We are still in the first wave of remote work after the pioneering companies like Automattic, GitLab, Buffer, Zapier, Ghost, and more laid the groundwork and proven to the world that remote work is possible and at least as efficient as office work.
This means that we are still in a phase where a lot of things are still being defined and clarified, and the language still hasn’t settled. For example, for a while we considered important to distinguish “remote” (a company with at least one office somewhere and workers could choose where to work from) and “distributed” (a company with no office where everyone works remote). This distinction hasn’t gained hold in common parlance, so it’s possible that the definitions below will still evolve over time.
On-Site Work
This is work where the person is mandated to be in the office for a specific number of hours. For some jobs this might be an unavoidable requirement, either completely (i.e. a barista) or partially (i.e. an office manager), but from others this can be just a matter of personal preference or, sadly, corporate choice.
Remote Work
This is work where the person can choose where they want to work from. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean “work from home”, home is just one of the possible places; nor it means “never in the office”, the office can be a choice.
All remote companies that do remote work well understand that there’s value in having people meet, so even if the job is “fully remote” they often have budget for teams to meet a few times per year, usually about once per quarter.
All organizations have limitations in this area. Sometimes very relaxed (i.e prohibiting just war zones and countries where intellectual property is at risk to get stolen) and sometimes very strict (i.e. you can’t get outside the country your contract is linked to not even for one day).
Hybrid Work
This is work where the person has a few mandated days in the office (usually 2 per week) and the others are remote. This is often framed as a type of remote by companies, but that’s not the case: given the frequent mandated time in the office and not always with compensated travel cost, it’s not a form of remote, but it’s a form of on-site.
Flexible Work
This is when the person is given full choice of how they prefer working: what works best for them? On-site? Remote? Hybrid? Flexible hours? Compressed hours?
Generally speaking, I’d consider “Remote” as the way to provide flexible work as that’s the only option that provides full choice, but I’m aware that some legislations might require different contracts depending on the number of hours spent in the office, hence the need to differentiate.
RTO (Return To Office)
This is the terminology used for companies that used to have some form of remote or flexible policy, and then decided to mandate instead people back in the office. This can take the form of both On-Site work or Hybrid work, as both require mandatory days.
Most of the time, this is a policy that isn’t anchored in data, as Remote has shown over and over to be at least as competitive as on-site. If you’re looking for a job, even if you’re ok to go back to the office, consider this a “orange flag” as it can be an indicator that the company is either anchored to old management myths (what other old approaches do they have?) or they aren’t good at acting on data (if they don’t accept data for something like this, what other data are they willingly ignoring?).
Remote First
This is the way we refer to companies that are able to run fully remotely, without having two tiers of people (people in the office and people remotely) that create tensions and misalignment. Some call this “remote friendly”, but I personally prefer remote first as it makes clear that the organization processes, software, infrastructure, and culture need to exist in the first place “as if” the company was fully remote. Then, there’s an office as a value-added option.
Async Work
Async work means that a big chunk of the work (most discussions, feedback, reviews, decisions, etc) doesn’t happen live (sync) but in an asynchronous way. While this term might seem too technical, it currently doesn’t have a better replacement in terms of clarity.
Effectively, all work exists on a spectrum between sync and async. On the sync side we have in-person workshops, meetings, calls, and generally anything that requires two or more people to arrange a time and be there when scheduled, for the amount of time needed. On the async side we have emails, discussion threads, code reviews, in-line document comments, and generally anything that doesn’t require people to be there at exactly the same time.
It’s important to point out something that might sound obvious but it’s not: neither side of the spectrum, even the most extreme cases, can be reached. Good sync companies always have some async, and good async companies always have some sync.
Knowing that a company is remote, remote first, or else, doesn’t say anything about where they sit on the sync/async spectrum. I used to work in a company that had excellent async practices, while everyone was in the same office. Thing is: async work is more efficient, even for a on-site company, as soon as it’s more than a couple of people.
The companies that benefit the most of remote are also async companies.
We need to recognize that a company that successfully shifts it policies and contracts to remote might need to do a second important step of change management to also embrace async work. Otherwise they won’t get the full benefits of async work.
These terms will change and evolve over time, but for now, this is a good map of what we mean if we are using these terms meaningfully.