Turns out workers—and CEOs—can be plenty productive without ever meeting up in-person.
Look no further than Ben Goodwin, the CEO (and co-founder and formulator) of OLIPOP, a company that produces low-sugar, high-fiber fizzy drinks geared at replacing sodas from the American palate. Crafting the business side of the product, it turns out, hardly requires any in-office participation. And Goodwin, a serial entrepreneur who has a hand in the creation of each of the brand’s fruity flavors, doesn’t have any office at all.
“I typically work from my house,” Goodwin told Fortune in a recent interview, adding that his entire company of over 100 workers is remote—and has been since its inception in 2017. No offices, no headquarters.
But that plan hasn’t been without its detractors. Back before the pandemic, around 2018, “some friends and investors” told Goodwin that OLIPOP “really, really needed an office,” he said. (No word on whether employees agreed.)
Those investors’ general argument was that offices filled with workers facilitate “better collaboration and organic engagement opportunities,” Goodwin said. Granted, he added, that was the prevailing norm at the time—just 5% of full-time workers were fully remote in 2019. “I think they had also just seen more companies in existence with that model.”
Goodwin and OLIPOP co-founder David Lester “begrudgingly were considering it, and then COVID hit and we were like, ‘oh, no, we can't have an office,’” he explained. “So we built a remote company. We built a remote culture. And correspondingly, I have a home office, and that's where I work.”
Goodwin is “personally thrilled” they stuck with the remote set-up for all the usual reasons: Greater flexibility, no commute, and—as a business owner—the ability to hire a geographically diverse team. It also hasn't hurt the company, which recently closed a $30 million Series B funding round.
Plus, there are the more abstract benefits. In Goodwin’s own research, workplace satisfaction results when employees make progress on something they believe is meaningful. They also, crucially, need to feel respected all throughout.
“The base of our culture revolves around those premises, and they just come to life with a slightly different structure because we’re remote,” he said. The company communicates seamlessly with all the usual suspects—Zoom, Slack, Google—and holds regular touch-bases and offsites.
As always, workers value autonomy
Regular surveys of OLIPOP’s entire workforce find that the remote set-up is a “treasured” aspect of the company, Goodwin said. Many job applicants even cite it as a dealmaker.
“The nature of remote work naturally encourages autonomy and respect for one's time, and this sentiment is reflected in the feedback we receive,” Goodwin said, adding that OLIPOP’s recent designation as a B-Corp (a non-profit company’s certification that it meets high accountability metrics regarding its benefits, sustainability, and values) is a testament to its high employee satisfaction rates. “We attribute [that], in part, to our remote work culture.”
Granted, there are many layers to the remote work debate, with plenty of CEOs taking the opposite approach, insisting upon the merits of gathering in-person on a semi-regular basis. Goodwin doesn’t claim to have answers that Silicon Valley lacks. “Certain cultures and company types are naturally going to lend themselves to in-person work—manufacturing, for example,” he offered. “Simultaneously though, I’m not surprised that most people would prefer to work remotely.”
Getting at a fundamental mismatch in priorities, he acknowledged that many bosses want their workers back in-office simply because they don’t trust them to get their work done remotely. But that’s not a where to work problem so much as a how.
That’s long been the bottom line for Annie Dean, future of work expert and head of Team Anywhere at software firm Atlassian. The mere thought that fixing those issues is insurmountable is willfully ignorant, she told Fortune earlier this year. Plus, she added, simple office attendance will never solve productivity, innovation, or creativity issues. “Those are all how to work problems, not where to work problems,” she said. “The office won’t solve these problems. New ways of working will. This is a watershed moment of innovation of how work gets done, but we’re still talking about the f–king watercooler.”
Over at OLIPOP, Goodwin echoed the sentiment. “Generally speaking, I believe work location is not going to fix hiring, culture, and leadership issues,” he said. “If you need to be looking over someone's literal shoulder to make them do their job, there's a much bigger alignment problem, often on both sides of the fence.”
