Work is a Verb #18 - REMOTE Score: The six letters that tell you if a remote company is worth your time


Work is a Verb

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We measure everything.

Revenue per employee. Time-to-hire. Net Promoter Score. Quarterly OKRs broken into weekly KPIs broken into daily standups. We've built dashboards for dashboards.

But ask most companies about their culture... and you get vibes and platitudes.


What gets measured gets managed

Even the crunchier numbers like cost of turnover and time-to-hire are generally overlooked. There's just a few more dots to connect between people metrics and revenue. It's undoubtedly worth the effort but there's enough friction that companies often can't be bothered.

If you've ever gotten a higher offer from another company and your employer failed to match it, this right here is exhibit A. If you actually do the math, it is almost always cheaper to retain talent... but no one is doing the math.

If companies are ignoring easy quantitative metrics like that, it's not surprising to see that they are doing even worse about tracking qualitative things like culture.

Sometimes it feels like they don't even want to know, as if they don't actually have a culture problem if they never give employees a forum to vent. Other times, companies genuinely want to know but outsource the survey process to companies with a defined agenda, lax anonymity controls and lazy survey design.

That's why we created the REMOTE Score™ - a framework specifically built to assess what actually matters for distributed teams.

What REMOTE Score Measures

The acronym isn't just cute branding.

Each letter represents a critical dimension of remote-first culture:

Retention — Are employees choosing to stay? Not because they're stuck, but because you're actively adding value to their lives.

Engagement — Are people invested in helping the organization succeed, or just clocking in from a different location?

Morale — Can your team maintain belief in the mission when things get hard? Great morale isn't the absence of bad days, it's building an organization that is resilient to them.

Onboarding — Are new hires integrated into your culture, or falling through the cracks because no one can see them struggling?

Technology & Support — Do your tools and processes enable great work, or are they a daily source of friction?

Equity — Does everyone have genuine voice and meaningful stake, regardless of location, background, or position?

Why This Matters

REMOTE Score asks: "Is this environment designed for people to do their best work?"

Until now the only answer was to waste your time applying to a job, interviewing and then working for a company that doesn't deserve you.

We built REMOTE Score to cut through that fog.

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💭 COMMUNITY PULSE

Last week we asked what your company measures during performance reviews and the results were clear...

If you're working to drag your company into the future, you are far from alone!

🎯 WORTH YOUR TIME
Ethan Mollick’s new piece on Gemini 3 is the rare AI article that actually shows, not just tells. Instead of listing benchmarks, he has Gemini 3 build a tiny playable game from an old tweet idea, then turns it loose in Google’s Antigravity IDE to behave more like a junior teammate than a chatbot.


If you're trying to keep up with AI but getting tired of nonstop hype, it's worth a read.

📰 REMOTE RUNDOWN

💻 Hybrid IT Jobs Quietly Go Remote-First: ACM's CareerNews highlights a Spiceworks piece on how the tech skills gap is reshaping IT work: 76% of U.S. IT employers say they struggle to find skilled talent and this is translating into an increasing number of remote positions (now more than half).

🎯 Job Seekers Aren't "Entitled", They're Done Settling: A Forbes Coaches Council piece argues that today's candidates are looking for more than a paycheck: they want stability, growth and flexibility. For anyone who's ever felt "too picky" asking for fair pay and sane expectations, this is useful external validation that your standards are actually where the market is moving.

🌍 Flexibility is Winning the Long Game: Robert Half's new remote work report finds that flexible work continues to stabilize, regardless of what other headlines might tell you. In Q3 2025, new U.S. professional job postings were 64% fully on-site, 24% hybrid, and 12% fully remote, and hybrid postings have climbed from 15% in 2023 to nearly a quarter of all new roles. Only 19% of job seekers say a fully in-office job is their top choice.

P.S. This is the first in a series on REMOTE Score. Next week: Retention and why the obvious reasons it matters (turnover is expensive, job searching is exhausting) don't even crack the top three.

If you know someone building or leading a remote team, forward this their way. The more people thinking critically about distributed culture, the better.

Working remotely—but never alone,

Jim


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