How Glance decided to make working from home the new normal indefinitely

Glance, the InMobi-owned lock screen content platform, made a decision that most technology companies talk about and then quietly walk back: it told its employees that working from home would be the permanent default, not a temporary measure waiting to expire. This was not a pandemic holdover. It was a deliberate structural choice, made after observing how its teams actually worked when physical offices were removed from the equation.

Glance's decision reveals that remote-first is a structural commitment, not a flexible perk with expiry dates.

The decision sits in a wider moment where organisations are sorting themselves into two camps. Some are pulling people back to desks with increasing firmness, citing collaboration, culture, and visibility. Others are reading the same evidence differently and concluding that presence in a building is a poor proxy for performance. Glance landed firmly in the second camp, and the reasoning behind that landing is worth examining closely.

What makes Glance's approach interesting is not the announcement itself. Remote work announcements are common. What matters is what follows the announcement: the tooling, the rituals, the hiring logic, the career structures, and the cultural defaults that either make a remote-first policy real or leave it as a line in a press release. The gap between policy and practice is where most organisations fall short, and Glance's choices in that gap reveal a great deal about what permanent really means.

What Glance Actually Decided and When

Glance announced that it would operate as a remote-first organisation, meaning employees would work from home as the standard arrangement rather than as an exception that needed approving. The office would remain available, but attending it would be a choice rather than an obligation. This distinction between remote-first and remote-optional matters enormously in practice, because optional arrangements tend to revert to the old default over time, especially when managers and senior leaders drift back to their desks.

The timing of the decision drew on what the company had observed during the extended period when remote work was forced rather than chosen. Productivity held. Some teams reported faster decision cycles without the friction of scheduling rooms and managing physical attendance. Glance also noted that its talent pool expanded when geography stopped being a constraint. Engineers and product people who lived outside major metro areas, or who simply preferred not to commute, became accessible candidates.

The distinction that matters

Remote-first and hybrid are not the same thing, even when both allow people to work from home. In a hybrid model, the office retains its primacy. Decisions get made in rooms, relationships form in corridors, and people who show up gain visibility advantages that remote colleagues do not. Remote-first inverts that: the default medium for all work is digital, and the office becomes a resource rather than the centre of gravity. Glance chose the inversion.

Why 'Permanent' Means Something Different to Remote Work

Calling a remote policy permanent is a stronger claim than it appears. Organisations can reverse a permanent decision faster than the word implies. What makes a remote-first commitment genuinely durable is whether the systems, incentives, and habits built around it would be expensive and disruptive to undo. A policy stays permanent when unwinding it would require rebuilding hiring pipelines, restructuring compensation bands, rewriting career frameworks, and asking people who relocated based on the promise to relocate again.

Glance's framing of its policy as indefinite signals an intention to build those dependencies. Once a company hires a team of engineers spread across five cities because location is irrelevant, calling everyone back to a single office is a redundancy event dressed as a culture initiative. The word permanent functions as a commitment device: it shapes the decisions that follow it in ways that make reversal increasingly costly.

What permanence demands from leadership

A permanent remote policy also asks something specific of leadership behaviour. If senior leaders spend most of their time in the office, even voluntarily, the gravitational pull on junior employees is real. Visibility bias, the tendency to favour people we see regularly, does not disappear because a policy document says it should. For a remote-first policy to hold, the people at the top have to model the default, not just permit it for others.

The Structural Commitments That Follow the Policy Announcement

A policy announcement without structural change is a statement of aspiration. The structural commitments that make remote-first real fall into several categories, and Glance's approach touches most of them. Hiring geography is the first lever. A company that continues to source candidates within commuting distance of its main offices has not truly gone remote-first; it has simply allowed existing staff to stay home. Expanding the hiring perimeter to include any location where the company can legally employ people is what changes the talent equation.

The second lever is compensation. Some organisations apply location-based pay adjustments, paying less to employees in lower cost-of-living areas. Others pay a single rate regardless of location. Each choice has downstream effects on fairness, recruitment competitiveness, and cultural cohesion. Glance's approach to this question shapes what remote-first means to someone deciding whether to accept an offer from a smaller city.

Structural change means hiring geography expands and compensation logic gets rebuilt from the ground up.

Career progression is the third lever, and the most commonly neglected one. Remote-first fails when promotion decisions still depend on who attends leadership offsites, who is seen contributing in a meeting room, or who manages to informally build relationships with decision-makers over lunch. If the criteria for advancement remain proximity-biased, the policy is cosmetic. Glance's structural credibility rests on whether its performance and progression frameworks assess contribution in ways that do not disadvantage people who have never set foot in the building.

