I've often struggled to be an ambitious, driven professional while being the best mom I could be for my daughters, constantly feeling challenged 'to have it all'. But remote work, especially at a company built around digital-by-default principles, has gotten me a step closer.
While I continue to struggle to "find balance", a remote-first company that constantly challenges and accelerates me has also given me a chance to build my personal life around my career - and be there for my kids, our family, and my broader community.
The Gift of Remote Flexibility
Covid has given us, working professionals, the gift of seeing what is possible with remote flexibility. Many companies have made that change permanent, but some leading tech companies still mandate a certain number of days per week in the office, which puts further challenges on working parents and hurts talent retention.
The Organizational Perspective, from my personal point of view
From an organizational point of view, the only way to make remote work successful is to build the entire system around it. This includes designing rituals, sharing context, making decisions, and cultivating a culture of effective virtual and in-person meetings. When done right, it sets up the organization for competitive advantages:
- Lower need for office real estate
- Ability to attract a broader talent pool
- Potential for 24/7 operations by leveraging time zones effectively
At Shopify, where I work, we've embraced this remote-first culture:
- While we have office spaces in major hubs, employees aren't expected to use them day-to-day.
- We encourage participation in "bursts" - intentional gatherings to achieve specific outcomes.
- We've built a culture of asynchronous decision-making and high-velocity context sharing.
- We prioritize ruthlessly and minimize unnecessary meetings.
The Mom Perspective
From a personal POV, remote work allows me to accelerate my career while reducing ‘mom guilt’.
I save about two hours of commuting time compared to when I worked at Google SF. It gives me more flexibility during the day for childcare urgent needs, such as when my child is sick at school and needs to be picked up, or to pick my child up from school when the schedule permits. It also gives me the ability to work internationally for short periods of time to visit family (my partner and I are both international).
However, it’s important to note that it's not all rainbows and unicorns and it requires a lot of intentionality to make it work for you. As a result, I travel a lot more (roughly every 4 weeks) to spend more time in-real life with my colleagues or external partners. I have a supporting partner who travels just as much and it's a constant coordination of our calendars to ensure one of us is in town (we don’t have any family nearby).
- Google Calendar is how we run our family life - everything personally or professionally is on our calendars, and we make a point to send optional invites to each other for any commitment (that we either both share or one of us participates in either for personal or professional reasons, including work flights). This way, we always have the same visibility into everything going on in our life holistically - both personally and professionally.
- We have an ongoing shared Google Keep list by topic - one for groceries, one for household shopping, one for our joint to-do-list. This alleviates the in-the-moment mental load and allows us to distribute those tasks more fairly. I’ve heard of some couples having those “delegation meetings” once a week to create more equity and mimic the same; I think it's a great concept (although for us it happens organically).
P.S. My husband and I are both Xooglers, so you can undoubtedly tell our affinity for GSuite products :)
Embracing the Future of Work
I strongly believe remote work is here to stay. I hope that we embrace it more as a society, especially among leading tech companies, to continue helping working parents remain in the workforce and push their careers to new heights.
For any working parent struggling to 'have it all' like me, I highly encourage you to consider finding opportunities that are fully remote at companies designed around digital-by-default principles. It might just be the key to unlocking that elusive work-life balance we've all been seeking.
