The Office of the (Near) Future: Remote-First Work

Bhavik Modi explores how to transition to a remote-first environment

July 1, 2020

min read

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Bhavik Modi

Senior Director

Surprised by your employees’ productivity working from home? You may be considering how you can capitalize on the transition that’s already occurring and accelerate the shift to a remote-first work environment. However, before you do, there are some critical lessons that you can learn from businesses already working in a virtual environment.

Reimagining the office

As human beings, it is difficult to think about the future without viewing it as an incremental improvement over the present. In today’s virtual environment, most organizations are attempting to recreate everything that was happening in an office environment and do it online. This is a common mistake that happens all the time – but it’s not actually the most effective way to transition.

In addition, many employers have invested significant sums of money in corporate campuses to improve collaboration. As companies have invested more in keeping people engaged at the office – leaders are left wondering how to walk away from these major investments and what takes their place.

So, how do you transition to a remote-first environment?

1. Reimagine don’t recreate: List out the assumptions you have about in-person work and provoke each one of them, reimagine what those tasks and activities might look like in a virtual work environment.

For example, many assume that: “if we become remote-first, we’ll never see each other again.” If in-person interaction is critical for your company culture and productivity, repurpose the office environment as a co-working space for employees to collaborate with each other when they need it. This opens opportunities to use smaller spaces that are closer to concentrations of employees, for example a co-working space in the city and an option for those in the suburbs – shifting away from a more traditional corporate campus.

In the COVID-19 environment, this requires some thoughtful consideration on what types of interaction need to occur in person and which interactions can happen over the phone or video chat, but there is no need for absolutes. Provide your team with options to meet in person if they prefer and can do it safely.

What does this look like in practice? A great example to look at is Automattic - a distributed digital publishing company (think WordPress and Tumblr) with over 1200 employees spread across 77 countries and 93 different languages. While a fully remote organization, the company still values in-person interaction, which helps them to maintain their culture – they have simply flipped the standard ratio (mostly in-person and infrequently remote) to mostly remote and infrequently in-person.

‍2. Lead the change: If leaders are still in the office, the rest of the company will aim to come into the office – if you want to be remote-first, leaders must commit to being remote themselves.

Face time with senior leaders is often considered an important rite of passage for corporate cultures, and the more time a leader spends communicating with you the better chance you have of being noticed for a promotion or a high-impact project.

In a remote-first organization, leaders can create a level playing field for a distributed workforce that rewards outcomes and not the person who is the first one in, last one out, or sends emails at all times of the day.

In shifting to remote-first, your leadership team must model the way they want employees to act. This means the leaders must also go remote and build new communication habits in their organization to allow for asynchronous collaboration and updates.

We are going fully remote first at Quora. Most of our employees have opted not to return to the office post-COVID, I will not work out of the office, our leadership teams will not be located in the office, and all policies will orient around remote work. (1/2)

— Adam D'Angelo (@adamdangelo) June 25, 2020

3. Flip the ratio of in-person to virtual interactions: In-person interactions don’t go away in a remote-first world, they are more targeted and thoughtful. Provide stipends to employees for team meetings, one-on-ones, and other interactions and set guidelines on when in-person interactions should happen and when they are not needed.

People are surprised when I say this, but I think in-person is really key. And so we just flip it, so instead of saying you have to be around your colleagues 48 weeks of the year and do whatever you want for a month, we say be wherever you want for 48 weeks out of the year and for three or four weeks a year we’re going to bring you together.

- Matt Mullenweg Automattic CEO

Remote-first companies need to set clear expectations and guidelines for when teams should come together (in a co-working space, coffee shop, or elsewhere) and limit those interactions to ones that add more value being together in-person than virtually – flipping the old co-location ratio as Automattic has done.COVID-19 has challenged common biases of where work can be done most productively, and you’ll find that teams (equipped with the right tools and resources at home) can be surprisingly productive without being co-located.

And who says you can’t have office perks while at home? It can be as simple as repurposing the money invested in your latte machine to provide a stipend for a green screen, dual monitors, microphones, and a high-quality web camera (and maybe an UberEATS subscription for some snacks when desired).

