This article was originally published in Top-Tier Support, Front’s Head of Support Kenji Hayward’s LinkedIn newsletter for customer service leaders. For more frontline advice and actionable insights, subscribe today to get them delivered to your inbox every other week.
Back in 2022, I faced my own return-to-office (RTO) mandate.
Here’s why I agreed to go to our SF office twice a week while keeping the rest of my team remote.
My team was crushing it. We hit 100% CSAT for the first time in 2021. Why force them to give up remote work when we saw so much success?
Mathilde Collin (Front’s CEO at the time) always valued the irreplaceable benefits of in-person interactions at the office. She helped me understand that my presence in the office energized other teams.
Team collaboration. Customer support had just restructured to be a part of the engineering, product, and design teams, and being in the office with them would allow me to build partnerships faster.
Why I fought for my team to stay remote
There’s a big debate about whether or not employees are more productive in the office or from home. For support, context switching is the ultimate productivity killer. When my team was in-office pre-pandemic, they were often bombarded with impromptu questions that would distract them from their tickets or delay them from helping customers on live chat.
Customer support is the perfect role to be remote as long as agents have all the tools they need. Shameless plug that Front made it way easier for my team to collaborate — if anything, I noticed a significant increase in the team’s efficiency after we went remote. Despite the team being spread across the U.S., France, Ireland, Australia, Chile, and the Philippines, 100% still agree they could collaborate effectively in our latest team engagement survey.
We had some of the highest scores through our company-wide engagement surveys done through Lattice. 100% of my team understood how their work contributes to company goals. 96% thought they had the right capabilities to do their work and the autonomy to do their job well.
We’ve experienced zero regretted attrition and have the highest average tenure of 3.125 years compared to the 2.16 years company average. We still continue many of the remote programs we implemented over the pandemic to boost team morale and stay connected, whether through group queue-crushing time, dedicated mandatory fun, our annual Secret Support Santa, or our quarterly team cooking class.
As we expand our global support (we’re hiring!), I wanted to make sure we continue hiring remotely to widen our talent pool. I negotiated with leadership that I would use office time for cross-team collaboration but my team stays remote — although they always have the option to work from one of our offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Dublin, or Santiago if they like.
The unexpected perks of office life
I love my hybrid office schedule. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are my remote days, so that’s when I book time with my fully remote team. These are also the days that I’m able to do deep work I can’t do at the office, like planning strategy, completing action items for projects, and creating content.
I reserve Tuesdays and Thursdays for my in-person meetings, typically with other leaders or Fronteers in the office so we can take advantage of the face-to-face time. I’m rarely at my desk because I’m usually darting around the office meeting people and getting pulled into different conversations.
Returning to the office confirmed its benefits:
Stronger interdepartmental relationships. I got closer to cross-functional teams like marketing and we partnered on lots of brand awareness and thought leadership projects.
Having a (literal) seat at the table for more conversations, decision-making, and strategy plans.
Faster, more effective collaboration. Projects move faster when you can bypass meetings or emails and tap your coworker’s shoulder instead.
This isn’t to say that the transition from remote to office life was easy. Over the pandemic, I welcomed not one but two little ones, so I had to get over the emotional separation and feeling guilty for leaving. But I soon found a rhythm that gave me my optimal work-life balance. Here’s what my work week looks like:
I wake up at 4 am every morning and squeeze in a quick 5-10 minute meditation. On office days, leaving by 4:30 am means there’s no traffic going from East Bay to SF, so I get to the office by 5 am — giving me a good chunk of time that overlaps with the team I manage in Paris. I leave the office around 2 pm to avoid rush hour and get home early enough to pick up the kids from school and give my wife a break.
On remote days, I follow a similar schedule. Wake up at 4 am, hit the gym, and then aim to be at a coworking space for the same working hours of 5 am to 2 pm. The key is to really separate work from home time. I wanted to be present for both and was getting stressed when I was feeling pulled from both ends at the same time. Not having an at-home office is helpful for my kids (and my sanity), which is why I’m able to get more done in the day and not bring any work home.
More tools for your support team
TheLoops is hosting a fireside chat with me and Mariena Quintanilla and we’ll be sharing our strategies for building AI-enabled support teams
I’m giving my unfiltered POV on AI’s impact on CX at PartnerHero’s webinar, where I’ll be joined by Mercer Smith, Erica Clayton, Sarah Caminiti, and Ashley Hayslett
Trying to improve cross-functional collaboration outside of support? Break free from your silo with these three partnerships.
Written by Kenji Hayward
Originally Published: 11 February 2025