Remote work didn't kill in-office culture. The wrong hiring did.

I've heard "remote work killed our culture" three times this month from clients. Each time, I've nodded politely, asked some questions, and walked away unconvinced.

I don't think that's what happened. When I look at the companies in our pipeline whose culture has frayed over the last few years, the common factor isn't remote work. It's that they hired badly through 2021 and 2022, when the market was tight, the urgency was high, and culture-fit screening got compressed or skipped. The office, when those people were in it, masked the fit problem. Remote work didn't cause it. Remote work just made it visible faster.

What actually happens to culture under remote work

In an office, the people who don't quite fit get carried by proximity. They're around. They go to the same coffee machine. They join the same Friday afternoon drinks. The friction of "this person isn't really in our world" gets papered over by being in the same physical world. The culture appears coherent because the cues are physical.

When the office goes away, those people don't change. The fit gap they always had is still there. But the proximity cues that hid it are gone. Now they're in their own home, working their own way, and the gap is visible in every meeting, every Slack thread, every offline week where they didn't communicate enough. The culture doesn't break. The fit problem just becomes legible.

So the question to ask isn't "how do we fix remote work?" It's "did we hire people who actually fit?" That's a recruitment question, and it's the question companies who blame remote work are usually trying not to ask.

What we screen for in distributed teams

We screen for the candidate's actual track record in distributed teams, not their stated preference. "Have you worked in a distributed team before, what specifically worked, what specifically didn't, what did you change about how you operate?" If the answer is generic — "I prefer hybrid" — that's not enough information. If the answer is specific — "I learned to send a Monday morning written update because my team was three time zones away and we kept missing each other" — that's a signal.

We screen for written communication. Distributed work is a written-communication job. Candidates who can't write clearly in a casual email are going to be friction in a Slack-heavy team, no matter how impressive their CV looks. We pay attention to the emails they send us during the recruitment process.

We screen for self-management indicators. The senior candidate who proactively confirms an interview slot two days ahead is a different person from the one we have to chase three times. Both can be hired. They have different operating profiles. Don't pretend you don't see it during the recruitment process.

A small admission. We've placed candidates who fit the brief on paper and turned out to be the wrong fit for a distributed team, and we've learned from each one. There's no perfect screening for this. The companies who do it best treat it as a judgement call with structured evidence behind it, not a yes-or-no answer from a personality test.

The companies whose culture held up through hybrid working are not the ones who went back to office five days a week. They're the ones who'd hired well in the first place. If your culture is fraying, the office isn't the fix. The hiring is.

— Monique