Realization #2: by default, remote-only teams tend to have a weaker...culture, for lack of a better term. There's much less of a shared sense of what it feels like to work at the given company, and it varies massively from team to team.

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Realization #1: you pay a large, ongoing tax in coordination and orchestration efforts between people and teams. I think pretty much everyone knows this much. You have to make the implicit explicit, and that goes for everything. This often manifests as an unusually high ratio of managers to ICs.

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I have not paid a ton of attention to the uproar over RTO policies, bc we are all in on distributed teams and not going back. My impression (via social media) has been that these were shadow layoffs. Last month I asked an investor why they are doing RTO. He said: "Retention, mostly. And morale."

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Running an all-remote company is likely to require a different set of skills, instincts, vendors, managers, leaders, and possibly execs. It is not a change you can flip on overnight, or achieve by just trying harder. I'm sick of folks pretending there are no real down sides to all-remote work.

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But it's not the craziest idea. If you're a leader staring at data that says your people are less happy, less connected to each other, performing less well, and thinking of leaving the company ever since everyone went remote... Then RTO is basically "revert deploy to last known good state". 🤷

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