Thoughts on Avela’s future of remote work

Like many companies, we enthusiastically adopted a fully remote posture in 2020, and have been fully remote ever since. 

There are tremendous advantages of a fully remote workforce, particularly the benefit of a larger, more diverse talent pool.  

As a result of our remote structure, we’ve become a great place for working parents, neurodiverse individuals, and those living n remote communities across the country. We’ve also set up meeting cultures that ensure everyone’s voices are heard, including introverts and those who might not be as quick to jump in. Coupled with our equitable hiring practices, we’ve been able to build a multicultural company with diverse perspectives.

The current generation of virtual collaboration tools are still limited.

At Avela, we rely heavily on Zoom, Google Meet, Google Drive/Docs, Notion, Asana, Slack, and Figma for collaboration. These platforms are fantastic for keeping teams aligned and moving forward toward our audacious goals. But, while we are optimistic about continued innovations in virtual collaboration software, the current suite has its limitations. We have found current tools ill suited for complex, ambiguous problem solving or open ended brainstorming. 

As an early stage company trying to change the way families access education for their children, we are often facing ambiguity and need to forge a path through uncertain waters.  We believe that getting together in person frequently is critical for our success. We also missed the social connection that comes from meeting in-person, and the lasting culture and employee retention that it fosters.

There’s also a speed of progress and innovation that comes from being in person. Catching someone in the hallway between meetings can shave off an entire week of back-and-forth. In fact, we’ve heard from our investors that their in-person portfolio companies are significantly outperforming their remote peers.

We first tried to solve the problem with in-person retreats and offsites.

We got the team together in person twice a year in a central location for a 3-4 day gathering, which was a combination of working and socializing. Individual teams also started meeting once or twice a year on their own, as well. The reviews were spectacular - everyone loved getting together in person, meeting their colleagues, building relationships, and having time to zoom out and brainstorm. 

But hidden in every feedback form was a concerning suggestion for improvement - shorten the length and reduce the frequency. Colleagues with families were having a hard time spending so much time away from home. And for those in remote locations away from major airports, the travel was arduous (and expensive). It turned out we were spending more money on travel for the retreats than we would if we had offices. They also took a significant amount of planning, and ended up consuming about 1/3 of our Chief of Staff’s time.

Now, we are experimenting with a new “hub” model for collaboration. 

We’d like to ensure colleagues have an opportunity to connect with each other roughly monthly, and that teams have a full week to work together onsite at least quarterly.

Employees will continue to work remotely from their home or office (e.g. WeWork) most of the time, but will be expected to get together with colleagues for roughly 2-5 days per month, often consecutive days. The exact cadence and frequency will vary by location and team, but we expect a common pattern will be for teams to get together for 3 consecutive days once a month for collaboration. 

It’s not practical for everyone to travel once a month, or even once a quarter. To facilitate this, we need some concentration of people in a few clusters or nodes, which we’re calling hubs. So, we are asking all new employees to live within “commuting distance” of one of four hubs: (1) San Francisco, CA, (2) Cambridge, MA, (3) Los Angeles, CA, and (4) New York, NY. 

This is not a “hybrid” model.

..but I don’t know what to call it. (Any ideas?)

Employees are not expected to come to an office 2-3 days per week. In fact, we don’t even have fixed offices.

In each hub, we have chosen a default WeWork location, but teams can elect to meet elsewhere or even rotate meeting locations. In fact, we have several colleagues willing to host teams at their home once or twice a month, and our board members have opened up their offices as well.

We also hope hubs will get together once a month or so for team events, happy hours, talks, museum visits, and more. The Bay Area Hub recently rented out a fire pit at Spark Social SF for s’mores and dinner, and in the past has attended talks at The Commonwealth Club, taken road trips to Wine Country, attended Exploratorium After Dark, and explored Cal Academy of Sciences at NightLife.

We still embrace remote work and will never be a traditional, in-office company.

No one likes a daily commute. As a software company, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to embrace remote work, and will continue to do so.  

