Where do you do your best work?

I used to ask people during interviews, “Where do you do your best work?”  This was before the pandemic accelerated a long term trend toward remote work.  There isn’t a right or wrong answer to this question but I wanted to talk through how people set themselves up for success and how we could support them when they joined.

Answers ranged from environmental to cultural and they often varied from person to person.  Most answers described a typical office environment and since I was often interviewing developers they usually added “wearing headphones to block out distractions”.  I don’t think anybody used the question as an opportunity to rethink how we work from the ground up as a clean slate.

This thought experiment is something I came back to frequently as the company grew and I still think about it as I figure out what I want to do next.

Forced experiments

As the world was forced into a society-wide remote work experiment, one of the first things that emerged on our slack channels were people posting pictures of their workspaces.  People submitted everything from hastily assembled laptops and monitors on a kitchen table to artfully decorated home office desks.  Where and how we work allows us to bring our styles and personalities to our jobs.

My current workspace, once I start writing code again I’ll let you know if the third monitor actually helps.

Switching to a remote environment also exposed the things we had left behind at the office.  Like many high growth startups, we had the mandatory Tornado™ Foosball and ping-pong tables available for people to use in between meetings.  After demoralizing sales calls or tense meetings, people used to come together for a quick game to reset and blow off steam or rebuild trust.  Without those pick-me-ups everyone felt a bit more isolated in their home office spaces.

The solution wasn’t to get everyone back in the office as quickly as possible.  We needed to lean on the tools that were available in our remote world to accomplish the outcomes we were achieving with the in person activities.  We gave people a small group in Slack they could lean on for emotional support after a bad call or for mentoring.  We experimented with a tool called gather.town to reproduce happy hour conversations and replaced white boards with tools like Figma.

Developing tools

I believe we’re a long way from having deep conversations about where we do our best work.  Too many people think employers are trying to trick them into coming back into the office, and in a lot of cases, that’s probably true.  The answers to what environment you need to be effective vary from situation to situation but might involve some in person collaboration. We should be open to many possible configurations and ask “what tools are we missing” rather than “how do we get back to where we feel comfortable?”

Being forced into a remote first culture, was jarring for most of us used to going into an office and interacting with coworkers every day.  However, it did open the door a crack so we might consider fundamentally different ways of working.  It will take some time for the world to catch up with practical tools that allow us to do our best work no matter where we are.  New companies and products will smooth the rough edges we saw in our initial attempts to work from home.  New ways of finding connection and building trust are being developed right now and the people who solve these challenges are going to have huge advantages going forward.

The benefits to pursuing a world that provides the flexibility to define our own best place to work are immense.  It unlocks jobs for people across geographies and provides opportunities that didn’t previously exist.  The workplace can now be accessible for people with disabilities, more flexible for people handling childcare, and provide routes to grow no matter who you are or how you work.  Some boxes are impossible to close once they’ve been opened and I’m excited to finally be seriously talking about “where do we do our best work?”

Gather.town providing a virtual environment to engage with large groups