Nick Francis has been building Help Scout as a fully remote company since before remote work was a movement. At Running Remote 2026, he presented the clearest framework I have heard for distinguishing between organisations that are remote by policy and organisations that are remote by design — and what the gap between them means for talent, culture, and performance in the decade ahead.
Two waves, fundamentally different demands
The first wave of remote work was involuntary. Companies went remote because a global pandemic gave them no choice. The standards were low because everyone was improvising. Being remote at all was the differentiator.
The second wave, Francis argued, is voluntary — and voluntary means competitive. Companies now choose whether to offer remote flexibility, which means the employees choosing to work for them have genuine alternatives. The talent market has evolved to expect remote capability, not celebrate it. 98% of workers want remote work at least some of the time. 46% would consider leaving if forced back to office full-time. The talent pool for distributed companies is exponentially larger than it was pre-pandemic.
In this environment, remote-friendly is not enough. It is now the floor, not the ceiling.
Remote-friendly versus remote-excellent
The distinction Francis drew is precise. Remote-friendly organisations treat remote as a policy — a document that says people can work from home. Remote-excellent organisations treat it as an operating model — every decision, every system, every process is evaluated through the lens of distributed work.
Practically, this shows up in several specific ways. Remote-friendly organisations default to synchronous meetings for decisions and communication. Remote-excellent organisations default to asynchronous work, with strong writing cultures and documentation practices. Remote-friendly organisations value presence, consciously or not. Remote-excellent organisations value outcomes, and have built systems to measure them.
The Remote Excellence Audit
Francis introduced five dimensions his team has used to evaluate where organisations actually stand on the remote excellence spectrum.
The first is the company playbook — the operating system manual. GitLab’s public handbook, built over more than a decade, is the gold standard: a document so complete that anyone can understand how the company operates without ever working there. Key questions: can a new hire understand operations before their first meeting? Do cultural norms get reviewed and updated regularly, or filed away? Does work move forward without real-time communication?
The second dimension is transparency. Buffer exemplifies this through their Open hub, sharing analytics, metrics, goals, and even salary information publicly. At Help Scout, every significant decision generates a decision record: who made it, who was involved, what context was considered, and the outcome. These records post automatically to a public Slack channel daily. Leaders must share updates and invite questions in the open — the CEO who wrote 230 Friday notes over many years was not doing extra work. He was doing the fundamental work of distributed leadership.
The third dimension is healthy accountability. Francis introduced the ARPA framework: Accountable (one person), Responsible (one or two people for execution), Participants (all involved), Advisor (particularly important for CEOs to stay in an advisory role rather than unconsciously taking over decisions). Every spec, initiative, and strategy document at Help Scout begins with an ARPA. Feedback must be frequent, written, and normalised — remote organisations make it easier to avoid hard conversations, which is a structural risk.
The fourth dimension is team connection. Francis described connection as rocket fuel — it makes everything move faster when trust is established. Help Scout has run over fifteen all-hands retreats, with detailed public playbooks for each one. They institutionalised ‘fika’ — a Swedish concept of coffee with a friend — using a Slack bot that randomly pairs employees monthly for non-work conversations. In-person onboarding radically accelerates new hire integration. The 60-40 principle for retreats: 60% fun and connection, 40% work.
The fifth dimension is hiring. Remote excellence in hiring means testing for the skills remote work actually requires: strong writing, the ability to work without real-time supervision, comfort with ambiguity and async communication. Paying for project work during interviews. Requiring in-person onboarding for new employees. Building global infrastructure for talent — Help Scout’s requirement is four hours of time zone overlap between teammates.
The AI lever
Francis closed with a practical point about documentation and AI. If decisions live in people’s heads or buried in Slack threads, AI will amplify the mess — searching across unstructured chaos and returning incoherent results. But with three years of documented decisions, properly structured, AI creates tangible impact on speed, onboarding, and organisational coherence.
The organisations that have been building remote excellence infrastructure — playbooks, decision records, transparent communication norms — are now the ones best positioned to leverage AI. The investment in writing things down was never just about remote work. It was about building an organisation that can think and learn at scale.
