The REAL Reason CEOs Hate Remote Work/Want Everyone Back In The Office And Why I Am Doing The Same!

Here's something I thought I'd never say. Remote work was holding back my business. I ran remote companies for over 14 years and I built 2 companies on it. I hired global talent. I told anyone who would listen that remote work is the future, but I was only seeing half the picture. We just signed a lease on a studio office here in Sydney because we realize remote work is great for lifestyle, but it's a silent killer for scale, for growth of your business. And the truth is most business owners secretly know this. They're just too afraid to say it out loud, but I'm not. And I'm going to show you why in today's episode. I'm going to break down through my own experiences, through research, through data, why remote work is not the best for every business or for every stage of business. I'm going to tell you the real reason why the remote work era is ending and what it means for your business. Let me be absolutely clear. I'm not anti-remote. I ran remote teams for over 14 years. I built my software company, Webinar Ninja, as a remote company. The 100 MBA has been remote. Remote work gave us access to global talent. It lowered our overhead, our costs. It gave us flexibility, gave us freedom. It's incredible in a lot of ways, but here's what I learned in over 20 years of building business. What works for your lifestyle doesn't always work for scale or hypergrowth of your business. You're trying to become the world leader in a category. It's very hard to do this with having a fully remote team. And you're going to hear me say this in this episode, very hard, more challenging, more difficult. And the reason why I'm saying this is because business as it is, is hard and you want to change the circumstances around you as much as possible to make it as easy as possible for you to succeed. And once you understand that difference, you'll see why all these big companies and CEOs are shifting away from remote work. These people are not stupid. They see the data themselves and they understand why this experiment of remote work for over the last decade or so has kind of taught us some hard lessons. Listen, I know workers might think that if you ask them to come into an office, they're going to say they just want to control us. They don't trust us. It's about ego. And I'm here to say, no, it's actually about momentum. Business doesn't die because people aren't working or doing the tasks they're supposed to be doing. They die because decisions take too long. Collaboration weakens, energy starts to flatten, creativity doesn't really start to flourish as you grow apart in a remote setting. And sadly, standards start slowly eroding. I've witnessed this myself in my own businesses. And remote work quietly increases the friction in your business. It's not obvious friction, but it's kind of like invisible friction. I'm talking things like Slack messages and waiting for replies and scheduling another Zoom to talk about what we need to do and clarifying misunderstandings that were done over text, async delays. What I found in my experience is that every micro delay compounds. And in business, speed is oxygen. And the difference between winning and losing is often how quickly you can collaborate with your team and get things done and get things out to your customers and into the marketplace. And the honest truth is that when everybody is in a physical space, an office, it increases speed. Now here's where it gets interesting. There are studies that show that remote workers are more productive. Now you might be saying, Omar, doesn't that contradict what you're saying in this episode? Hold on for a second. Let me explain. There's a widely cited study by Stanford that was published by Nicholas Bloom that found out remote work employees were about 13% more productive in controlled settings. But here's what gets missed when people are looking at the study. The productivity was mostly individual task completion, tasks that required fewer distractions, more focused output. Now listen, remote work is great for certain type of work, but it's not necessarily great for innovation, for strategy, for team creativity, for high-level collaboration. And I actually saw this for myself as I'm growing my media company here at The $100 MBA. It's very hard to have creative, decision-making discussions in a timely manner if you are remote. Every time we create an episode, there's many steps. There's many people involved. Now I'm not saying that you have to have a completely in-person team or a completely remote team. I'm saying that you need to make sure that people that are making decisions, creative decisions, are communicating easily without friction. Now let's talk about burnout. Uh, every year Microsoft does this study called the Microsoft Work Trend Index. And in 2021, they did a study on remote workers and they They found that remote workers work longer hours. 54% of them felt overworked. 