Fostering an outcome-driven workforce.

Employees who no longer commute reclaim about 72 minutes a day, and put close to 40 percent of it straight back into their jobs, according to a 27-country study co-led by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and reported in December 2024. That finding closes an argument executives have run since 2020: whether people work as hard without someone watching over their shoulder.

Our CEO, Anand Krishnan, has a different take on it. A believer in remote-work, he says “an organization's advantage compounds from knowing who its people are, and a distributed team never builds that knowledge by accident. It has to be designed.”

Value beyond work, and finding nuance

RTO or work from office proponents have a plethora of reasons for why they prefer that work mode. The pattern persists: proximity bias - a manager's tendency to weigh a contribution more when they watched it happen, and less when they only heard about it. In an executive survey by Envoy, a workplace-technology firm, 96 percent admitted they notice work done in the office more than identical work done from home, even when they believe they treat both groups the same.  Additionally, when sharing a building for eight hours a day, accessibility becomes a given and things seem in control.  

Remote-first companies gave this up on purpose, in exchange for autonomy, employee well-being and a wider hiring pool. The trade was worth making. Fully remote workers report the highest well-being, and are less likely to quit, according to a new study of 7,700 employees. And research settled the productivity debate years ago. But some human nuances – camaraderie, a sense of fraternity, enthusiasm and shared vulnerability, need to be assured, reinforced and reminded. For a distributed team it is critical to hold on to and translate through screens. Formal signals alone -resumes and performance reviews – capture a fraction of what a person brings to a room. As an organiztion that prides itself and drives all its efforts towards delivering outcomes, this is one of them too.  

One week, twice a year, built to foster

thinkbridge has operated remote-first since it for the better part of this decade, and it delivers outcomes that compound advantage for clients on that model without a glitch. In the effort to design this understanding of human nuances better, twice a year, the entire team assembles in  our office in Pune, for a week the company calls Work from Work. The purpose is to have the whole team interact, observe and get to know each other better as colleagues and beyond. This week lets everyone asks the sharp questions, take initiative, guide their colleagues and carry the weight that never surfaces in a simple status update, stand-up calls or a resume.

Two conditions decide whether this works, and neither is guaranteed. Leaders need to observe and understand who is on their team. And that observation only becomes effective when they act on what they see, in directing, delegating and designing the organization to ensure our core value of delivering outcomes to everyone is met. And employees have to bond, communicate and be seen for who they are, what they bring to the table and how they can work on their own and with the organization to achieve the same goal. Or this exercise becomes an expensive group photo.  

Working towards better outcomes

A company that trusts its people enough to let them work from anywhere needs to reinforce what the shared goal is and understand who is good at what to achieve that. Proximity bias gets that on paper, but it comes with its own baggage. So, remote-first workplaces need to ask the question on purpose, in a room, on a fixed date, where everyone can see and understand for. That is the “Work from Work” week at thinkbridge. The exact cadence matters less. The goal and discipline behind is what matters. And it is designed to foster a workforce that delivers outcomes.  

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