Zach Holman has some great points about creating a work culture that truly embraces remote work:

I think there’s a split between being remote-friendly — hiring some workers in a different city — and remote-first, meaning you build your development team around a workflow that embraces the concepts of remote work, whether or not your employees are remote.

By forcing yourself to use chat instead of meetings, by forcing yourself to use chatops to mercilessly automate every single manual action, you end up creating things faster, with more built-in context, and greater ability to share your knowledge across the organization.

If you’re not working in a remote-first environment today, not only are you not going to have a remote-friendly environment tomorrow, but you’re going to eventually have a hard time retaining talent and keeping competitive pace in the future.

The world of work is changing. That’s just the way it is.

If your workplace is not already looking at adjusting to become remote-first, you should take a good look at why that is. There’s no reason for lots of work to require sitting in a specific office with other people. I’ve been working remote-first for almost six years now, and I don’t want to look back.

The future is already here; it just requires that businesses throw off the chains of tradition and embrace location-agnostic workplaces.