‍4. Create a new rhythm of communication: Asynchronous communication involves a new communication rhythm — repurposing emails/check-ins and other meetings and creating new norms for how information is communicated and how others can contribute to building on ideas from other parts of the company.

Leaders should consider building a new asynchronous rhythm of doing business. Instead of emails and calls (which in a distributed workforce are tough to schedule across time zones) – consider a blogging system like what Automattic uses called P2s to document progress on projects.

P2s are posts written every day by employees to summarize what they have been working on, the problems that they might have encountered, and the discussions they had that day. If you think about the purpose of in-person meetings, whether face-to-face or on Zoom, this is typically what people are doing – unearthing hidden information from the organization to see what folks are working on, reach group decisions and find ways to collaborate.

By documenting what is happening on P2s, it has become a cultural norm at Automattic for all employees to read P2s and uncover what is happening around the company. This communication method creates a transparent organization without FOMO (fear of missing out) when not included in a meeting or copied on an email chain. Using an internal search index, you can look up P2s and follow certain topics (like Google Reader) to stay informed on progress.

‍5. Honor what made your culture great while continuing to grow: Continue to honor what makes your culture great, remote-first doesn’t mean you have to lose it – it offers new opportunities to build your culture and invite more talent into your organization that you previously may not have had access to.

If you ask any leader what makes their organizational culture great, you will likely get a range of responses from company to company. Some companies value a strong safety and compliance culture that enables them to reduce risk in their work environment, while others value an entrepreneurial environment where they are afforded creativity to take on challenges. Employees on Glassdoor rarely say that office perks make a company great – it’s about the people, work environment, and opportunities provided.

Those same positive attributes can be reimagined (not recreated) in a remote-first environment. It can be as simple as creating space on employees' calendars for “making time.” Making (or Maker’s time) is a concept created by Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, which advocates for blocking a large portion of each day for individuals to do focused project work without fear of interruption or task-switching – for example blocking each morning until 12:30 PM for individual work.

By reducing the need for emails and check-in calls, it creates more dedicated work time for employees to creatively solve challenges and is a great example of reimaging the virtual workplace vs. recreating interactions we typically had in person when located next to each other.

To encourage comradery, you can promote small team or one-on-one interactions amongst employees by providing gift cards for lunch or coffee so employees located near each other can meet and network. Another option is for leaders to participate in targeted, fun interactions across the company – for example, virtual trivia nights, a virtual scavenger hunt, or hosting a “bring your kids to work” on a company or department-wide Zoom call. Anything to create a positive environment representative of your company culture.

Remote-first work allows organizations to honor and celebrate what made their office cultures great and re-invest time and resources to continue improving on that culture forward in a distributed work environment where you have access to more talent outside of your city.

So, what’s next?

The current work environment offers both challenges and opportunities. Shifting to a remote-first permanently can make sense for organizations moving forward that have seen the benefits of this shift but doing so doesn’t need to be a daunting challenge. By learning from organizations who have been doing this and doing it well for years, your organization can meet the challenge of the future, while preserving your culture, accessing new talent and reimagining your work environment to unlock productivity.

^{Learn how to design conversations that actually move decisions forward.}

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1. Las capacidades sin contexto no sobreviven al día a día

Un ejecutivo de ventas puede salir de un taller sabiendo exactamente qué preguntar, cómo estructurar una conversación de valor, cómo posicionarse como asesor estratégico en lugar de vendedor de productos. La semana siguiente, el peso de las métricas de corto plazo, la presión por resultados y las urgencias del día a día terminan arrastrándolos de vuelta a la rutina de siempre.

McKinsey (2024) encontró que más del 70% de las iniciativas de transformación comercial no logran sus objetivos — y la principal causa no es el diseño del programa, sino la falta de condiciones organizacionales para sostener los nuevos comportamientos.

El problema no es el taller. Es lo que existe o no existe en la realidad de la estructura comercial.

