5 Reasons Why Your Company Will Never Let you Work Remotely & 3 Why They Might

Chris Herd
6 min readFeb 6, 2020

The most important thing workers want today is remote working opportunities.

Every single one of us wants, and increasingly expects, five things:

  • trust
  • control
  • balance
  • flexibility
  • autonomy

1. Most companies don’t feel comfortable giving their workers these things

Where we do not receive those things or the perception of our role leads us to believe that our boss is withholding them from us, workers will increasingly search out companies and opportunities which give them all of these things. For office-first companies, this will grow to become a major problem. They will lose their best workers to their biggest remote-first competitors and it will happen incredibly quickly.

The average talent between office-first and remote-first companies will grow slowly at first before a rapid explosion. The reason?

Company 1

  • 🏢Has an office
  • ⏰time there a KPI
  • 🏙️worker, expensive city
  • 📍hire best person 30-mile radius

Company 2

  • ✈️is remote-first
  • 📈output is the KPI
  • 🌏worker, live anywhere
  • 📍hire best person globally

Which company do you think will win?

The answer is as obvious as it is inevitable.

Remote companies will dominate this decade and disrupt every office-first company.

The challenge for companies is that, right now, they don’t know what the difference is between operating remotely. Rather than leveraging all the benefits of remote work to maximize productivity, they want to replicate office work for remote workers.

The changes required to move from remote-work to office-work:

  • async over sync
Chris Herd

CEO / Founder / Coach @FirstbaseHQ Empowering people to work in their lives not live at work ✌️✌