Do NOT Work From Home

Why working from home ruins startups

Working from home is very popular these days as is having a work life balance. While the idea of any founder who wants to be successful having a work life balance is so ludicrous I won’t even both addressing it I think it’s important to talk about WFH and its negative impact on a startup’s culture and likelihood of success. While I know there are plenty of startups that have managed to grow with a WFH culture from day one and I applaud them, I would strongly recommend against it as you are significantly reducing your chance of success. Let me explain.

When I founded RFi in 2006 I lived at Bondi Beach in Sydney. My co-founder Alan Shields (MAICD) lived at Manly beach on the other side of Sydney harbour. This was before the financial crisis, pre zoom and video conferencing with clients, before smartphones and before WeWork and co-working spaces became ubiquitous. Despite a general business culture of working from an office there were plenty of people working for themselves who if they could worked from home. Both Bondi and Manly were superbly set up for it- incredible ocean beach suburbs with fantastic cafes and restaurants, all year round amazing weather, gorgeous natural environment and an incredibly chilled vibe. If you lived here, liked the water, sunshine, beach and outdoor life in general and could manage to work from home why wouldn’t you? Despite all this we were both clear that as soon as we could afford it, even before we were paying ourselves a half decent wage, our No. 1 priority was to get an office we could both go to each day.

This begs the question – why? We didn’t have many client meetings to go to and anyway it was a short 20 min trip for both of us into the city if we did. We didn’t need to be in the same place to deliver or work on any project together as our roles were completely separate- sales and product. So why the insistence?

When you are first starting, especially if you’re bootstrapping, to say you are down in the gutter fighting for any scraps you can get would be an understatement. This is both exhausting and incredibly mentally challenging. Even when you start to get going it feels like a million decisions are coming at you non stop every day. It’s relentless and that needs to be embraced. Every single sales and product conversation you have, in fact every client interaction however small and seemingly insignificant, teaches you something. All day every day you are learning something new that you use to iterate and adapt as you work out how to win and build a product you can sell. Once you’ve got that you are endlessly adapting and changing as you grow and start to scale. The one benefit you have as a founder over any incumbent is your speed - speed of decision making, speed or product or sales evolution, speed of reaction to market movements - speed is your best friend.

Your ability to not just react super fast but to work creatively, to think quickly and outside the box, all at speed is I believe massively enhanced if you are in the same space. Its often referred to as ‘ water-cooler’ conversations in the corporate world but in the startup world you want to live at the watercooler. Every conversation should be radically challenging the status quo, the expected way of doing things, business as normal. The type of thinking that corporates delegate to the water cooler is a startup’s entire way of life. The quicker you can creatively react to and solve issues the quicker you will grow.

Being in the same space also helps drive your culture. It doesn’t matter what your culture is although it should have several key elements (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7417128591777394690) but your culture must become embedded into your business DNA. The quickest and easiest way for that to happen is for you to live and visibly demonstrate your values on a daily basis to your team. Not only is the easier in the same space but you can instantly spot if someone Is going off message and not demonstrating your business’s values and correct it. Your culture will drive your growth so the faster it’s in your DNA the better

When you start you are employing people for less money than they can usually get elsewhere and while it is a huge amount of fun you are putting them under an unusual amount of stress. Having them all in one space helps. Firstly, they will all instinctively motivate each other and that produces good work. The bonding of being part of a team that’s working incredibly hard under the pump but hopefully starting to get results is greater in person. When you’re not getting results or dealing with challenging issues that team ethos of rallying around and driving each other on again is better in person. The last thing you need is someone feeling demotivated working from home and producing sub standard work or worse becoming too stressed too function well.

Secondly it’s much easier to take pride in what you are doing and what you are achieving if you have people who you are sharing  every moment with – yes you can do this online but in person is better, more immediate and has a greater dopamine impact. Thirdly you are a startup and every single hire is crucial- you need them to work out or if they’re not going to then figure this out as quickly as possible before they cost you more precious cash. You need to make sure that every hire you make is working out as well as can be hoped, is adhering to your culture and values and  and having everyone around you makes this much easier. If there are any problems you can spot them and resolve them almost immediately if you're in the same space.

Finally when you get those small wins you can all celebrate instantly together. This is hugely important as you will all be under the pump almost all the time and feeling it, so being able to down tools on the spot and celebrate a win is a key driver of success and of the continued ability to operate under sustained pressure.

If no one of this is helping convince you then think about the many days you will have when you wake up to yet another huge mountain of almost insurmountable problems, have to drag yourself out of bed and find the motivation not just to fire yourself and your team up for another day of swimming upstream but also be buzzing with optimism and creative positivity as you find solutions. . On these days , which will be most days,  walking into your office with your team there ready and raring to go, buzzing off each other and fizzing with activity and dynamism, will give you an almost physical lift you can never get from zoom 😊