2. El cambio requiere alinear seis pilares

Lo que diferencia a las empresas que realmente transforman su modelo comercial de las que solo capacitan, está relacionado con seis pilares que operan simultáneamente.

1. Patrocinio de la alta dirección que empodera en lugar de solo exigir

2. Disciplina en gestión de cuentas/clientes estratégicos, con metodología y seguimiento

3. Conversaciones centradas en el cliente, no en el portafolio de productos

4. Cada interacción con relevancia estratégica, preparadapara crear valor medible

5. Nuevos comportamientos integrados al ritmo operativodiario y la cadencia del negocio

6. Líderes comerciales presentes que sostienen la cultura, no solo la expresan

Cuando falta uno, los demás no escalan y terminan provocando un círculo vicioso.

3. El liderazgo que sostiene vale más que el que exige

El patrocinio de la alta dirección y la presencia de los líderes comerciales sonlos pilares que más frecuentemente fallan. No porque los líderes no crean en el cambio, sino porque el día a día los jala de vuelta a revisar resultados, no a construir comportamientos.

Gartner (2024) señala que los equipos comerciales cuyos líderes hacen coaching activo y visible tienen hasta un 28% mayor probabilidad de adoptar nuevos comportamientos de manera sostenida.

El entrenamiento define el rumbo y entrega el mapa; el liderazgo es lo que realmente ayuda a navegar y sostener el cambio.

‍

Conclusión

Si tu empresa está invirtiendo en transformar la forma en que sus equipos comerciales se relacionan con los clientes, la pregunta ya no es si el entrenamiento funciona. La verdadera pregunta es: ¿qué tan preparada está la organización para sostener el cambio?

Porque el talento existe. Las habilidades se desarrollan. Pero la cultura no se improvisa; se construye todos los días, con liderazgo, alineación y consistencia.

¿Cuál de estos seis pilares es hoy el más débil en tu organización?

Blog Posts

May 5, 2026

min read

Eight weeks, 24 countries, one diamond: The pattern behind our applied AI breakthrough.

Part 2 in a series. BTS CEO Jessica Skon shares stories and lessons on what made the first Applied AI diamond spread, what it felt like inside the team that built it, and what we see as clients adopt this approach.

Learn more

In Part 1, I told you about the three decisions we made two years ago and the simulation flywheel that produced our first Applied AI diamond.

Here’s the field-notes version.

Over 80% of our global business have now adopted a new Applied AI approach for doing simulations in the first eight weeks, across 24 countries and every practice.

‍The flywheel didn’t stop with simulations. It moved into finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Teams started building agents and bringing them onto their own org charts. We didn’t plan for any of that. We built the conditions for people to find their own breakthroughs.

What it felt like inside the flywheel.

When the simulation team went live with their first clients on the new way of working, the lead person hit a wall. Their words:

“You’re asking too much. You’re making me be a full-stack developer. Up until this point I did a small part, and I sent it to the team, and they built off the back end, and they brought it back. And now I have to end-to-end soup to nuts, basically alone.”

There was graphic UI work nobody had been trained for, the fear of delivering quality below what BTS expects of itself, and the weight of not having a playbook. This was not the joyful adoption story most consultancies tell.

Then something shifted. Six members showed up for product testing, where the usual was two or three. The work created teamwork I hadn’t seen at BTS in years. The breakthrough was not an instantaneous change from skepticism to celebration. It was a breakdown in confidence, then rally, then bonding. If we didn’t make room for the breakdown, we would have lost the rally.

The other breakthrough was global teamwork; not yet a BTS core strength. Our culture is beautiful: high-freedom and entrepreneurial. But people’s first identities are to their countries. Almost every prior attempt we’ve made at a global initiative has failed. The one exception was Covid. So, when I say what happened next surprised me, I mean it.

I asked to join the simulation team’s Slack channel rather than pulling them into status meetings. What I got to watch in the mornings was someone in South Africa waking up, posting “I tried this and got stuck,” then London adding on, then San Francisco weighing in, then a surprise breakthrough overnight from Tokyo. We didn’t engineer that. Curious and determined BTS’ers did. The problem was interesting enough that the org chart didn’t matter. It was amazing to see and a glimpse into the next evolution of the BTS culture.