39% of them felt exhausted. The workday extended into nights and weekends and boundaries really just disappeared. Now you might be thinking, oh, this is great. My team is going to be working even more for me. No, you don't want your team members to burn out because that leads to turnover, people leaving you. And when people leave your company, it's very costly to replace them. It takes a lot of time and money and effort to find a new person to be a part of your team and to train them and to get them up to speed. It could take up to 6 months, and that is a huge delay, and that's just one position. So it's actually better for you to curb burnout. And this is what I love about this concept of like strict hours, a place where people go to work and then they go home and enjoy their life so that they can recover and come back 100% for you the next day. Another study for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that remote workers increase their workday by nearly 48 minutes on average. On average. There's people that do more than that. They work more, they have longer hours, they have less separation from their work and life. And let's be honest, everything starts to blur. They're working from home while doing a load of laundry, while preparing lunches, while getting ready for dinner, and they work throughout the day even to the evening. I once heard Cal Newport talk about in an interview that many people don't actually do meaningful deep work until the weekend. They actually spend their weekends doing deep work because they don't have time to do that work during the week because they're doing admin work and Slack and messages and email. I briefly mentioned this earlier, but one of the biggest silent killers of remote work is task switching. You're on Zoom, then you're on Slack, then you're on email, then you're on text, then you go back to the Notion document you're working on, and then you go back to Zoom for another meeting, and you're constantly context switching. Research shows that It could take 9 to 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption. And the longer the interruption, the longer it takes to refocus. Have you ever tried to answer a question from a colleague or solve a problem over Slack or over email? It can take up to like 3 hours, something that could take 3 minutes in a short conversation in an office. And it might feel more comfortable on Zoom than in person, but speed matters more than comfort. When you're trying to get things done efficiently. But here's the hidden cost: culture. Listen, culture is not a mission statement. Culture is how fast problems get solved in your business. It's how honest feedback is. It's how feedback is delivered. It's how standards are held high. It's how much energy that fills a room. I mean, let's be honest. When was the last time you left a Zoom meeting feeling electric, feeling energized? Never, right? Or very rarely. Exactly. But how many times have you left an in-person meeting and felt fired up? More often, I would say, than a Zoom meeting. And that's not by accident. Humans are tribal creatures. We like human in-person interaction and we grow and thrive through that interaction. And your environment matters. Have you ever gone to an art gallery or museum and wonder why are the ceilings so high? Why is a room so big? And this is done on purpose because you really can't think big and creatively in a space or in a small box. You're kind of confined to the space and your mind kind of conforms to that space. So if you're seeing yourself through Zoom in this little box with all these little boxes, it's hard for you to really think big. I know this sounds kind of a little bit strange or a little even subconscious, but it's true. You start thinking bigger when you're at an art gallery as you're looking at that piece and you're kind of pondering because you have the room to start thinking bigger. And I know that this is the physical space and not in your head, but it makes a difference. This is why a lot of people get a lot of energy and a lot of creative ideas in nature, because there's infinite space. By the way, if you're enjoying this practical breakdown of remote work versus in-person, then you're going to love an upcoming episode that I'm working on right now. It's all about how you show up in person. I sit down with the personal style expert Cassandra Sati, and she shares why those who dress in a certain way earn more and grow faster. It's pretty remarkable. I was shocked by how much I learned about your personal brand and how you project yourself to the world impacts your success. So hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode when it comes out. Listen, like I said, remote work or in-person, it depends on your business, your needs, and what you're going after. And I'm going to get specific about that in a second, but we need to talk about trade-offs. Everything you do in life and business has a trade-off, and remote work is no different. Yes, there's comfort, there's flexibility, there's individual productivity, and there's lower costs. You don't have to have an office and pay for rent and pay for utilities and pay for internet and that and furniture and all this other stuff, right? But offices optimize for speed, for alignment, for culture, for collective output. So if you're a lifestyle solopreneur, a freelancer, a small remote team that isn't aggressively scaling at the moment, Remote is an incredible option, but if you're trying to build a category leader to be number one in your category, if you want to scale revenue aggressively in the next 12 months, 24 months, if you want to increase innovation in your business, if