In this guest interview we spoke to John Riordan, a Non-Executive Director at Otonomee, about his journey with remote working. Riordan has long advocated remote working, and in this interview he shares some of his thoughts on the subject formed over several decades working with some of the world’s leading brands.
You've been a strong advocate of remote-first working for some time. Can you outline what the epiphany was for you?
My road to Damascus moment was being at a Boston Red Sox baseball game in late 2001. It was shortly after 911. I was working in customer care, and it changed immeasurably because we had to take 20% of the cost out of our product and customer service cost structure immediately.
The best way for us to achieve that was to work with an outsourced vendor (OSV). At the time, the outsourced vendor market in the US was very similar (in terms of basic offerings). However, there were one or two companies doing something a little different, and one of the companies doing something different was a company using remote workers in Florida.
I overheard a conversation at the Red Sox game between two people talking about remote workers. And the best way to describe the conversation was that there was an element of sniggering and derisive laughter - “Remote work, come on, you're kidding me.”
One of the speakers argued that remote workers were going to be at home “watching Oprah”. I remember that quote distinctly, “watching Oprah”, but for me, the cost was significantly lower - I just saw a phenomenal opportunity.
On the way home that evening from Boston, I got thinking about what I was going to be doing over the next two days. There were two really important things I needed to do. I had time in my calendar on Thursday to do annual reviews and on Friday to do annual budgets.
And what was I planning on doing?
I planned on bringing my laptop with me, and I was going to work from my home office, which was about half an hour from the company site. And it dawned on me I was going to do my own, really quiet, private work at home. Long before the term ever got floated, I was doing what would now be called deep work, and I was doing it ‘remotely’. And I realized, hang on a second, there's something to this—doing deep work away from the office on a laptop.
So roll forward a few months and I ended up reaching out to this company utilising remote workers. A few weeks later, I visited the company mentioned in the conversation.
And the second sort of gotcha moment was when they invited me to come and watch a training class.
The training classes were on-site and I got to see the people as they were training, and I also got to see the work environment they would be using, the online work environment.
I observed first-hand the demographic profile of the people who were training for these jobs. It was people who were more mature, people who had richer life experiences, and who had a more settled work career. It was very clear these people had worked in professional office environments. I saw a level of professionalism that I hadn't seen before, and I saw people with a lot of pride who wanted to show you photographs of their home office setup.
So there was a professionalization I hadn't expected, but the next kind of gotcha moment was when I saw them interacting. It was my first time seeing a chat room in a corporate world. I had assumed that chat rooms were playful, silly, frivolous. However, for these people, chat rooms were where you were asked a question, where all the answers were logged, and which were essentially becoming a knowledge base before knowledge bases ever existed.
You wrapped all those three things together, and that, for me, was when I went, hang on a second- there's something to this remote stuff that works really well.
What are some primary benefits you feel are key elements of the remote work philosophy?
There's a book by Daniel Pink called Drive, and it's about motivation. What is intrinsic motivation?
Somebody recommended that I read it, and as a leader managing people, I was keen to better understand the concept of motivation. The basic premise of the book is that there are three things that are important for people to have the correct internal drive and internal motivation.
1- Trust
2- Autonomy
3- Purpose
So I read the book, and I thought that was really interesting especially when viewed through the lens of remote work.
The first thing you're doing is trusting someone. I'm looking at somebody, whether it be online or in person, when I'm hiring them, and I have to trust this person to work in a different location and get the work done.
Once you do that, the next thing you have to consider is autonomy. Give the person autonomy and create an environment around them, where they have enough ability to make their own decisions. They know you trust them, and they know that they have enough autonomy to make decisions. Nine times out of 10, it's going to be the correct decision, and that one out of 10 times where they make the wrong decision, you're going to back them and support them, and coach them to do a better job the next time. So that's the trust, that's the autonomy.
And then the last one is the overall purpose. What I noticed very early on, when I was dealing with people who were advocates for what was known in those days as telecommuting or teleworking, was that there was also a societal benefit. Many of them wanted to do more with their lives, and this, to a large extent, was the removal of the commute, the removal of wasted time from their world, and time that they were able to put back into their own lives, their families lives, their own physical health, their mental health, and it had that wider societal benefit.
So, trust, autonomy, and purpose are the key elements. I think that's probably the best way to frame remote work.
You refer to the death of commuting. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?
Commute time really does vary by country and city. I think Ireland's commute is around 28 minutes, and the UK's is around 30 minutes on average per person. A lot of the statistics that you read reference the generally accepted principle that when the one-way commute is in and around the 40-minute mark, people really question the very essence of their being.
- Is this a place I should live in?
- Is this the job for me?
The closer you get to that 40 minutes, the more you're playing with somebody's inner demons about whether or not this is the right thing.
It is indisputable that people who have a shorter commute experience less stress, tension, and anxiety about it.
So that's a very key point, you know.
And why is that important?
Taking a US example, 90% of US homeowners have a mortgage that's under 5%. If they were forced to move elsewhere and sell up and go elsewhere, they're going to lose a really important thing, which is a low interest rate (on their mortgage), because they're going to suddenly be in a very, very different world. So you're challenging people's economic futures by tying the nature of employment to fixed physical offices within a reasonable commuting distance.
And so the commute itself is a problem.
Having to move roles and to change to a different city because of a commute, causes financial problems that are hard, but most people don't see.
Another reason why I think the commute is a thing of the past is that, if you sat down now and said, come up with a work construct where carbon emissions are significantly reduced, where employees are more motivated, where employees have more time and are less hassled, where employees save on average, 15% of their work time, and for their overall total time not commuting.
Imagine if you had a world where your employees have a work-life balance, and have more time available, and they're more active in their local communities, and it's a world where weather events don't impact productivity as much because people don't have this forced commute.
Imagine if you had that.
Oh no, we actually have it !
And it's a world without commuting and we saw this in March 2020 with Covid when the world took its laptop and its desktop and moved home, and a lot of people did the same thing for the next three or four months.
And guess what? Commerce continued.
E-commerce flourished, but commerce in general continued.
We know we can do it.
We know it's beneficial.
One of the more interesting things that I would say is that not many societies have moved forward by looking backward.
So if you were to contemplate what businesses will be like in 2035 I'd have a strong view that there will be less large corporate headquarters, and that to me is the essence of the death of the commute.
About John Riordan
John Riordan is Chairman of Quintas Capital, based in Cork. He joined the Otonomee board in 2022 and retired as Director of Support for Shopify in 2021. He has also served as Chairman of Shopify International Ltd.
John is also a board member of Grow Remote and The Sanctuary Runners, serves on the Irish Rugby Football Union Commercial & Marketing Committee, and is an advisor or board member of several start-ups and scale-ups, including Otonomee.
About Otonomee
Otonomee is one of the world’s first purpose built, remote first, outsourcing companies (BPO) who provides partner companies with outsourced sales and customer support solutions.