Before announcing a remote-first policy, audit every promotion decision made in the previous two years and check whether physical attendance correlated with advancement. If it did, the criteria need changing before the policy goes out.

How Culture Shifts When the Office Is No Longer the Default

Culture does not live in a building, but a lot of the informal mechanisms that create shared culture do. Spontaneous conversations in corridors, shared lunches, the ambient awareness of what colleagues are working on, these are not trivial, and removing them does not automatically produce something better in their place. Glance's shift to remote-first required thinking carefully about what culture-building looks like when none of those mechanisms are available by default.

The answer most remote-first organisations arrive at is that informal culture needs to be engineered deliberately rather than allowed to emerge. This means creating structured time for connection that does not require a shared physical space. It means documenting decisions so that people who were not in a given conversation can understand what was decided and why, rather than relying on verbal hand-offs between people who happened to be present. It means treating asynchronous communication as the primary medium rather than an inferior substitute for real interaction.

What gets harder and what gets easier

Onboarding new employees into a remote-first culture is genuinely harder. Without physical immersion in an environment, new joiners take longer to absorb unwritten norms and build the informal relationships that make work feel navigable. Glance addresses this through structured onboarding programmes that make the implicit explicit: who to talk to, how decisions get made, what good work looks like here. What gets easier is the ability to hire and retain people who were previously excluded by geography, and the reduction in the low-level friction that commuting and fixed schedules impose on daily cognitive load.

The Tooling Overhaul That Remote-First Demands

Remote-first organisations run on different tools than office-first ones, and the gap is not just about which video conferencing platform you use. The tooling stack has to support asynchronous collaboration as its primary mode, which means documentation tools, project management systems, and communication platforms all need to be chosen and configured for a world where not everyone is online at the same time or in the same time zone.

Glance's tech-native background gives it an advantage here that most legacy organisations do not have. A company that grew up building software products already has engineering-grade habits around documentation, version control, and written communication. Adopting remote-first tooling is an extension of practices that already exist rather than a cultural overhaul starting from zero.

Map your communication tools against two questions: does this work asynchronously, and does it create a searchable record? If a tool fails both, it is creating invisible work for the people who were not in the conversation when it happened.

• Async-first messaging platforms where threads are searchable and persistent
• Document-based decision logs that record context, not just outcomes
• Project management tools visible to everyone, not just the team lead
• Video recording for presentations that do not require live attendance
• Virtual shared spaces for informal interaction that replace corridor time

The risk in any tooling overhaul is notification overload. A team that was once interrupted by physical tap-on-the-shoulder can become a team interrupted by constant pings across six platforms simultaneously. Remote-first tooling needs to include clear norms about response expectations, quiet hours, and the difference between urgent and merely visible communication.

When Skipping Discovery Costs More Than the Decision Saved

On a dating app project we worked on, the client wanted to move quickly into build and skip discovery on the messaging component of the product. The brief was tight, the timeline felt urgent, and the assumption was that messaging was a solved problem. What emerged was a generic messaging system that allowed automated and fake messages, directly contradicting the verified, bot-free onboarding the rest of the product had been built around. The mismatch required a complete rewrite of that section, adding roughly £15,000 in budget and two months to the schedule.

The parallel for Glance's remote-first shift is direct. Organisations that announce a permanent remote policy without doing the discovery work first, understanding where collaboration actually happens, which roles depend on physical proximity, what informal learning looks like for junior staff, end up with the same kind of mismatch. The policy says one thing, the lived experience says another, and closing that distance costs far more than the upfront thinking would have.

Discovery in an organisational context

Discovery for a remote-first transition means asking specific questions before the announcement rather than after. Which teams have work patterns that genuinely benefit from co-location? Where does mentorship currently happen, and how does it need to be replaced? What does a new joiner need in their first thirty days that the office currently provides by accident? Glance's decision to go permanent suggests these questions were asked and answered before the policy was named, not left to be solved once employees started holding them up as problems.

Run a two-week audit before any remote-first announcement. Ask every team to log where their significant decisions were made, who was present, and whether the outcome would have been the same had that conversation happened asynchronously. The results will show exactly where the structural work needs to go.

The Employee Experience Redesign Nobody Budgets For

Remote-first changes the employee experience at every touchpoint, and the budget for redesigning that experience is almost always underestimated. The visible costs, laptops, home office allowances, video conferencing licences, get approved because they are tangible. The invisible costs, the time required to design new onboarding journeys, to retrain managers in async communication, to build the psychological safety that makes remote workers feel connected rather than isolated, get absorbed or ignored.

