 Now, let's talk more about the future. I'm excited to introduce you to Chris Herd, who is the founder and CEO of FirstBase, an all-in-one provisioning platform for remote teams. Ensuring that your team has everything that they need to be most productive at home or really anywhere that they might be working is crucial to providing the best employee experience. Companies take a number of approaches to this, but FirstBase allows teams to manage all of the equipment that remote workers need with a monthly subscription. Over the course of the last 12 months, Chris has also spoken to more than 2,000 companies about remote work. So in this session, we're going to get a peek at what he's learned from all of those conversations. Let's tune in to hear Chris's predictions about what the future of work will look like going forward. Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Herd. I'm the founder and CEO of FirstBase, ageq.com. And before I kick it off, I just wanted to take a quick minute to thank the GitLab team for inviting me to be part of today. The event that Darren and Emily and the rest of the GitLab team have pulled together is incredible. And I think what we have as part of this event is probably the best collection of remote work talent and speakers that I've ever seen. So equally as excited as everyone here to watch what goes on over the next few days. So what I'll be talking about today is what the future of work is going to look like. So to kick that off, I guess the best place to start is what I do. As I said, I'm Chris. I'm the founder and CEO of FirstBase. And we help companies set up, supply, manage, and maintain the physical equipment remote workers need at home. We do that for everyone from some of the earliest stage companies in the world through to $50 billion plus publicly listed companies. So I would start with the caveat that anything I say comes from a place where the people talking to me are more remote than the average company. So I think it's important to note that. The second part, which is actually I don't benefit from a world that is fully remote more than I do from a hybrid feature of work. So I think what I am saying is I'm giving you the perspective of what company is coming to me you're saying, whether that is hybrid, whether that is fully remote, or whether they're just coming to speak to me to learn more about what remote workers are saying. And where I'm going to kick that off actually is why I love remote work so much in the first place. Who you can see here sitting here at our drum set is my daughter, it's Millie. And I became a remote worker having missed her walking, laughing, and talking for the first time. So remote work for me was a bridge to a higher quality of life. And that was way before I built a company in the space. I never meant to build the business I did. I started out building a financial technology company. We had to be remote to access talent. And then we ended up discovering all these other challenges and obstacles. So my why was always spending more time with the people I care about most. And that drew me into really wanting to deliver that to everyone else. So where we're going to start is basically over the last 18 months or so, I've spent a lot of time talking to companies all across the spectrum. And in that time, I've probably spoke to at least 2,500 people or companies about remote work, and mainly focused on what remote work is going to look like into the future. Some of this started before COVID. It's continued through it all the way through to today. And I think during that time, there's a couple of key trends that I've spotted and continuously heard from companies. So the first point we're going to start with is HQs are finished. Most companies I talk to, if they haven't already cut their commercial office real estate, they're planning to. And they're going to do that to a significant extent, whether that's for a 50%, 60%, 70%. The average I hear is somewhere between 50% and 70%. And the reason for that is that workers want to work remotely. 90% plus percent of people never want to work in an office again full time. So companies, as they've surveyed people through the pandemic, have heard this very clearly from their talent. We don't want to go into the office as often. Companies are then reacting and saying, OK, we don't need as much office space. The second thing that we're hearing is sort of a continuation of that thread is the volume of companies that are going to be fully distributed. And probably around 30% of the companies that come to me tell us that they've either already cut the office entirely or they're planning to. And I think what that's happened for, the reason why that's happened, is that as the pandemic has continued, habits and behaviors have calcified. And workers have moved away from the cities where their offices were in the first place. And the report that I think people seen come out in Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago, where it said 40% of people would quit rather than going back to the office. 50% of millennials would quit rather than going back to the office. Going fully remote is obviously an answer to solving that in many respects. And I think that brings us to the first point, which is why companies benefit here. The first reason companies are going fully remote is incredibly simple. It lets them hire the most talented person in the world for every single role, rather than the best person that they can afford in a 30 mile radius of an office. And that obviously has massive implications in a knowledge-based economy, which is where most of us work. In a knowledge-based economy, companies are only as strong, powerful, and successful as the people that they employ. So in a knowledge-based economy, companies are their people. And that means that to be a better company, to hire the most talented people, you have to be remote. The second benefit to companies, which I think is super clear, is cutting costs. So the second reason they're going remote is to cut the cost of the office. And that could be anything from $10,000 to $50,000 per worker per year, depending on the size of the organization. And you start to play that out across a 1,000-person organization, where they're spending $10 to $50 million per year on real estate, where a remote competitor doesn't have any of those costs. So that obviously lets them be more cost-efficient, well tied to the prior benefit, which means they're also more talented. And that, I think, takes me to the first potential issue that we're seeing around remote, which is remote burnout. Prior to the pandemic, the question I always got was, how can we trust our people to work remotely if we can't see them? And people have proven that they can. There's no question at this point that people do great work while working remotely, which takes us to the second question, which is, how do we ensure our people aren't working too hard and they're burning out? So I think there's a lot of companies exploring ways to do this right now. We've heard a lot of companies doing things like wellness days, where they give their team a day off without any