President and CEO of Clearfield , providing optical-fiber management and connectivity solutions across North America. Palm trees. The sun glistening on the water. Songbirds perched on the porch, singing. As I write this, I'm in the perfect place to talk about remote work. Some leaders express strong opposition to the trend. Managers doubt the productivity claims of their remote employees.
Elon Musk has called remote work immoral. Many are demanding employees return to the office or find another job. Five years ago, I had a similarly black-and-white view on remote work—it had to be one way or another. I never would have guessed that in 2024, I would be working from a vacation home in
Florida or the back of a Sprinter van while my husband drives across the country. I would never have imagined myself crediting remote work with helping me achieve a higher level of what I can only describe as productivity. Leaders can keep fighting, but employees want remote options. Recent data found they value working from home as much as an 8% raise and companies offering it can reduce turnover by up to 35%. As technology improves to accommodate it, the remote and hybrid trend will only continue to grow. The key to success will be how well we integrate it. To integrate management, level up. With remote work, new risks emerged—voids in soft-skill learning and undocumented knowledge. Our company saw this and started working to identify and capture our unwritten knowledge, and now, to integrate it into formal training programs. Our managers also had to become leaders by default or they wouldn't be as effective. Leaders resisting the shift to remote may harbor some level of fear of the unknown and uncertainty over how to make remote management work. Business schools still teach management from an in-person, hands-on perspective. To support individual development without their physical presence, managers now need more leadership skills: to inspire purpose, a sense of belonging, trust and a culture of accountability. At our company, we are giving individuals greater access to direct communication from leadership with fewer top-down layers. This might lead to less middle management, but not necessarily
Job loss. By finding a promotional opportunity within those new spaces, anyone can level up their skills to make themselves necessary. To integrate autonomy, be clear and intentional. For people to effectively work at home, leaders need to set clear expectations: what they want and consider success from that remote position. Remote workers need enough autonomy to work effectively on their own, but enough connection to never feel alone. Establishing a normalized cadence for remote workers to get together makes it easier for everyone involved to plan for it. When leaders do demand their team members to be in the office, the reason for being there should be both clear and intentional. Presentations and one-sided learning can be remote, but discussions conducted together in the same room can be more effective. We encourage departmental efforts to meet regularly and, when possible, either all remote or all in person. Even in a boardroom, a meeting with 10 people present and two online is less effective in representing everyone equally. To rise to a higher level of training, leaders need to schedule in-person content that makes the most of being together. Our annual all-company meeting brings everyone across the country back to the mothership for three days and, this year, I took care to be intentional. We needed to schedule a new product training and planned to gather everyone in a classroom to convey information effectively, but we also included time to break up into smaller groups for hands-on interactions. Using the product one on one made that classroom training applicable and demonstrated why we all needed to be there. Integrate when and where it makes sense. Leaders integrating remote models often hit a roadblock in innovation. Our design team chooses to spend more time working in person because so much of the process—from creative thought and the origination of ideas to engineering and design development bringing those ideas into reality—requires combining expertise to solve problems they could otherwise not solve alone. Still, they are willing to embrace remote work where it makes sense. Currently, they are aiming to redesign products utilizing more of what we have in abundance and less of what is scarce. We also hired an individual from the northern outskirts of Minnesota to the team for a specific role: Ensure that if we spec in new product components, we have no equivalent among our existing 5,000 part numbers. If we required this person to come into the office every day, they would otherwise be unable to do this highly skilled work for us. Here, remote work made sense. Integrating remote individuals with face-to-face responsibilities might also make sense. We expect our remote salespeople to live where they sell so they can travel to a customer site for problem resolution, a sales opportunity or whatever the situation might require. Even during my five-week stay here in Florida, I may fly home to meet in the corporate office or at a customer site. Remote work allows me these choices in how I get work done and greater mental wellness to do so appropriately. Integrate the benefits. In-person connections keep humanity thriving in the workplace, but remote work expands our repertoire of sourceable talent and how we bring a team together. It also allows me to rent a house for a month, invite my children and grandchildren to stay overnight and create deeper connections than would otherwise be possible. Give yourself room for trial and error. What works today, five years from now, it might not. Still, remote integration is the future of work, and the sooner you start trying and learning which integrations achieve the most benefits, the bigger your lead in getting there. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?