I'm taking my company remote

Find Your Superpower newsletter 022

Read time: 6 minutes

Topics covered: remote work, work from home (WFH), work from anywhere (WFA), flexible work

A week ago, I wrote a LinkedIn post about taking my company fully remote and the virality of that post was unbelievable! 🚀

One week later, I am still working hard to respond to the comments and direct messages regarding that post—I had to reserve two hours on one day for that and I have not finished.

While I simply cannot believe how much interest and opinions that post created, in the same week Zoom announced its global return-to-office (RTO) policy, which is kind of ironic if you think about it.

What was also unexpected to me was receiving a huge number of job applicants for any possible role in my company that may exist. I am grateful and I wish I were hiring right now, because it would have made it such a breeze. Please feel free to reach out so that I know who you are for a future job opening. I’m always looking for freelancers!

On that note, there is a fundamental difference between a virtual startup with a bunch of remote workers, versus the kind of business I run.

For one, while my team had been working remotely since the pandemic began, we would still return irregularly to the office—we distribute and sell our inventory of books and magazines (we have both B2C retail and B2B clients) from a cosy office that cost good money to renovate and fit out with office furniture, consumables and other items.

Next, we have also run many CSR projects from the office, such as our 2021 International Women’s Day event where we joined forces with local sustainability fashion startup Style Theory to help 50 women with professional makeovers and photoshoots for their LinkedIn profile. In 2022, we teamed up again to run ten mentor-mentee shoots and tell their stories on social media.

Why are we going remote now?

We are going remote now because our office has already been severely underutilized for years. As I shared, status quo held me back from letting go of my lease for many years, but my instincts tell me that it is now the time to embrace the future of work.

In a city of 5-10 million people, imagine if much fewer people had to travel to work every day (for jobs that do not have a face-to-face requirement). How much energy would we save? How many fewer cars and roads would we need? How much time would we collectively save?

In another LinkedIn post, I calculated that I saved an entire month each year from working remotely.

Here’s my daily time investment working in an office:

• 60 min getting ready for + out of work
• 90 min in commute to + from work
• 30 min admin time at work (often much more)

= 3h daily

—

Here's my annual time investment working in an office:

• 3h x 20 business days = 60h/month
• 60h/month x 12 months = 720h/year
• 720h/year ➗ 24h = 30 days/year

= 1 entire month.... wouldn’t you want one month of your life back?

Further, I have never had one person ever complain about our 100% WFH or WFA policy: I’ve had employees work remotely while traveling around the world, and during performance reviews they always bring up how grateful they are not to have to fight traffic jams and commute daily.

As a mother of two, I can attest that mothers love working remotely, plus I love hiring mothers. Remote or flexible work levels the playing field for career women who are pregnant and mothers to babies and toddlers. Remote work also supports people with disabilities and medical conditions that hinder mobility. And for everyone else, it will give back to you your personal time and sanity.

Is remote work always better?

On this topic I want to assure you that I’m not living in la la land. I’ve always been very clear that not everyone is suited to remote work. All of us have different personality types and levels of professional experience, and our needs at different stages of our career are also remarkably different.

That said, a prototypically strong remote worker is one who is both an excellent communicator and fully accountable for their work performance.

First, they must be able to communicate well using apps like Slack, WhatsApp or Zoom, and not everyone fares well there—they simply “disappear” like they were never part of the company in the first place. NB: communication is a different axis from extroversion-introversion. Introverts can be excellent communicators, and vice versa, extroverts can be poor communicators.

Second, they must be fully accountable for their work performance. In some egregious cases, they may be unreachable for hours (or even full days), or miss their deadlines but not communicate a change in plans. While this is also a problem in an office setting, the problem is compounded in a remote setting as nobody has any visibility on the matter.

Therefore, I remain a huge supporter of face-to-face meetings and social interactions with my colleagues. I organize company-sponsored lunch and coffee meetups that are intentional—these social and recreational meetups allow me to stay in touch with my colleagues. I even fly in colleagues into Singapore if they are based overseas. In fact, I look forward to meeting them more now than I would if I saw them daily!

More importantly, I have taken the future savings and consolidated it into an annual fully-sponsored 3D2N company retreat. In 2022, I flew all of us and our executive coach Chuen Chuen Yeo out to Langkawi, Malaysia, where she taught us about our Clifton strengths. Even my son tagged along.

Guess where we’re going this year…BALI! 🏝️

Is it still hard to say goodbye to my office? Yes.

But like Marie Kondo advised, does it spark joy? If not, thank it and bid it farewell.

So here goes…“Goodbye office, I love you and I bid you farewell. I will miss you very much. Thank you for looking after all of us for so many years!” 🙌 

For those of you who are new to my newsletter, this newsletter, Find Your Superpower, subscribed by 24,000+ people, discusses the following three goals: (1) Making a career transition, (2) Professional branding on LinkedIn, and (3) Reinventing ourselves for the future of work.

Thanks for reading issue 022 of my weekly Find Your Superpower newsletter.

See you next week. 

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