prior notice. And I think we're going to see a lot of exploration in this space over the next 12 to 18 months. The next thing that companies are saying is, well, we're going to go remote, but we still need to see each other physically. And I think how we're beginning to think about that is with things like off-sites. And obviously, GitLab have a rich history of doing things like this. So 6% plus percent of companies we talk to say, OK, well, we're going remote. To whatever extent that is, they still say we need time together physically, because there's a lot of things that we benefit from when we do that. And a lot of them look at it as, well, why wouldn't we make this a great experience for our team? How can we make this incredible for workers to travel, meet up with their teammates, end up in a beautiful location, and do great collaborative work for weeks on end? So that's something that I think many people would be intrigued by. Personal choice, I think, is an interesting way to look at it. Personally, the smartest people I know all plan to work remotely at some point in this decade. Tied to that is the best companies I know all plan to hire remotely this decade. And with that prior stat, I said before, of 98% plus percent of people never wanting to work in an office again full time, that becomes a clear thing, which if you're a company not doing this, how do you attract and then retain talent? Asynchronous work by default, I think, is the thing that most companies have got wrong during the pandemic, actually. The majority of companies, it was really easy to replicate the office environment remotely. And what that's led to is the Zoom fatigue that people are talking about. There's no breaks. There's less boundaries. And I think the important thing to recognize here is that this has been the worst possible version of remote work. This has been lockdowns and homeschooling and not being able to travel and see friends and these types of things. But a huge number of people still want to work remotely. So as it continues and people obviously lean into that and companies hire more people remotely, the question then becomes, how can we leverage and maximize the unique benefits of remote to create a better organization? And I think asynchronous work is largely the superpower that people are looking for there. Personal injury, this is something that is obviously exploding and people come directly to me for. People are realizing that working in an office comes with many intrinsic benefits. You have the right desk. You have the right chair. Your monitor is at the right height. And as people have been working at their sofas or at their kitchen counters, they've started to get back pain and neck pain and repetitive strain injuries. So companies who continue with remote work are going to have to ensure that their workers are set up to work remotely or we're going to continue to see a massive explosion of these things, which is obviously incredibly problematic. Universal problems, I think, is what's clear here. It doesn't matter the size of the organization, the type of the organization, or the geographic location of the organization. Every single company is generally facing variations of the same problems. And we spoke to companies and work with companies right across the spectrum. They're all asking the same questions, which for me then begs the question of how much of a sea change is this? I look back historically and I say, OK, well, what happened to companies that didn't adopt computing? What happened to companies that didn't implement software? What happened to companies that didn't embrace the internet? And because everyone's facing the same things and the benefits are the same, this is the question that I have for many companies is what happens to you if you don't go remote, if you don't go remote first? And I think that's the reality and scale of the disruption we're going to see for companies that refuse to go this way versus companies that do. Pollution reduction, I think, is an incredibly interesting thing that very few people are thinking about. In many respects, I see remote work as the biggest green revolution and the easiest lift that nobody's really paying attention to. And this has to be something that companies begin to think about, people not commuting every day, people traveling less. And all the benefits that come with not running an office for 24 hours a day, it's a huge thing that I think many companies are going to begin to recognize and lean into more heavily. Quality of life I obviously touched on. And I think even more importantly, companies are starting to realize that they can't expect workers to waste two hours a day, 10 hours a week, 520 hours a year, which equates to somewhere around 33 days every year. Multiply that across a career and you're talking four years of your entire life wasted. And I think that's just not something that companies need to expect anymore. We have the technology to work anywhere. People are sitting on subways, carrying the laptop that they take out and work from in the office, while slacking people in the same building. We've worked remotely for almost a decade already in many respects. And now I think companies are realizing that if they don't give this to people, they're biggest competitors will. And that's what takes us onto the pressure of remote or why we'd more specifically refer to as the remote work dilemma. Many companies we talk to don't want to go remote as they're going to be forced into going remote as they will. So the question is that you have to be remote as your biggest competitor, otherwise they're going to steal your most talented people. They're going to hire more talented people. And I think if companies don't react to this quickly, it's going to kill them. That is the extent to which this affects people. It's the average talent level of the organization growing rapidly as a remote organization, while office first companies bleed talent slowly, while simultaneously becoming less cost efficient. So there's the double side to that sort where companies need to react and they need to be as remote, if not more remote than their biggest competitors. And I think what that leads to is what companies are scared about isn't the quality of work being produced anymore. It isn't workers being trusted to do great work. What they're scared about are the intangible things they can't measure like quality of communication, collaboration in person, water cooler chat. And I think what many people have realized is that these are excuses. If you're solving your biggest problems around the water cooler by mistake, maybe your organization's got problems rather than it being a good thing. And I think this is what they've realized over the last 15 months where works continue to happen. Many organizations have had their best years ever. And largely I think it's due to the fact that people aren't distracted in the office and they're able to do deep focused work without distractions. And that I think is the crux of the argument here of why remote is so important. The measure of performance in an office is how long did you sit in that