you want to build a world-class culture where people are banging down your door to join your team, you need that frictionless in-person collaboration. And that's when you should consider having an in-person office. But what about productivity? Yes, remote workers often complete more measurable tasks, but I ask this: are they doing more tasks? Are they doing more important tasks? What's the difference? In an office setting, strategy discussions happen organically, uh, ideas form faster, tough conversations happen sooner. This is really important— just-in-time feedback in your team members so that you can course-correct and train before it's too late and they go down a path that leads to dismissal. Your standards are reinforced naturally just because people are observing what is the standard. What I find is that you don't build greatness in isolation. You actually build it in proximity, and the closer you are to the people you're trying to influence, your team, the more impact you'll make. Now, why am I making this shift? Why is this so personal to me, this episode? And why am I building this local studio office here in Sydney? The first thing is that we will still have remote team members and they're going to work very closely with us and our local team. But there are people, positions in our company that just need to be local because it's going to take us to the next level, whether that's producers, whether that's videographers, whether that are engineers, whatever they might be, but they need to be in the same room as where the actual creation is happening, where the content is being made. And the bottom line is, is that Nicole and I want to build something elite, not decent, not flexible, or not even comfortable. We're willing to be uncomfortable to be world-class. And I see this chapter in my life as my chance to give it my all. And I've realized that elite teams thrive in shared environments, especially when doing creative work like in a media company. So I'm not killing flexibility, but I'm increasing proximity because creativity growth requires that proximity. We just grabbed the keys to our studio office here in Sydney yesterday, yesterday from the day I'm shooting this, and I can't wait to share it with you. You want to follow me on Instagram. Cause I'll start sharing some behind the scenes footage of us building out our studio office. My handle's @omarzenhom on Instagram. I'll be sharing the journey of building our local team as well and showing you how it goes, both the ups and the downs. Here's the honest truth. If your business is plateauing, if it's slower than before, if it's lacking energy, if you're missing deadlines, if you're not making launch deadlines, if you're feeling disconnected in some way, it may not be your product or your strategy. It might just be your structure. Take it from me, who's been running remote teams for over 14 years. Remote teams require extreme discipline. Most businesses don't have that level of operational maturity or have the manpower to manage remote teams. So instead of trying to fix your product, maybe you need to fix your location. And that sometimes is the right move If you're trying to grow quickly and you don't need to do this one day to the next, this is not black or white. Sometimes remote teams crush and it works for them. Some teams need proximity and some teams need both. How do you know? Well, you need to ask yourself this important question. What are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for lifestyle or are you optimizing for leverage? Are you optimizing for comfort or are you optimizing for compounding growth? Be honest with yourself. And if the answer is lifestyle, then that's okay. It's your business. It's your life. You get to do what you want. That's the beauty of entrepreneurship. Listen, these Fortune 500 companies, the Facebooks of the world, the Googles of the world, the Amazons of the world, these CEOs, they're not stupid. They're responding to the incentives that they see that require them to go back into the office. And when growth starts to slow, they're not going to just sit there and be like, oh, that's okay. No, they're going to remove the friction that's slowing down growth. And sometimes that means more in-person time, more overlap time with other remote team members, uh, more shared intensity and creativity. And yes, that's the direction I'm moving into too, but I'm not a throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of guy, right? There are certain things that remote work is great for, great positions work in that environment, and there are positions that in-person really work well. And I want to make sure that we can do a hybrid approach to get the best of both worlds. If this episode challenged your thinking a bit and you want to check out another episode that pairs perfectly with this one, then you want to check out this episode that is titled The Growth Rate Most Businesses Should Actually Aim For. A lot of people don't know how fast they should be growing, what percent every month, every quarter. And I want to just give you that game plan, that blueprint, that actual number. And that's what I do in this episode so that you have a clear path to stable growth because structure and growth are deeply connected. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.