Don’t Optimise for Average
Why Office-First with Flexibility beats hybrid, remote, and everything in between
The debate around remote work has collapsed into a false choice: fully remote, fully in-office, or "hybrid."
Each side is entrenched. Remote advocates cite autonomy and broader talent pools. In-office defenders talk about culture, collaboration, and speed.
Hybrid attempts to strike a balance, often resulting in the worst of both worlds: half-empty offices, scattered teams, and a diluted culture.
The problem isn't the options. It's the frame of the debate.
This isn’t a three-way standoff. It's a chess game. And most companies are missing the queen: Office-First with Flexibility (OFWF).
Why "Hybrid" Falls Short
Most hybrid models fail because they lack a strong centre of gravity. In the absence of a clear default, they gradually drift toward remote by default, often unintentionally.
Teams are told they can "choose" when to come in. The result: inconsistent attendance, thin in-office energy, fragmented collaboration.
You can't build a high-trust, high-performance culture if people are physically scattered without rhythm or purpose. Slack and Zoom solve logistics, but not culture. Not decision speed. Not the ambient learning that occurs when great people work shoulder to shoulder.
Nicholas Bloom’s research shows most employees like hybrid models about as much as getting an 8% pay raise. That’s useful to know, but preference isn’t the same as performance. Just because hybrid is popular doesn’t mean it works.
Designing your company around what’s liked, rather than what drives outcomes, is how performance degrades over time.
The nuance: good hybrid systems have a clear default and social expectation. Without that, you’re just paying for expensive offices no one uses, while creating a second-class experience for those who show up.
What "Office-First with Flexibility" Actually Means
Office-First with Flexibility flips the dynamic:
The default is working in-office.
Flexibility exists (for legitimate needs, e.g. appointments, childcare, focused work, etc.).
No attendance tracking, no rigid mandates. The goal isn’t to police; it’s to create an environment where high performers thrive.
No arbitrary quotas like ‘three days per week.’ Instead, there’s a clear expectation: if you're in a city with a core team, you're in the office most days. That’s the norm, not the exception.
This is not "hybrid.” This sets a cultural gravity around being together, while treating people like adults.
The idea that office-first is about managers ‘looking over shoulders’ is a lazy caricature. This isn’t about control. It’s about proximity, speed, and shared momentum.
Netflix captured this spirit early:
"People tend to do their best work when they understand the context, not when they’re tightly controlled."
Sam Altman reinforces the same principle:
"The most ambitious people often want to be around others who push them."
In OFWF, offices are not mandatory prisons. They are magnetic environments: energising, focused, high-trust spaces where the best work gets done, and people want to be.
Gen Z Isn't the Problem
There’s lazy thinking, such as "Gen Z won't tolerate the office."
That’s wrong.
The best Gen Z talents (like the best of any generation) want growth. They want to be around energy, learning, and ambition. They value proximity to mentors and colleagues who raise their bar.
Max Marchione doesn’t hedge:
“At Superpower, whilst we hire some people remotely, we only hire Gen Z talent in SF. To be hired that young, you need to be an outlier. Outliers want to learn as quickly as possible, grow their networks, and be in person.”
Grouping entire generations into one stereotype is bad strategy. Focus instead on exceptional performers, regardless of age. Exceptional young talent thrives in environments that offer speed, rapid learning, and visible ambition.
If you optimise for the average, you will get average. If you optimise for the exceptional, you will get greatness.
Not Everyone Will Like It; That’s the Point
Some people will prefer to work from home permanently. Sometimes for good reasons (childcare; commute), sometimes for less good ones (comfort; complacency).
That’s fine. But high-performance cultures should be unapologetically polarising. They’re not built to maximise comfort for everyone; they’re designed to attract the few who thrive in the environment.
Some people do great work remotely, and that's okay. But if the culture is built around in-person energy and ambition, it’s better to be clear. Not everyone will want in, and that’s the point.
Alex Fala said it well:
“Companies can't optimise for everything, and ambitious environments have particular requirements that aren't for everyone.”
You can’t turn average performance into greatness just by changing where someone sits. The best companies, like Stripe and Amazon, design their cultures around exceptionalism, not comfort.
Paul Graham put it sharply:
"The natural state of a startup is growth. If you're not growing, you're dying."
High-performance cultures need density: physical, intellectual, and emotional.
The Future: Strategic, Not Dogmatic
The future of work is not fully remote. Nor is it blindly in-office.
The future belongs to companies that think function by function, role by role, level by level:
A junior engineer onboarding? Office presence is invaluable.
A senior back-end developer working independently? May need more remote flexibility.
A product leader running cross-functional strategy? Needs to be in the room.
It’s not about ideology. It’s about effectiveness. It’s about setting a clear default: in-office, with flexibility, applied consistently in cities where we have critical mass.
Some roles, teams, or individuals may warrant exceptions; however, the bar is high, and the reasoning is clear.
This avoids the chaos of negotiating conditions on a case-by-case basis, while still enabling exceptional people to do exceptional work, wherever they are.
How We Operate at Partly
At Partly, we are Office-First with Flexibility:
Where we have critical mass, we invest heavily in offices worth coming to.
We encourage being in-office most of the week; no tracking, no rigid rules.
We hire the best people on the planet, even in cities without offices, if the role truly allows remote effectiveness.
We have high trust and high expectations; that’s the deal.
We believe proximity compounds trust, speed, learning and innovation. We believe frameworks beat chaos.
And we believe exceptional people deserve an environment optimised for their ambition, not one diluted for average preferences.
Conclusion: Build for Performance, Not Preference
The companies that thrive over the next decade won’t treat location as ideology.
They’ll design for what works: in-office by default, flexibility when it matters, and a culture grounded in trust and clarity.
The “remote vs hybrid vs office” debate is stale.
For startups that want to outperform, the move is clear: Office-First with Flexibility.
Cheers,
Harry 👋