Remote flexibility

There’s a never ending debate on office versus remote work. My stance is that there will never be a right answer as everyone likes to work differently. Just like everything, there’s pros and cons to being fully remote or fully in the office. Every company will just need to decide where they fall on the spectrum and decide what is best for them and their company’s culture.

At Secfi, we have taken a hybrid approach. We have an office in San Francisco, New York, and Amsterdam. But we also have remote employees scattered throughout the country. Our Amsterdam office is largely in-person as most people come in nearly everyday. In the U.S., if you live in SF or NY, most people are coming in a few times a week.

The model has largely worked for us. We are technically a remote company as the team was built as split between the U.S. and Amsterdam already so we had some protocols in place to enable that collaboration between the locations.

One major positive of the hybrid model that I’ve seen since the pandemic is that this promotes flexibility. As we are not bound to the office from 9-5, people can take time during the day to take care of personal needs whether that’s picking up kids, going to the gym, etc. I’ve always encouraged this to my team.

For example, I like to take a break during some afternoons to go on a run or go to the gym. Sometimes I have an empty block in my schedule in the late morning or mid-afternoon of the workday to go workout and take a break. It’s been great for my mental health and makes me more productive when I do get back to my desk. I know some have taken the mornings to do a bit of skiing or surfing as well.

I think that this is the future of remote flexibility. We have a level of trust in our employees that they can do this and still get their work done. In my opinion, it creates happier employees. We do not spend time policing people to be online at Slack at certain hours to be instantly responsive - that is counterproductive.

Of course there’s limits to all this. You can’t just decide to take every morning off of the week. We only have limited time in the day to collaborate on everyone’s schedule. Flexibility goes both ways as well. Last night, I had to take a call at 10pm. It was not ideal, but I had to make myself available due to time zones.

Building this in our company and teams culture is really important to me. I’d imagine a lot of other startups and companies will be operating the same way soon if they aren’t already.