The pattern: Explore, expand, institutionalize, renew.

What we’ve now seen play out, both inside BTS and with clients, follows the same four-step pattern. Each step asks a specific decision of the leader.

Explore.

Stay stubborn on the aspiration and fluid on the path. Our breakthrough wasn’t the path we originally took. We changed tools and approaches. Nobody could have foreseen that. And if the team had taken the first six months of learnings from AI as their definitive “this is the detailed path we will follow,” we never would have gotten the disruption. Five different tool combinations were tried before we found the one that worked. Companies that lock into a single path or tool too early are betting against compounding capability that doubles roughly every seven months. That is not a bet I’d take.

Expand.

Run the old way and the new way side by side. When the simulation team’s breakthroughs got real, the instinct was to retreat into more internal testing. We did the opposite. They ran old way and new way in parallel on 6 or 8 live client projects across all three geographies. Every single one ended up going live the new way. The backup was always there. They didn’t need it.

Institutionalize.

Burn the boats. The simulation team committed that no new client work would be done the old way after January 1. The other practice leads then committed to dates within Q1, even though most of them had not yet experienced the new way themselves. They had to trust their colleagues. If you can do it for the most complex thing, you could probably do it for the less complex ones. By February 15, we had approaching 90% global adoption across 24 countries, across all practices. I was shocked and proud. We had spent years failing at exactly this kind of global rollout.

Renew.

Treat your agents as contractors. People on our diamond teams are now managing 30+ agents they built themselves. Our teams give agents performance feedback. We terminate their contracts when they don’t deliver. We expand the responsibility of agents when they outperform. The frontier question we’re wrestling with now is token budgeting. Two friends of mine running engineering-heavy companies believe that within 6 - 9 months, their token cost per engineer will exceed the cost of the engineer. Whether that’s the right framing is open. The question is real, and every CEO will be asked some version of it within the year.

What had to be true for this to scale.

Once we achieved this amazing global innovation, the leadership sat down to figure out what made it work. We named five things. None of them were about the technology.

Real pain points as the starting point. We had so many people frustrated from those ways of working, all the back and forth and all the wasted time, that this was gold for them. The old way was already painful. The new way wasn’t a forced disruption; it was relief. Find the workflow where the pain is loudest and start there.

The diamond unlocked creativity, it didn’t constrain it. This was the most differentiated insight, and the one most leaders miss. It wasn't "here's the new tasks and rules." It was, "once you learn how to do this, the sky's the limit. You can be even more creative." If your rollout feels like a new set of rules constraining your people, you’ve built the wrong thing.

Pair deep expertise with fresh eyes. The disproportionate share of our breakthroughs came from a tenured tinkerer with total command of the work, paired with someone new to the role who hadn’t yet built the muscle memory of how it had always been done. Without that pairing, you get incremental improvements to the work you already know how to do, instead of a reinvention.

Refuse the “people are too busy” reflex. When I brought the rollout to the global leadership team, the excuses came fast. “Our people are too busy. They’re burnt out. Q1 is going to be busy. No one’s going to have time.” My response: “This is a chance to eliminate the tasks you dread and expand what you love. I know it is a short push of extra work, and I think after the fact you and your team will feel joy and pride and say it was the best time we ever spent.” This is the moment most AI rollouts die.

Senior leaders must lead by example and do the work themselves. This is not middle manager’s job. This is not something you delegate. Even though you don’t build simulations anymore, you must know what this is. One of our partners proactively put time on senior leaders’ calendars and forced them to do the work. Once they started building, the excitement grew, and they could advocate for the rollout because they understood it. If your executives haven’t put their hands on the keyboard, you don’t have a rollout. You have a memo.

What we’re seeing across clients.

