One of the hesitations I have about services like Teamflow or Tangle that attempt to re-create a more skeuomorphic workplace experience with video, audio, or VR is that the more synchronous you make workplace communication tools the more narrow you make your market. Many teams enjoy working remotely precisely because they aren’t constrained (or judged) by the norms that came with offices: an arrival time, an expectation that you can be seen at your desk, and a willingness to be interrupted.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday published a report stating that seems to put a name to this idea: workers prefer flexible hours over flexible location:

Ninety-five percent of people surveyed want flexible hours, compared with 78% of workers who want location flexibility, according to a new report from Future Forum, a consortium focused on reimagining the future of work led by Slack Technologies Inc.

The new data, collected in November 2021 from a survey of more than 10,000 knowledge workers, offers a snapshot into just how popular hybrid arrangements have become in the second year of the pandemic, how virtually all workers prize schedule flexibility above all and the growing concerns that many bosses have about how to keep promotions and pay fair when some employees are in the office while others stay home.

The benefits of remote work, as we’ve been living it for the past two years, are at odds with the kind of benefits that these collaboration and communication services are trying to provide. And this kind of work culture is a very sticky kind, because “cheating” on your desk benefits each individual individually. This means that if a team believes that sitting at their desks for the same set of hours and being available to each other in a drop-in fashion during those hours is so important that it warrants the loss in individual flexibility, you still need to have some strict group accountability in order to keep it going.

This is one of the reasons Slack works so well -- it’s somewhat synchronous, but location agnostic; so I can be present and contribute at work while also running an errand to the grocery store, or sitting at my kid’s tennis match. So it facilitates productivity while allowing people to “cheat.”

I think there is a smaller market for teams that really do hunker down and do collaborative work on consistent hours, but I worry that as workplaces become more distributed across time zones, and more startups are choosing to build asynchronous-first teams, the teams for whom a virtual office-like experience is attractive will continue to shrink…at least as a full-time offering.

So the challenge for these services is to find the model for synchronous experiences that doesn’t fall into the trap of assuming that their customers will sit at their desks for reliable hours, but that don’t just overlap with meeting space or event offerings like Oculus’ Horizon Workrooms or Hopin.