23 June 2025

Why leaders resist remote work

Remote work has always been about the flexibility where your laptop becomes your office, productivity beats micromanagement, and work adapts to your life, not the other way around.

Imagine this:

You have your laptop with you, a good internet connection either via WiFi or mobile data, and you're sitting in a cafe or a park or a coworking space or best of all, on a beach - and getting shit done for your company.

After a couple of hours of deep work, you close your laptop, walk the beach, go for a swim, chat with your friends, and then come back to work.

Doesn't that sound like a dream work day?

But what's stopping you from working like this?

Probably a "mandatory" in-office policy :)

Let me recap the facts. The whole world worked from home during COVID and people reported being as productive and in many cases more so.

• What changed?
• Why the sudden urge to call everyone back to office?
• Why some companies when headquartered in the US or EU have hybrid as optional while their counterparts in the east have hybrid as mandatory?
• Why tie one group of people in a certain geography to a location while the other group gets the choose their place of work?

The truth:

🌶️ Unpopular opinion: In-office culture is mostly a half-assed remedy for loneliness of leaders and top-exec in organizations.

Remote work have had a love-hate relationship mostly because leaders fail to change themselves and hence render the whole thing ineffective. Most leadership is missing the forest for the trees when it comes to remote work.

Your customer knows no boundaries. Your code knows no boundaries. Your sales knows no boundaries. Your top management gets to move around. So why does the majority of the company have a location bound in the name of:

• "Being productive"
• "Seeing faces of colleagues & bonding/empathising"
• "Team collaboration"
• "Maintaining company culture"
• "Hustling together to get milestones"
• "Better communication"
• +100 other excuses.

One can counter all the above in different ways with data. At the end of the day, it comes down to the person and how they want to work, interact, and communicate with the team.

When we mandate in-office, we basically dictate how employee's lives will be because top-exec "feels" this is the right way for the org. In most part of India, people travel about 2-3 hours every day in big cities (Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi) to get to work. And these are not even blue-collar jobs, these are simple IT jobs which people can do from their home, cafe, a nearby WeWork, or even from a different time zone while making sure they can be close to their family, friends, partner, or explore a new part of the world.

Here's proof that remote-first actually works:

There are companies who're built remote-first from day-1 and have outperformed in many areas compared to their competition. Few examples are:

1. GitLab: One of the largest and most successful remote-first companies, with over 2,300 team members worldwide, known for its transparent, handbook-driven culture and robust DevSecOps platform.

2. Automattic: The company behind WordPress, employing over 1,170 people globally, all working remotely and scaling efficiently for years.

3. Toggl: A leading remote-first time management tool provider, with a fully distributed team since inception, supporting remote workers in tracking productivity.

4. Coinbase: A major cryptocurrency exchange that has embraced remote-first operations, allowing employees to work from anywhere without mandatory office days.

5. Shopify: Announced a "digital by default" approach, with most of its workforce remote and a significant reduction in office capacity.

These companies have proven that remote-first models can drive innovation, attract top global talent, and outperform traditional in-office rivals.

Guess what: Choosing to go remote doesn't have to be black and white.

It needs to be in the grey. And it needs to be a choice you're giving to your employees, not mandating it.

And I know...I know. I've heard the excuses before:

• "but it creates disharmony in the team"
• "I don't trust my team to get the job done"
• "I don't know what they're doing"
• "One person took advantage and did xyz..."
• "Remote is not really our thing..."

Here's the real issue:

My take is that leaders and top execs need to learn the basics of remote work which includes a lot of behavioural changes like:

• being great at writing
• communicating with clarity in emails/slack
• making sure to be a document-first company
• trusting outcomes over activity
• giving clear context instead of vague instructions
• being comfortable with asynchronous decision-making
• learning to motivate without physical presence
• embracing transparency in all communications
• or building systems that work across time zones

These are hard skills to acquire and practice continuously. But I am optimistic about this.

My suggestion:

Give full-remote (or optional hybrid) an honest try. Like a good 1-2 year try. I am 100% sure that it'll change your and your company's life forever. But here's the catch - you can't half-ass it. Don't just allow people to work from home while keeping all your old office-centric processes intact. That's setting everyone up for failure.

Start by investing in the right tools and training. Get your team comfortable with async communication, document everything, and build systems that work across time zones. Set clear expectations about availability, response times, and deliverables. Most importantly, train your managers to focus on outcomes rather than hours logged.

Track the right metrics - productivity, employee satisfaction, retention rates, and actual business results. Not who's online at 9 AM or who attended the most meetings.

Give it time to work. The first few months will feel awkward as everyone adjusts. Some people might struggle initially, and that's normal. But stick with it, iterate on your processes, and watch what happens.

I guarantee you'll see:

• Higher employee satisfaction and retention
• Access to global talent instead of just local hires
• Reduced overhead costs (less office space, utilities, snacks)
• More diverse team members who couldn't relocate for a job
• Increased productivity as people work during their optimal hours
• Better work-life integration leading to less burnout

The companies that figure this out first will have a massive competitive advantage in attracting and retaining top talent. The ones that keep clinging to outdated office mandates will be left behind wondering where all the good people went.

📸 Picture from my 1 month workation from a cafe in Dortmund, Germany :)