We’re now running this play with client organizations across industries and geographies. The companies whose flywheels are accelerating paired their A-players with their early-career talent, pulled IT and legal into the working sessions, refused the “too busy” reflex, and put their senior leaders’ hands on the keyboard. The companies whose flywheels are stuck almost always have a leadership pattern at the center of the stall. Not a tooling pattern. Not a governance pattern. A leadership pattern.

If this resonates, let’s talk.

If you read Part 1 and asked yourself whether your flywheel was turning, the question I’d add now is sharper: do you have the conditions in place for a diamond to appear? If yes, you’re already moving. If no, the technology will not save you.

Here's where we're starting with clients: a working session, half day to a full day, with a small group that owns one of your highest-friction processes. Together we map where your first diamond is most likely to land, how to set up the side-by-side trial, and what your version of "burn the boats" should look like.

The destination, if we do this right, is a self-reliant culture of applied AI inside your company. 5, 10, 15 diamonds compounding into a fundamentally different way of operating. From what I have experienced this is a once in a career opportunity for dramatic shareholder value creation if you get that muscle going. I say that because I'm watching it happen, in real time, inside our own company and across our client base.

If you want to get your flywheels spinning and map your first diamond, start here. Bring your hardest workflow. We'll bring the playbook.

Blog Posts

September 25, 2025

min read

Team meetings: A missed lever for performance?

BTS research shows meetings with clear accountabilities boost team effectiveness 3.9x, turning routine meetings into real performance drivers.

Learn more

Meetings are a universal ritual in organizational life. While managers on average spend more than half their working hours in meetings, many leaders can’t shake the feeling that meetings are falling short of their potential. Are they advancing the work, or quietly draining energy? At BTS, we study teams not as collections of individuals, but as living systems. This perspective reveals dynamics that traditional methods often overlook. Rather than aggregating individual 360° assessments, we assess the team as a whole to examine how the team functions collectively. Applying that lens to one of the most common team activities (meetings) uncovers patterns worth paying attention to. Drawing on thousands of team assessments in our database, we focused on two meeting behaviors:

Do teams meet regularly?
Do team members leave meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps?

Our question: How strongly do these behaviors relate to overall team effectiveness?

What the data revealed

Using data from 1,043 respondents (team members and informed stakeholders) we ran a Bayesian analysis to evaluate the predictive power of each behavior. The results were striking:

Both behaviors were linked to higher team effectiveness.
But one mattered far more: leaving meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps was 3.9x more predictive of team effectiveness than simply meeting regularly.
And teams that often or always wrap up meetings with next steps rated 0.66 points higher on a 5-point scale of team effectiveness than teams who sometimes, rarely, or never close with accountabilities - that's almost a full standard deviation higher (0.96 sd)

Meetings aren’t the problem, muddy outcomes are.

Teams often default to frequency, setting cadences of check-ins or standing meetings. Our data suggest that what differentiates effective teams from the rest is not how many meetings they hold, but what comes out of them. A team that meets less often but ends each session with clear accountabilities will outperform a team that meets frequently but leaves outcomes ambiguous. In other words, meetings aren’t inherently wasted time; they become wasted time when they don’t translate into aligned action.

A simple shift that pays dividends

The good news: improving meetings doesn’t require radical redesign. Small changes reinforce accountability and dramatically increase the value extracted:

Close with clarity. Reserve the last 5–10 minutes of every meeting to confirm: What decisions have been made? Who owns what? By when? This habit shifts meetings from “discussions” to “decisions.”
Make commitments visible. Use a shared action log, team board, or project tracker so next steps are transparent, and progress is easy to follow. Visibility builds accountability.
Assign a “Closer.” Rotating this role signals that closing well is everyone’s responsibility. The Closer ensures the team doesn’t drift into vague agreements, but leaves aligned and ready to act.

When teams adopt these habits, the difference is tangible: less rehashing of the same topics, faster progress on priorities, and a stronger sense of shared ownership. These small shifts compound quickly, making meetings not just more efficient, but more energizing and effective. In a world where teams face relentless demands and limited time, focusing on how meetings end may be one of the fastest ways to improve how teams perform.