Glance's shift requires thinking about employee experience the way product teams think about user experience: as a designed thing rather than a natural outcome. The moments that matter in an office-first environment, the first day walking in, the weekly all-hands in a room, the informal chat after a meeting, have remote equivalents that need to be designed rather than left to chance. Without that design work, remote-first produces a technically distributed team that culturally behaves as though it is always in the middle of a bad patch.

The employee experience redesign also includes managing the people who find remote work genuinely harder. Not every role, personality, or life situation is well-suited to working from home. Parents with young children in small houses, early-career employees who learn by observation, people who struggle with the boundary between work and home, these are real constituencies, and a permanent policy needs to address them rather than assume the default works for everyone.

Why Remote-First Is Harder to Reverse Than It Looks

Once a company has gone remote-first in any meaningful way, pulling back is structurally complex. The talent acquired under a remote-first promise relocated, arranged childcare around flexible schedules, or accepted roles precisely because geography was not a constraint. A reversal is a broken contract, and the people most likely to leave when a reversal is announced are often the ones with the most options: the experienced engineers, the senior designers, the product leads who were recruited because of the remote promise in the first place.

We see the same dynamic in product decisions. On the sports club app we worked on, the team warned early that continuing to add features without launching would exhaust the budget before anything reached users. The warning was noted but not acted on, features kept accumulating, and the project ended with the entire budget spent and nothing published to the app store. Reversing a direction is far harder once the investment has compounded. Remote-first organisations face the same compounding: every month of distributed hiring, every relocated employee, every async process embedded in the workflow makes the cost of reversal higher.

The talent dependency that locks the decision in

Remote-first also changes the talent pool in both directions. A company that has operated remotely for two or more years will have hired people who have never worked in an office in their professional lives, or who have deliberately chosen roles that do not require it. The skills, habits, and expectations of that workforce are calibrated to a different environment. Returning them to an office is not just logistically difficult. It produces a mismatch between how people work and where they are asked to do it, which tends to resolve through attrition rather than adaptation.

What Other Organisations Can Learn From Glance's Approach

The clearest lesson from Glance's decision is that the word used to describe a remote policy matters less than the structural weight behind it. Calling something permanent while keeping all the infrastructure of an office-first culture in place produces the worst of both: a distributed team that operates as though it should be in a building, with none of the informal benefits that proximity actually provides. The structural commitments have to follow the announcement, or the announcement is noise.

The second lesson is about timing. Our experience working across product and experience design projects consistently shows that the most damaging moves are the ones made too quickly without adequate thinking, and the ones made too slowly to be meaningful. Glance's approach appears to have sat with the question long enough to build genuine conviction before making a public commitment. That sequencing, think, then commit, rather than announce and then figure it out, changes the quality of everything that follows.

Where other organisations tend to go wrong

The most common failure mode is announcing remote-first while keeping the performance and visibility frameworks of an office-first organisation. Promotion decisions still favour people who attended the right meetings. Senior leaders cluster in a central office and make decisions informally between sessions. New joiners find that the written culture described in the handbook does not match the verbal culture they observe in practice. Glance's value as a reference point is precisely in showing what avoiding these failures requires: the policy, the systems, the behaviours, and the resource allocation that give the policy its weight.

Conclusion

Glance's decision to make remote work the permanent default is interesting not because remote work is new, but because making it genuinely permanent requires a degree of structural commitment that most organisations stop short of. The policy is the easy part. The hard part is rebuilding hiring geography, performance frameworks, onboarding experiences, tooling stacks, and leadership behaviour to match.

The parallel to product work is close. We saw on the dating app project that skipping the discovery phase for even one component of a product, in that case messaging, produced a mismatch that cost £15,000 and two months to repair. The same logic applies to organisational design. Announcing a policy without doing the underlying design work creates a version of the product that says one thing and does another, and the repair cost compounds with every day the gap is left open.

What Glance offers the wider conversation is a worked example of what it looks like to commit rather than hedge. Remote-first organisations that succeed at it tend to share a common trait: they treated the shift as a design problem, not a HR policy problem, and they allocated the thinking and budget that a design problem requires. The organisations still struggling with it tend to have done the opposite, announced first, designed later, and found that later never quite arrived.

If you are working through what a genuine remote-first commitment would mean for your organisation, or trying to understand where the gap between policy and practice is costing you, let's talk about your employee experience design.

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