Summary of A16z Podcast Episode: Unraveling Remote Work: A Deep Dive | a16z Live #9
Podcast: A16z
5 min. read
— Description —
Discover the survey results on back to work strategies from Andressen Horowitzs portfolio companies Learn how remote/hybrid work is here to stay and how efficiency and creativity will be maintained or exceeded Find out why remote communication tools are more effective than once thought and how in-person working connections will be redefined for the better
Explore the impact of remote work on productivity and the future of Silicon Valley.
Unraveling Remote Work: A Deep Dive | a16z Live #9
Table of contents
Key Takeaways
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Andressen Horowitz surveyed their portfolio companies on back to work strategies revealing continued remote/hybrid work and belief that efficiency/creativity will be maintained or exceeded
- Check out the rest of the survey results
- Remote communication tools are much more effective than once thought
-
In-person working connections will be redefined for the better
- Off-sites could be more effective now, this might become a more intentional opportunity to connect with your work and colleagues in a different way
- “Water cooler talk” doesn’t actually make connections. It is too time limited in a restricted environment and can often give a false sense of relationships
- The market supply and demand of the workforce will eventually stabilize on the issue of the cost of living locally or remote and adjusted compensation
- Remote work will redefine productivity; hours in-office or lines of code written per day are very unreliable stand-alone metrics for ensuring productivity
- Beginning of the end for Silicon Valley – better if “silicon valley” exists in the cloud rather than a geographical center
Intro
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Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) and Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) are the co-founders and general partners at the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz
- Also joined on Clubhouse, Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi), former President of Microsoft Windows
- Marc, Ben, and Steven discuss listener-selected questions on their live Clubhouse show with an emphasis on the future of remote work and post-covid workplace dynamics
Andreesen Horowitz Survey
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Andressen Horowitz surveyed their portfolio companies on back to work strategies
- 25% fully remote
- 67% hybrid:
- 38% – require 1 to 2 days a week in office
- 28% – occasional travel to off-site office
- 89% of companies plan to continue to hire remote workers
- 86% will prefer a hybrid or remote model for board meetings
- 63% believe they can be as creative/innovative in a hybrid/remote world
- 10% believe they can be even more creative in the hybrid/remote world
- Check out the rest of the survey results
Surprises from Remote Work
- Some companies are completely pivoting from 5-day in-office weeks to fully remote, never falling back into their old ways
- Remote communication tools are much more effective than once thought
- Forced creative companies to be even more creative
Questions Raised from Remote Work
- What is the right model of hybrid remote and in-office work?
- How do you know your employees don’t have multiple jobs?
- How does remote work promote effective career progression and the ability to be more visibly noticed?
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What is the substitute for “management by walking around”?
- They discuss the value of management being in-office giving them more awareness of overall office sentiment which can lead to better leadership and the ability to identify problems quicker
New Workplace Dynamics
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Remote work is just more efficient than in-person work but comes with drawbacks
- Creativity and tough conflict resolution are less successful in remote work
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Off-sites could be more effective now, this might become a more intentional opportunity to connect with your work and colleagues in a different way
- Feedback to off-sites is always that the free time to connect socially is the most valuable
- “Water cooler talk” doesn’t actually make connections. It is too time limited in a restricted environment and can often give a false sense of relationships
Remote Compensation Issues
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How do you handle compensation when considering the local cost of living versus the opportunity of remote work?
- Solution 1: Adjusted pay based on working remotely or working locally
- Solution 2: Same work, same pay
- Depends on the company’s angle of incentive, want the best talent or want the local workforce benefits
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The market supply and demand of the workforce will eventually stabilize this issue
- “You can’t outrun the market on this issue” – Ben Horowitz
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Could result in a massive reshuffling of workforce geography
- Silicon Valley most likely won’t be as concentrated of a tech hub as it has been historically
Productivity
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Hours in-office is a very unreliable stand-alone metric for ensuring productivity
- This is the ultimate shortcut for management quantifying productivity
- In the early days of IBM, they put a metric on producing 10 lines of code per day to measure the scale of potential productivity. But this ignores context
- Bullshit Jobs: A Theory – A book and theory by David Graeber that the capitalistic system is creating fake jobs purely for the purpose of keeping people occupied to stall the effort towards any sort of social/political revolution
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“at work network” – research done by Buzzfeed that the general workforce spends an enormous amount of time on the internet consuming non-work related information, potentially 40%-50% of their time
- Most companies are probably scared to look at this metric
- New companies in the remote revolution will end up eliminating some jobs that fall into this statistic
Employee Retention
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Surveys predict high levels of turnover in the upcoming “back to normal” months
- People re-evaluated their lives and purpose during the pandemic
- Burnout
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Remote work diluted the in-office beneficial symbiotic relationship with colleagues and their work
- Might change jobs to try and find this again
Decentralized Crypto Start-ups
- When everyone in a crypto company is an engineer, rather than in typical business functions (Marketing, Sales, etc.), they tend to be more decentralized in nature
Silicon Valley
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Is this the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley as we know it?
- The podcast hopes so
- Better if “silicon valley” exists in the cloud rather than a geographical center
- Opportunity in tech has not been geographically distributed appropriately to maximize innovation
- Resembles a monopoly – emphasizes power rather than innovation
- 25-30 year transition curve