This article was previously published EIX – Exchange of Entrepreneurs and Innovators.
Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups whose employees show up in a physical office see 3.5x more revenue growth than remote-only startups.
Let the discussion begin.
During the pandemic, businesses engaged in one of their biggest unintentional experiments with how to organize office work remotely, in the office, or a hybrid of the two.
Even after the pandemic, startups still struggle to manage how best to manage the issue of returning to office. In short, employee expectations for continuing to work remotely and the best way to build and grow a profitable company.
Before asking which is the best configuration, the first question is what exactly do “remote work” and “office work” mean? digital), some offices (Flexible Hybrid, Synchronous Hybrid, Office First), and even offices only.
James Kim and reach capitalAn early-stage technology investor surveyed the portfolios of 37 companies using the following taxonomy for how virtual and physical work can be organized.
Using this model, James discovered that: Pre-seed and seed-stage startups with employees returning to some type of office saw 3.5x more revenue growth than fully remote startupsThese are surprisingly large differences, and while other factors may play a role (see ‘What this means’ below), the impact of an all-hands-on-deck approach cannot be ignored.
What accounts for these differences? Not surprisingly, nearly 90% of responses from pre-seed/seed startups said team culture is influenced by work composition. Surprisingly, however, the self-reported team culture, eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) and unfortunate wear and tear – Turnover that hurts the company — The composition of work is similar everywhere.
So while employees said that team culture doesn’t seem to change regardless of office composition, very early-stage startup performance (measured by revenue growth) is another story. I’m here.
What does this mean?
The data are suggestive but not conclusive.View the full summary of findings here.
Let’s start with the dataset. The sample size for the study was his 37 companies in the Reach Capital portfolio. This is large enough to see patterns, but not large enough to generalize to all startups. Second, Reach Capital’s corporate portfolio is the future of education and work. Earnings results by workplace mix may vary in other markets. Geography is not limited to Silicon Valley, as Reach Capital’s investments are made in many regions, including Brazil.
Finally, office composition is just one of the factors that influence a startup’s growth rate. Still, the results are thought-provoking, and other VCs may want to run the same research across their portfolios to see if the results match.
(By the way, Nick Bloom at Stanford University and others have done extensive research on thousands of people about remote and hybrid work. hereand hereTheir research primarily focused on employees engaged in independent day-to-day operations such as travel agencies. However, we are interested in a very specific subset of creative knowledge workers in the early stages of startups.Specifically, if a startup search for For product/market fit and business model, not when performing day-to-day tasks.
If the results are in a different location, you can guess why. Working from home can be distracted by chores, family and network issues. Do these little things make a meaningful difference in productivity?
In an early-stage startup, do random conversations between employees at unscheduled and unscheduled hours lead to better insights and ideas? If so, productive brainstorming takes place within departments. from engineer to engineer, for example?
Research from the 20’sth the century has proved that informal face-to-face interaction It is important for coordinating group activities, maintaining corporate culture, and team building. This informal information allows employees to access new, non-redundant information through connections to various parts of the organization’s formal organizational chart and connections to various parts of the organization’s informal communications network. can. In addition, research shows that creativity is “small world network – Highly locally clustered network structure and It is often a hotbed of unplanned fluid interactions that support innovation. That is, inside an early-stage startup.
For decades, founders and investors of Silicon Valley companies have known this small world network effect as tacit knowledge. It has become a feature of the physical design of Silicon Valley office spaces, from Xerox PARC to Pixar headquarters to Google and Apple.
So perhaps the opposite is true. Will working remotely in ad-hoc or fixed meetings via Zoom really hinder growth? Creativity and New Insights, just when the startup needs them most?Are there any new tools like discord and anything else that can replicate the physical proximity water cooler effect?
Either way, it’s the beginning of an interesting discussion.
what is your experience
lesson learned
- Data from one VC found that pre-seed and seed-stage startups with in-office employees make 3.5 times more revenue than startups that work remotely.
- Is the data valid? Is it the same for all markets/industries?
- If yes, why?
- Is there a difference between remote and in-office productivity for creative and execution tasks?
Filed under: Covid-19/Recovery, Family/Career/Culture |