Why is Omnea not fully remote? - Omnea

We understand that over the last few years working culture has shifted dramatically. We’re big fans of the added flexibility and greater freedom that the new working world brings and recognise that now more than ever, people can make decisions that aren’t pegged to an office location. That’s why remote working has always been an important topic of conversation for our team, and something that our Founders are continually debating and thinking through.

However, there are a few key reasons why we have opted for a hybrid in-office working model at this stage of the Omnea journey, detailed below. It’s a structure that we think will help us build the strongest culture and foundations, while empowering our team with enough freedom and flexibility to do their best work. We suspect it may change in the future (to become more remote/choice-first) but for now, this is where we’ve landed!

1. How it will work

• Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in office
• Monday & Friday WFH (or go in if you prefer!)
• Choose your own working hours (within reason)
• Optional: Choose to work remotely a few weeks per quarter — this will naturally become more flexible once you’re properly settled in after the first few months
• Optional: Omnea-sponsored remote work abroad every few months

2. Here are our main reasons

• In-person interactions result in faster iterations.
  By default, remote working naturally has a communication barrier — it’s just that little bit harder to get what you want across. This naturally affects how teams communicate. For our people to be as efficient as possible, designs, stories and specifications need to be readily communicated upfront. Until we have the people and systems in place to efficiently and speedily communicate these inputs, it is much faster and easier for us to knowledge-share over the table and ask ad hoc questions as we go.

• In order for remote to work well, you need to over-communicate everything.
  Over-communication is especially important in the early days when the majority of knowledge exists in only a few peoples minds and there are always new people trying to learn fast! Until the team is larger, and this intimacy and tighter pool of knowledge has been spread out, we feel that the quickest way to get individuals up to speed is to have everyone in the same room... you can literally tap each other on the shoulder to ask a question.

• Providing support for more junior members of our team.
  In the same vein as above, we want to ensure in these early stages, that all the junior members of our team are properly taken care of and mentored. Everyone should be surrounded by people they can learn from, and this is especially important when you’re early in your career. We have an entirely flat hierarchy and want to encourage natural interaction and learning via osmosis for everyone’s benefit.

• A big factor of why people join and then stay at companies is down to the people they are working with.
  In our eyes, fully-remote working still has a long way to go when it comes to building a team’s culture from the ground up. Companies have gotten better at this (and we’re also pretty excited by our company-sponsored remote work idea and some of the socials we’re planning!) but we still feel that in the early days, being together in one place a few days a week leads to better team cohesion and culture. Mainly, we’ve realised that everyone joining in these early days is joining to work alongside the current team. Imagine taking the best folks from each of the best start-up and scale-up environments in the city and putting them in one room — that is literally the team we’re building. These people can get a job wherever they want but they’ve chosen to work together at Omnea. In our view, it would be loss for those people to not bond and learn from each other!

• Product ideas and improvements come from organic collaborating, often between people/teams that may not otherwise interact much.
  We have seen this countless times in our careers. For example, if a team member complains about a problem, another person on the team would see that as an opportunity and be able to help find a solution. Talking to each other in an ad-hoc manner also results in new ideas and better ways of doing things. While some of this can be replicated in more formal, remote settings, we firmly believe that it’s much harder in these early stages to plan for these scenarios and have the same kind of energy behind idea-generation. We want to breed an environment where problems and solutions can surface naturally.

3. Frequently Asked Questions

• Do we have set working hours?
  People generally sync up and work similar hours, and certain meetings mean there’s naturally overlap but you can choose your hours too. Some people like starting a bit earlier, and others later (our CTO is a bit of a night owl…) and we don’t run a strict timetable. As an early stage business made up of ambitious people, we definitely work harder than ‘normal’ and sometimes that means working longer hours, e.g. to meet a critical deadline.

• Can I choose different days to work in the office?
  Team members will be expected to be in the office on Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday. There’ll be some weeks people can’t do that and that’s ok! But this is the default at the moment. Monday and Friday are intentionally designated for flexible/remote working, however employees are welcome to come into the office if they prefer.

• Where’s the office?
  We’re based in a private office space in the WeWork at 123 Buckingham Palace Road, in Victoria! That’s because we already have people at different sides of London so central is easiest, and Victoria has good transport links.

• What’s our London office like?
  Our favourite highlights include:

  • 3 minute walk from Victoria Station
  • Concierge Team
  • Bike storage, showers (WITH towel service)
  • On-site barista
  • Doggy friendly
  • Bi-weekly team lunches!

• Will these policies change over time?
  Yes, definitely! Once people have ramped up, there’ll be more flexibility to be remote. When people are working on things that lend themselves to deep work, there’ll be more flexibility to be remote. And generally over time, we’ll likely become a bit more remote. But for now, in these early days, this is the set up that we think will be most successful.