whether the least skilled person on your engineering team would be materially better if you could hire everywhere

26:31 Compare remote productivity discount against talent density gains to decide remote vs hub

Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023

People are more productive in person than remote, specifically because open-ended brainstorming about what is possible does not work over video, while execution-focused work on how to get there works well remotely

There's a magic that manifests only in the middle of a table, a shared picture floating over the conversation; 'what could we do' needs that, 'how do we get there' does not

27:48 In person needed for open ended brainstorming remote suffices for execution

Keith Rabois · Nov 27, 2023

A company can impose an extreme in-person work culture in any geography if it is unapologetic and upfront about it, because you only need the top 1% of people in that community to opt in

Being unapologetic lets people self-select in; the risk is being too open and not upfront, which produces hires with wildly varying commitment levels

47:25 Self selection via being unapologetic and upfront makes intense in office culture work in any geography

Mike Shebat · Nov 27, 2023

GitLab is a rare, identifiable exception to the rule that remote companies don't work, because an open-source company is built around corralling hundreds or thousands of contributors distributed around the globe

The business model is predicated on open source software with global contributors, so distribution is inherent to the model

48:38 Open source companies are a legitimate exception to in office superiority given their inherently distributed contributor model

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

A deliberate cadence of weekly business reviews paired with one-on-ones replicates the postmortem feedback loop in a remote organization

He uses business reviews to give input and one-on-ones to receive feedback on the previous review, giving a touch point every other day with team leads and closing the loop, with leads replicating the same pattern one level down

41:23 Structured review and one on one cadence replicates in person postmortem learning remotely

David Heinemeier Hansson · Apr 14, 2020

The common objections entrepreneurs raise to remote work — replicating the magic around the whiteboard and knowing whether people are working — are shallow, trite excuses that are not well thought out

Packing a day with end-to-end video conferencing leaves everyone zoomed out of their minds, and unlike the office it doesn't even give you the social payoff of being in a room with people

3:54 Common objections to remote work are shallow and poorly reasoned

David Heinemeier Hansson · Apr 14, 2020

Remote work loneliness and isolation are real problems that must be addressed head-on by making social connection explicit and separate from work, rather than hoping it emerges out of the work itself

Human connections are important and need to be replenished frequently, so the company schedules them deliberately (Friday game hour, five-by-twelve calls, recurring async questions)

9:39 Loneliness must be addressed through deliberate scheduled social connection separate from work

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Remote onboarding requires being deliberately proactive about scheduling a new hire's time with other people, because the organic conversations that happen in an office don't occur

Everything in remote work happens on scheduled time with a Zoom link, whereas in an office interactions happen organically

48:49 Remote onboarding requires deliberate proactive scheduling since organic office conversations dont happen

Tom Hulme · May 8, 2024

Companies forced into remote work during COVID generally executed it badly: they became efficient at their jobs by stripping out the innovative and enjoyable parts, and junior people stopped learning

The initial impression of efficiency gave way to realizing they weren't innovative, juniors weren't learning, and people were frustrated — thirty Zoom calls a day removed the fun parts of the job

64:04 Covid remote stripped innovation and junior learning

Harry Stebbings · May 8, 2024

Hybrid work as practiced in the US is the worst arrangement because teams lack synchronicity — they come in two days a week without cohesion around which days

Without agreement on which days everyone is in, the team never overlaps in person

65:05 Hybrid without synchronized days fails

Tom Hulme · May 8, 2024

Shrinking the office so a third of the team is in at any one time is a false economy; it is much better to keep a full office and have the whole team in a third of the time

Value comes from the whole team being co-located simultaneously, not from continuous partial occupancy

65:26 Full team co location beats partial continuous occupancy

Jean-Denis Greze · Jul 21, 2023

The industry has talked too much about remote versus hybrid; the working model is not the difference between success and failure as long as hiring and culture are matched to whichever choice you make

Fully remote companies succeeded pre-pandemic because they pre-selected for people who wanted remote; the pandemic's problem was forcing people into models they didn't choose

18:28 Working model choice matters less than whether hiring and culture are matched to it

Harry Stebbings · Jul 21, 2023

The person who gets the promotion rather than the one who doesn't is most often the one who is in the office more

25:27 In office presence not remote work determines who gets promoted