In April 2020, I wrote about the early days of remote delivery. I said some things would get better and some would get worse. Two years in, we've got enough data to separate the signal from the noise. Some of my predictions held up. Some didn't. Here's the honest picture of what remote-first actually looks like when the novelty has worn off.
What You Need to Know
- Remote-first work is permanent for us. The question is no longer whether, it's how
- Documentation culture is the single biggest improvement from remote work
- Social connection requires deliberate investment that still feels awkward but works
- New team member onboarding remains the hardest problem to solve remotely
What Stuck
Documentation as Default
This is the clearest win. Before remote work, decisions were made in hallway conversations and never written down. Architecture choices lived in someone's head. Client feedback was relayed verbally and lost in translation.
Now, everything is written. Architecture decision records. Meeting notes. Sprint summaries. Client feedback logs. Not because we implemented a documentation policy, but because remote work made writing things down necessary. The necessity created the habit. The habit created a better-informed team.
3x
increase in our internal documentation output since 2019
Source: RIVER internal Confluence metrics, May 2021
Two years later, the documentation habit persists even when we're in the same room. That's the sign of a real cultural change rather than a temporary adaptation.
Asynchronous Communication
We broke the real-time communication addiction. Not entirely - some things need immediate discussion. But the default shifted from "schedule a meeting" to "write it in Slack and wait for responses." That shift recovered hours of productive time per person per week.
The team adapted at different speeds. Some people naturally prefer asynchronous communication. Others needed to learn that a question asked in Slack at 10am doesn't need an answer by 10:05am. We set expectations: respond within four business hours unless it's flagged as urgent. That simple rule eliminated the anxiety of constant availability.
Flexible Scheduling
We stopped pretending that everyone is productive from 9 to 5. Some developers do their best work at 7am. Some hit their stride at 10. As long as there's a core overlap window (10am-2pm) for meetings and collaboration, we don't police when the other hours happen.
This wasn't possible in an office where presence was the proxy for productivity. Remote work made output the only measure. The team is measurably more productive on flexible schedules. Not because they work more hours, but because they work their best hours.
What Didn't Stick
Virtual Social Events
We tried Zoom trivia. We tried online games. We tried virtual coffee catch-ups. Most of them felt forced and attendance declined steadily. The problem is that social connection over video is exhausting rather than energising. After a day of video calls, nobody wants one more video call, even a fun one.
What works instead: brief, unstructured time at the beginning of meetings. Five minutes of conversation before the agenda starts. It's not social programming. It's human interaction embedded in work interaction. Less ambitious. More sustainable.
The virtual pizza party is dead. What actually works is small moments of genuine human connection. A five-minute check-in before a sprint review. A Slack channel for non-work chat. An occasional in-person lunch. Keep it real, keep it simple.
Tim Hatherley-Greene
Chief Operating Officer
Full Remote for Everyone
Some people thrive remotely. Some people struggle. We assumed everyone would adapt. They didn't. Two team members told us directly that they're less productive and less happy working from home full-time. They need the structure of an office. They need the separation between work and home.
We now maintain a small office space that's available for anyone who wants it. Some people use it daily. Some use it once a week. Some never use it. The flexibility to choose is what matters, not a blanket policy in either direction.
What We Got Wrong
Onboarding
Onboarding a new team member remotely is hard. We underestimated this consistently. A new person joining a remote team doesn't absorb context through osmosis the way they do in an office. They can't overhear conversations. They can't read the room. They can't ask the person next to them a quick question without scheduling a call.
Our first two remote hires took twice as long to reach full productivity compared to office hires. We've improved the process since then - dedicated buddy system, structured first-week schedule, daily check-ins for the first month - but it's still not as smooth as in-person onboarding.
Meeting Load
We expected meetings to decrease with remote work. They increased. The informal five-minute desk conversation became a fifteen-minute scheduled call. The "quick chat" became a calendar invite. By mid-2020, some team members were in meetings for 6+ hours a day.
We course-corrected with the 40-minute meeting rule and a strict async-first policy. Meeting load is now manageable. But it took deliberate intervention. Left to its own dynamics, remote work generates more meetings, not fewer.
Where We Are Now
Remote-first with optional office access. Four core hours of overlap. Async as default. Documentation as culture. In-person for discovery workshops, team building, and new client relationships.
It's not perfect. It's better than what we had before. And it's still evolving. The key is giving people the flexibility to do their best work, wherever that happens to be.