Remote Workers Explain its Biggest Misconceptions

Amit Matani remembers when he started working remotely as an engineer for AngelList back in 2013 as one of its early employees.

“It made sense that I was working from home in a different city,” Matani told The Org. “I started out as an engineer and I could write code pretty easily. No one back then thought someone in product management or leadership roles could work remotely, especially not a whole company.”

Matani has been with the startup talent platform for nearly nine years—all of them completely remote. He now works as CEO of AngelList Talent, overseeing the company’s technical recruiting product. He was part of a small percentage of remote workers that didn’t see much change in their day-to-day lives in the past two years.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, three quarters of Americans did not work remotely at all, according to research from the NCCI. In 2020, the pandemic forced more than one-third of all workers to shift their work to their homes, when they would not have done so otherwise.

This radical shift in how we work isn’t changing anytime soon. More than 60% of working professionals in the U.S. are at least somewhat remote in their jobs, indicating that hybrid and remote work are here to stay.

But despite the massive transformation across sectors to a remote workforce, remote workers (and those advocating for fully remote workplaces) still say they face confusion from peers and employers about what it truly means to work out of the office, and find themselves managing misconceptions of what remote is and is not.

Remote work doesn’t mean WFH

“One of the biggest misconceptions to me is the idea that remote work means work from home,” Matani said. “The expectation being that if you are a remote worker, you are working from a home office or your bedroom.”

Matani argues that employers need to think of how to cater to remote employees who want the freedom to work from anywhere.

“Whether that means a co-working stipend or the ability to travel to different places with their friends—they are all still considered remote workers.”

It certainly is a popular lifestyle. Harvard Business Review reported a 49% spike in digital nomads in 2020.

“Competent employees will increasingly seek out roles of this nature because they will afford the individual more autonomy, freedom and discretion which allows them to make choices about where, when and how they work,” said Clodagh O’Reilly, business psychologist and founder of the Workforce Experience awards.

“And, as organizations are increasingly able to value their contribution as specific and measurable, they are unlikely to lose out financially — especially as many choice destinations for nomads are more affordable than the cities where their employers may operate or have premises.”

Remote does mean equal access to information

In order to attract the best talent, startups are bending over backwards to become more remote-friendly. Longtime proponents of remote work, like Marie Kretlow, says the normalization of remote work has allowed first time remote workers a chance to reassess what their priorities are.

Kretlow spent ten years of her career working remotely, three of which she was designing and building out a remote onboarding strategy for the SaaS company InVision, an all-remote company that launched back in 2011.

“I would say a difference from then to now is that people are really leaning into that and asking for more flexibility than ever before,” Kretlow told The Org. “They're really recognizing the importance of that work-life balance.”

She now leads people experiences and programs at the email collaboration startup Superhuman, where the latest obstacle for her is creating equal access to information for all employees, something Kretlow says is one of the biggest challenges about remote work.

“One thing we have been pretty thoughtful about is proximity bias, and really intentionally combating that ensuring that folks have equitable access to information, equitable opportunity to participate,” Kretlow said. “For us that looks like leaning into a lot of asynchronous collaboration first, just so folks have the opportunity to work together in the ways that work best for them at a time that works best for them.”

Matani echoes these sentiments about building a remote-first culture.

“Companies that are trying to do kind of the hybrid approach will choose one or the other, and it's gonna be really hard to have this middle group,” Matani said.

“I think having a fully remote company that is thoughtful about the remote process is so incredibly important to the individual remote person.”

Founders launching startups today are having to answer this question quickly. Getting it wrong could mean losing out in an already fierce tech job market.

Steven Fabre is one of these founders. As the CEO and co-founder of Liveblocks, a seed-stage startup focused on building API tools for developers, Fabre has chosen to make his company completely remote.

“I think it's important if you go remote, to make it fully remote,” Fabre said. “Because when you have some kind of headquarters right, it can create this feeling of missing out for the people that don't go to the office.”

Instead of having one central office, Liveblocks currently has employees distributed across Western Europe and the eastern United States, and is hiring in these areas purposefully to ensure there isn’t too much asynchronous work. This comes from Fabre’s firsthand experience working remotely across three different time zones over the past six years.

“Having at least three to four hours of overlap with your team, while still having a few hours of downtime, in my experience, has been pretty important,” Fabre said.

Remote work doesn’t mean you can’t form connections

Another misconception of working remotely is that workers will not be able to form the same meaningful connections and network organically the way that in-person office settings provide.

While it’s certainly true that working individually and not in a shared office space offers opportunities for isolation and declining mental health, longtime remote workers say it is possible to make those connections, provided that the environment is right.

For Fabre and his former co-worker Lindsey Scott at InVision, both say that their all-remote company provided the most meaningful connections they’ve made with co-workers so far in their career.

“I've always been really surprised by how much you can connect with people over Zoom,” Scott said.

“I also found more people that I had a lot of admiration and respect for working for a remote company because it was just a less homogenous group of people. There were people from all over the country and all over the world. It’s really refreshing to meet these colleagues that have such diverse backgrounds and interests.”

Sign up now: Stay up to date, level up and hire better with our behind the scenes newsletters at the world’s top startups.