Remote work matters, but culture matters more

I have sat in too many founder dinners where the first question is about office days and the last question is about churn. It is telling that we start with the seating plan and end with the people leaving. The truth is simple and a little inconvenient. Your policy on Tuesdays and Thursdays will not save a culture that does not make people feel seen. The research backs this up, and so does every exit interview that quietly says the same thing. People do not leave because they worked from home on Wednesday. They leave because no one noticed what they did on Thursday.

We ran this lesson the hard way in a team split across Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. The leadership group was stuck in a loop. Productivity looked flat, interviews were dragging, and Slack felt like a traffic jam. The default reaction was a hybrid rule. Three days in, two days out. Managers could grant exceptions. The deck said togetherness. The floor said confusion. What happened next will sound familiar. The calendar filled up. The work did not get easier. The most capable people started taking recruiter calls anyway.

When we slowed down and looked past the noise, the pattern became obvious. The teams that stayed steady were not the ones that sat together more. They were the ones whose managers had a habit of naming good work in public, fixing small frictions without drama, and showing a path for growth that did not require a miracle. The teams that bled talent had the same tools and the same policy, but different habits. Appreciation was sporadic. Feedback arrived only as a postmortem. Promotions lived in a black box. The lesson was not about location. It was about culture that travels through any medium.

If you need numbers to believe this, you have them. Across industries and geographies, the spike in remote during the early pandemic did coincide with a lift in satisfaction. That effect faded as the world normalized. What did not fade was the power of feeling valued, being managed well, and seeing a future in the company. The signal is consistent. Remote freedom might nudge happiness at the margins. Corporate culture is the core driver of whether people stay or go. Treat remote as an amplifier. Treat culture as the instrument.

I like to frame this for founders as a simple trade. You can spend your leadership calories enforcing presence, or you can spend them building presence that people want to be part of. The second option is harder to measure in the short term, which is why many teams avoid it. It also happens to be the one that compounds.

Start with appreciation, but do not leave it to mood. In our rebuild, we made appreciation a system, not a personality trait. Every Friday, each manager surfaced five specific wins tied to behaviors we care about. Not just the loud launches. Quiet refactors. Clean handoffs. A saved customer. We budgeted a modest peer nomination pool every quarter with clear criteria. The rule was simple. Praise fast. Praise specifically. Praise in daylight. You would be surprised how quickly that shifts tone. People who feel noticed do not need to prove they are working by being seen in a seat.

Then we fixed management hygiene. The test was direct. Does every report have a scheduled one-to-one that is rarely moved, a clear set of outcomes with current status, and a known path for escalation when something blocks them. We cut performative check-ins and replaced them with decision logs that explained not only what we chose, but why. Slack threads got shorter. Specs got sharper. Meetings shrank. Managers stopped acting like calendar admins and started acting like force multipliers.

Career clarity was the third leg. We published promotion rubrics that used plain language. We tied growth to skill and scope, not proximity to the founder or the office. We set learning budgets that could be spent on certifications, conferences, or stretch projects. The signal mattered more than the money. People could see movement. They knew what good looked like. They understood what would get them there. Confidence rose inside the team and recruiter pitches lost some shine.

Only after those moves did the remote policy become a tool instead of a battlefield. We kept it simple. Collaboration windows were set by team, not by headquarters. If your work needed deep overlap, you designed it. If it did not, no one invented a meeting to justify a commute. We wrote down the few moments where in-person made the most sense. Onboarding milestones. Sensitive feedback. Complex architecture debates. Everything else competed on clarity and respect for time. The result was what we wanted from the start. Fewer arguments about place. More accountability for outcomes.

This is where the keyword matters in practice. Treat remote work and corporate culture as distinct levers. Remote defines the canvas. Culture defines the picture. If you push the canvas around the room and the picture is blank, you will not feel any better about your wall. If the picture is strong, you can hang it in more than one place and it still works.

Founders ask me what to measure when they stop micromanaging location. Here is what actually moves. Track voluntary attrition by manager. Track new-hire satisfaction at day 45 and day 120. Track time-to-decision for changes that cut across functions. Track the ratio of praise given publicly to praise given privately. Track the number of career conversations that lead to a concrete next step. None of these require a new tool. All of them tell you whether your culture is a system or a slogan.

There is also a geographic truth we gloss over. Some cities favor long commutes. Some buildings are designed for quiet. Some homes are not. A blanket rule will land unevenly. That is why the best teams I see customize the remote rhythm by role and by market. Compliance teams in regulated industries tend to sit together more. Product and engineering can flex. Sales builds around client rhythm. What matters is that the why is explicit and the tradeoffs are owned.

The fear behind all this is that flexibility invites laziness. In my experience, laziness hides behind crowded offices more easily than it hides in a culture that measures real output. The fix for underperformance is not a turnstile. It is clear expectations, timely coaching, and the courage to part ways when fit is not there. Remote policies can make that clarity easier, because they force you to write down what work looks like when no one is watching.

If you are about to roll out yet another hybrid mandate, pause and ask one question. What problem does this solve that a culture fix would not solve better. If the answer is collaboration, invest in better briefs and better rituals. If the answer is learning, invest in shadowing, structured reviews, and pair sessions. If the answer is trust, invest in managers who know how to build it. The office can support each of those, but it cannot replace them.

Here is what I would do differently if I had to run this again from zero. I would pilot at the team level and publish the results like a lab report. I would hold managers to an appreciation quota until it stopped being a quota and started being a habit. I would make the first leadership offsite about writing the behaviors we reward, not about picking the new coffee vendor. I would be slower to declare policy and faster to test rituals. I would remind the team that flexibility is not a gift. It is a contract built on trust and delivery. Then I would deliver.

If your culture depends on where people sit, you do not have a culture. You have a seating plan. Build something sturdier than that, and the remote debate will finally shrink to the size it deserves.