As I scan the headlines, I’m struck by a familiar refrain: large employers demanding a mass return to the office, cutting back hybrid flexibility, and reasserting FaceTime as a key indicator of productivity.
Yet, as someone leading a fully-remote, globally-distributed team, I believe many are overlooking what remote work can truly unlock when done right.
While it’s harder to set the ball in motion with a fully-distributed team the leverage it offers – in talent density, capital efficiency, and making use of all 24 hours in a day – is unparalleled.
Yes, in some cases bringing people together physically has merit. Both I and my co-founders make an effort to visit team members globally where we can.
These visits can be spontaneous or planned – like attending one of our team members’ weddings in Kazakhstan, hiking out of an airport to grab a pizza in the UK while transiting across the country, or even an impromptu trip to India when the local team is all flying in from different cities to catch up at one location. It could even mean encouraging others to plan a trip with their cross-functional team.
True magic is being able to minimise the concept of ‘distance’, so people think of separation in terms of time zones, not kilometres.
As Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos) once argued, the magic of serendipitous interactions – what he called “collision hours” – is essential to innovation.
That principle doesn’t vanish just because your team is remote; it merely requires a new translation.
Rigidity vs remote
The challenge many companies face is that when you yank people back to the office, you reintroduce friction: fixed seating charts based on teams and business units, commuting to one central office (no matter how terrible the local traffic might be!), and the overhead of physical infrastructure. You may also quietly re‑erect barriers of hierarchy and siloed specialisations.
Meanwhile, remote-first companies (ours included) can leverage asynchronous workflows, cross-time-zone strength, work-from-anywhere flexibility, and unlock global talent pools – if intentionally designed for
Research affirms that remote work has both risks and rewards. A recent International Workplace Group study of over 1,000 employees found that teams were less stressed, drained, and anxious when working remotely. That helps with both motivation and retention. However, Microsoft observed that remote models tend to reduce cross‑group collaboration by up to 25 percent, driving silos if left unchecked.
From our vantage point, having worked remotely from day one, the below four key practices have anchored our success. Keep in mind, these aren’t silver bullets, but they are essential scaffolding for any organisation serious about making remote work successful.
1. Engineer your digital ‘collision hours’
In a physical office, people from different functions bump into each other – over coffee, in corridors, at lunch. That’s often where breakthroughs, cross-pollination, and trust form.
Remote abolishes walls – but you don’t get the benefit automatically, you must recreate it. If anything, I believe remote offers more possibilities to recreate these moments and collision hours.
We run “collision zones” – scheduled windows where engineers, designers, ops, and customer-facing teams drop into shared channels (voice/video/text) for open-ended chats, whiteboard sessions, or ad-hoc pairing.
We have permanent non-work slack channels such as #watercoolers, #trips and #memes and dedicated cross functional channels like #AI, #customer-love or #wins to celebrate cool use cases or feedback when a customer compliments us generously.
Rather than siloing people by discipline into separate Slack groups, we actively run cross-functional meetings and rotate people across digital rooms so they meet new colleagues and spark cross-domain ideas. Running a remote team has its own routines and rhythms – and it’s conscious and engineered until it becomes spontaneous.
Unless you consciously design these windows, people will retreat into their functional silos — and that’s precisely what many returning-to-office mandates inadvertently reintroduce.
2. Choose words with care – especially “offshore” and “onshore”
Language shapes culture and belonging. When you refer to some teams as “onshore” and others as “offshore,” you implicitly signal that some employees are core and others are auxiliary – or that some teams are privileged and others are subcontracted. That subtle framing erodes belonging.
We insist that everyone is part of the same team: there is no “main office” or “remote office,” just “our team.” Whether someone works from Melbourne, Mumbai, or Madrid, they get the same internal framing, the same titles, and the same access to leadership dialogues and HQ speakers. That semantic shift – though subtle – matters. It prevents “us vs them” mental models and reinforces equitable ownership across borders.
3. Over-communicate – and lean heavily on writing
In an office, you may overhear context, pick up body language, catch side comments. Remote strips all that away.
So you must reintroduce context with words – generously and redundantly. Sometimes even with GIFs and emojis.
We believe in three foundational habits:
- Send more than you think necessary: Share rationale, decisions, trade-offs, even failed experiments. Don’t assume everyone “knows” what you mean.
- Capture and document: Written records – meeting notes, decision logs, context memos – help traverse cultural and communication style bounds. For example, in some Middle Eastern cultures, debate and overlapping conversation are normal; in many East Asian settings, pauses and reflection are preferred. A shared document lets people read, re‑read, reflect, and respond in their style, rather than forcing everyone into the same real‑time interaction rhythm.
- Use nonverbal written cues: We found GIFs and emojis to be an extremely efficient way to communicate how folks are feeling. For example, when someone from a sales team wins a sale, they or others in the team assign their “own” emoji or avatar to it to claim the dopamine. We have an AI agent that surfaces whenever we get a positive Google review and tags the relevant person who might have helped us win the customer. And we use third-party tools that introduce funny or celebratory GIFs spontaneously into our non-work channels to spark conversations.
Over-communication is not overkill – it’s actually trust-building. When team members can see the thinking behind a decision, they are more likely to align, especially when they are remote and can’t ‘peek over your shoulder’ in the hallway.
4. Build context on local operating conditions
Very often, in running remote teams, one works with folks fully distributed across continents — and we don’t have all the context on their local operating environment. A cyclone in the local country, floods or large-scale power outages. Cross-border warfare in the immediate neighbourhood? All of these impact how people feel at work and how plugged in they are.
Australia is beautifully distant and blessed to not have the struggles the rest of the world deals with. Having perspective and first-hand experience of the local, on-the-ground operating environment – and being plugged into their geopolitics, or even something as simple as how bad peak-hour traffic is during a work commute (Manila or Bengaluru) – helps build empathy. More importantly, it creates an appreciation in your local team that you care.
At a time when many Australian firms are declaring “back to office, full stop,” I’d offer a counterpoint: you don’t need to regress to seat‑based work, if you instead evolve your operating model. Remote-first doesn’t mean less cohesion – it demands more deliberate cohesion.
If you want to unlock flexibility and productivity, especially in talent-constrained environments, then the answer is not to collapse back into old office habits – it’s to lean harder into remote’s affordances, while provisioning the connective tissue that makes a team feel like a team.
Let others force people into rows of desks. Real connection – and real output – comes from design, not proximity.
- Anish Sinha is the cofounder and COO of insurtech Upcover.
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