‘Offices are a stage for performative productivity,’ says CEO who helps bosses manage remote teams

“Offices are a stage for performative productivity” and “the easiest place to fill time with distraction and feel busy,” Firstbase CEO Chris Herdtweeted this week. His software startup helps companies set up, manage, and retrieve equipment for remote workers, and it counts Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins among its investors.

“The people who trust remote workers the least are the people who personally struggle being productive when working remotely the most,” Herd wrote, sharing a link to a column in The Times entitled, “WFH is appealing but it’s just not working.” Herd remarked, “‘Just not working’ is self projection.” 

A host of high-profile CEOs have insisted this year that employees spend more time in offices and less remotely, among them Bob Iger at Disney, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, and Robert Thomson at News Corp. Typically they’ve called for three or four days a week back in the office.

Herd agrees that companies benefit from employees spending time together, but he argues the best way to accomplish that is not to sign long-term office leases, but rather to have semi-regular off-site gatherings. Companies that do remote work well, he believes, will have an advantage over ones that stick to office-centric patterns of old, partly because they can attract better talent by drawing from a larger pool of candidates.

Herd, of course, has a vested interest in the future of work involving less office time, given his company’s focus. 

But many prominent business leaders feel younger workers, in particular, need an office environment to absorb the company culture, connect with colleagues, and learn from mentors. Many of those younger workers feel the same way, and often lack a suitable home office, perhaps because they have roommates or live alone in a claustrophobic apartment—or indeed still live with their parents. By contrast, many older, more established employees, particularly ones with children, might want to spend less time commuting and in the office and more time at home. 

“We’ve treated things monolithically,” said Hung Lee, writer and founder of the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter, during the a16z podcast earlier this month. “But we’re probably at the point now where we need to bring in the nuance, because what is positive for one group of people is negative for another.” 

Herd argues that the phrase “remote work” has been “hijacked” to mean work from home, whereas it really means work from anywhere, whether it’s a cafe or a co-working space. “Remote work means empowering employees with trust and responsibility, fostering a culture of accountability and initiative,” he tweeted last week, and “escaping the distraction factory adult kids club that the office has become.”