seat? Did you sit in that seat for eight hours? If so, your middle manager's happy. The measure of performance while working remotely has to be how much work did you produce? And if you're not producing great work, it becomes incredibly obvious that you're not performing to an adequate level. On the other side of that, if you're producing incredible work, that's incredibly clear as well. And for me as a leader of a remote first organization, it doesn't matter to me if you do your job in 25 hours a week or 40 hours a week. All I need is your performance and doing what the company needs to be moving forward. And I think this is the other superpower of remote work because as you start to do it, you realize which is written overspoken. Documentation is the unspoken superpower of remote teams. And almost all of us have worked in offices where there's a verbal culture. What I know is then transmitted to other people which is then transmitted to more people. And if I leave the organization that the nexus of that information leaves and it isn't necessarily recorded in the best way. The difference with remote first organizations is everything can be documented. And what that becomes is a repository of knowledge that grows over time and increases irrespective of people coming and going from the organization. People can contribute to it and improve it over time. And as organizations do that, the documentation obviously grows and improves as well. Flattened organizations, I would say, is the thing I'm least certain about here. I think we're seeing a lot of reaction from middle managers who are realizing that their performance metrics are tied to feeling busy. And the people who actually do the work feel productive when they get work done. And the difference there or the juxtaposition there is that for middle managers to feel productive, they have to disrupt the flow of the people actually producing the work. Whereas the people producing work need to be left alone. So I would hope what happens here is there is a flattening of organizations. Workers are able to just focus on producing output. And we have less bottlenecks, but I think this is very much TBC. Company of resorts is maybe the most interesting thing I've heard in recent months. Some of, I would say, the largest organizations in the world are beginning to think about these incredible specialist places that their teams travel to on a calendar basis to do great work. And they're facilitated with everything you need to focus on that piece around collaboration and communication. And I think for me, like the interesting part about this is remote organizations actually have the potential to be closer than in-person organizations. Because when we are coming together, it's with the purpose of doing that. And everyone knows they're in an office, people come in after the weekend and the question is how was your weekend? And it leads to this inane conversation where shallow superficial relationships emerge where when you leave the company, few of those relationships last. Remote organizations are different. I can really ask you about your kids or your hobbies and things that are really important to you become important to me. And that enables the foundations of creating that remote relationship. Remote laws are something that I think happened probably quicker than many people realize. We've seen this begin to happen in the UK. There's a lot of talk of it in Germany. I think you're gonna start to see many states in the US begin to approach this as well. And what we're talking about here is just giving people the right to work. This is about access to opportunity. And I think I'll leave that there because I'm gonna come back to that in a minute. Meeting death, Zoom fatigue is a thing or it's emerged to be a thing. But I think that's mostly off the back of people forgetting how many meetings they attend while in an office. I think actually the deeper part here is that most meetings actually shouldn't happen in the first place. So wasting two hours traveling to meetings, traveling overnight for a 30 minute meeting in cities. I don't think they're gonna happen to the extent that they did before. And I think what we'll see emerge is this process around when people do come together. So tying back to the resort idea and the remote offsites, I think the implication of that is actually the death of many, many meetings. Internal community is incredibly interesting. People spend a lot of time talking about culture in offices. And I would say there's very little culture in offices. What people are mostly talking about is a cult. And it's homogeneous. Offices are great for some people, terrible for others. And that disqualifies many people participating. So how I like to think about it at least remotely is thinking about it as internal community. And what that means is thinking about how teams emerge and they fluidly transition as people come and go from an organization. And then the micro communities that emerge inside that. For me, it's just a more interesting way to think about the culture that is inside the remote organization. And I think thinking about it as community is a more intriguing way to visualize it. And finally, I'm gonna finish with a hope. Everyone that's attending today cares about remote deep play or is interested about it. And for me, I'm hopeful that remote work breeds a far better future of work than the one we currently inhabit. There's a lot of talk just now about the future of work. I don't care about the future of work. What I really care about is the future of living and how we can enable it. And the most important part of that in my eyes is how can we create the most diverse, inclusive, and accessible organizations in history? Offices have been great for certain people who emerge rapidly inside organizations and progress because they're loud and they dominate beings. But for me, I want to help build organizations that are past that. They're great people, places for single parents to work or people caring for other family members or anyone with health conditions or impairments that make it difficult, if not impossible to work in an office. And there's no guarantee that this happens. It's on our shoulders as leaders and the voices in this space to take this forward and really demand that it happens. Everyone's seen the data coming out around women falling out of the workplace during COVID. And if we don't address this, I think there's a real danger that we end up in a worse future of work than the one that we have or we recede from the progress that seems to have been made over the next 10 years. So I hope that remote organizations breed the most inclusive, accessible, and diverse organizations in history. I hope that it happens incredibly quickly. But I think we all need to fight for that as a group, as a community. And if we do that, I think we realize that the future of living is enabled by it. So thanks again to the GitLab team for inviting me. If you want to continue the conversation, I'm at chrisunderscoreherd on Twitter. Or if you want to learn more about what we're building at First Base, I'm at firstbasehq.com. Thank you.