Some context: I am the CTO/co-founder of a company which has been remote-first since the beginning (one of our cultural values is "remote first") and has taken

Some context: I am the CTO/co-founder of a company which has been remote-first since the beginning (one of our cultural values is "remote first") and has taken on the notoriously difficult hybrid approach of some folks working distributed and some on-site (in San Francisco). We've done this because our video messaging tool actually powers 100's of 1000's of remote teams around the world, and we knew we had to have structure and processes that resembled remote work if we were going to have deep empathy for the power users in our user base. In practice, this has typically netted out to ~40-60% of our work force being on-site or distributed/remote (e.g. at times 40% on-site/60% remote or 60% on-site and 40% remote). Some important things we've noticed: 1. Of the people who work on-site, many choose to work from home a couple days every week because of the cut down on commute, because they need to go heads down without any distractions whatsoever, or because they need to take an easier day and mix in errands. All of these points are totally legitimate, and I've found the productivity of our team is actually super high compared to full on-site teams. 2. When we absorbed any portion of our team, our communication processes ended up having to be remote-first, or we would see attrition/morale drop in the remote team members. This seems so obvious in retrospect, but I don't think a lot of the companies who will choose to do hybrid truly realize this. 3. People who have been working remote before the pandemic hit have universally said remote absolutely sucks given the current situation and they can't wait for things to return to normal. The normal they are talking about is still working remote. I'm not dropping in this comment to beat the drum of "remote solves all problems", but I can confidently say remote is here to stay (or at least some form of it) in most technology companies. In practice, this means those companies will need to set up their processes to be remote-first or they will see attrition of some of their top talent.