This hub model is intended to be the “best of both worlds,” giving colleagues the flexibility to work from home most of the time and live untethered from daily commute, while still offering some sense of community and fostering collaboration.

We’ll continue hosting annual retreats.

In addition to hub gatherings and team onsites, we plan to host an annual company retreat each year. This is a central part of our culture and core to ensuring connectedness across the company and country.

We have also made it a tradition to invite customers to speak at our offsites and to tour district and school facilities, so we’ll alternate the location of our annual retreat to ensure our team has an opportunity to meet customers from across the country.

There will always be exceptions, and early employees will be accommodated.

Just as traditional workplaces with in-office cultures had some employees who were remote, we too will have colleagues living outside of the hubs. Most of these will likely be sales and marketing professionals who need to be “in the field” and are already accustomed to significant travel. 

There will also be cases where we need highly specialized skillsets that are not readily available in our hubs, particularly for fractional experts, like our security, compliance, and legal specialists. There might also be cases where we opt for taking advantage of talent in lower cost geographies (particularly in Latin America). We’ll handle those on a case by case basis. 

We would also not be where we are without our founding team and early employees, who joined Avela before we had formed this concept of hubs. We’re working hard to make sure Avela remains a great place to work for everyone, especially those who got us to where we are, so we’ve adjusted expectations for some of our early employees. (Fortunately, we’ve chosen our hubs based on the locations of our current team, so the vast majority of colleagues shouldn’t see much of a change.)

We are energized by the future of work and the opportunities it brings, so this is a work in progress.

As collaboration and travel technologies improve, we will continue to reevaluate our working norms and styles.  We are eager for holopresence, virtual whiteboards, eVTOL taxis, and supersonic flights to once again revolutionize work and travel, and will adapt our collaboration practices accordingly. 

Our current hubs have been selected based on (a) current employees’ locations, (b) talent density, and (c) airport/flight availability.  While we expect San Francisco and Cambridge will remain hubs indefinitely, we are still evaluating the other hub locations. LA’s sprawl and intense traffic complicate it as a hub, and New York might be better thought of as a satellite of Boston. We are also considering a more central hub in Denver, Austin, Chicago, or St. Louis. (But for now, we’re moving forward with the 4 aforementioned hubs.)

We’re also open to colleagues who are comfortable with longer commutes. Joe Biden famously commuted round trip from Wilmington, Delaware to Washington DC every day on the train, about 3 hours a day. Lots of San Francisco residents commute to Sacramento daily, and many Philadelphia residents train into NYC weekly. As long as you’re genuinely willing to commute into the hub 2-5 days a month, we’re happy to have you join us!

We’re cautiously open to candidates who want to relocate to a hub, but would hesitate to encourage a candidate to move only for Avela. We also aren’t in a position to cover relocation costs in a significant way.

We’ll cover travel costs outside of hubs.

Just like the old days, regular commuting to your office (hub) is at your own expense. But since it’s so infrequent, this should still be a significant savings. Our hubs are also all located near major public transportation hubs, so getting around is easy and cost effective.

In addition, one of the many benefits of Avela is that we offer commuter benefits. Employees can set aside pre-tax dollars to cover parking, public transportation, bike maintenance, and rideshare pooling (Lyft Line and Uber Pool). 

All travel outside or between hubs, including to retreats, will be fully covered by Avela. And of course, all other forms of business travel, including sales meetings and customer visits, are reimbursed, even within a hub.

We’re still learning and would love to hear your thoughts.

We realize this approach won’t work for everyone, and that’s why we wanted to be so transparent about it upfront. Just like we believe in the value of finding the right school for each child, we want to help candidates find the right company for their talents.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you think this strikes a nice balance?   Candidates, how do you think about the tradeoffs of geographic proximity with building relationships and solving tough challenges?  Fellow entrepreneurs and business leaders, what has worked best for you? How have you continued to innovate and grow rapidly in the remote environment?

Find me on LinkedIn or send me an email at gbybee [at] avela org .