I’m the CEO of a remote-first company. I’ll never ask my employees to return to the office.

Mike Landau started Park My Fleet as a remote-first company.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mike Landau, the founder and CEO of Park My Fleet, a remote-first company that provides services to commercial vehicle fleets. B-17 has verified his identity and employment. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I launched Park My Fleet during the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown. That gave me no choice but to start the company remotely and rely on the experience and maturity of the people we were hiring to get the job done right from home.

Before that, I firmly believed that you need to be in the office to build the team and have cohesion, but my thoughts on that changed completely during the pandemic. I was no longer geographically restricted to recruiting and acquiring talent.

Since then, I’ve found that you don’t need to be in the office to have cohesion among teams and execute; you can be successful without being together physically.

The world is my oyster for recruitment

As the company grew, I became increasingly enamored with remote work. From a recruitment perspective, the world is my oyster. I like that employees don’t have to think about their commute or can still do the school pickup, which helps their work-life balance.

It also doesn’t matter to me how you spend your work break time, and I believe we’ve had a very high employee retention rate because of this flexibility.

Most Park My Fleet employees are US-based, but we have tech teams in Costa Rica and Israel. Aside from that, we have some physical locations that require people to work on vehicles, and sales employees carry out client visits, but everyone else is remote. I trust people are disciplined enough to work from home and do the job.

We have a camera-on policy

Even though I was initially kind of forced to operate a remote-first company, I continue to see the significant benefits of being able to recruit people from all over the world.

We still try to get together and have quarterly team-building events or at least twice a year so people get some face time with their colleagues. We also have a camera-on policy, so everyone can put a face to a name.

I find it a lot easier to collaborate remotely, especially with things like sharing a screen online, rather than having people huddled around one screen and looking at something or trying to connect to a projector in a conference room.

I have an office in my house, making it a comfortable and enjoyable workplace. We have a work-from-anywhere policy, too; as long as employees comply with local employment laws, then I’m happy for them to do that. I’ve worked from hotels on the beach and in Europe while vacationing.

The one downside that I see with remote working is that it could be daunting for new hires, particularly if they are used to an office environment. Also, it might be challenging to get everybody up to speed, familiarize them with the organizational chart, and help them understand how the internal plumbing of the business works.

But we try to overcome that with face-to-face video calls. There are people we’ve interviewed for various roles who said they wanted to be in an office and would thrive better in that environment, which I respect.

RTO probably makes sense for Amazon

Large organizations like Amazon may need that level of connectivity, and that’s probably the right decision for them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with in-person office work; it makes sense in certain environments.

However, remote working is best for me as the CEO of a company growing nimbly and trying to get the right people in the right roles quickly and efficiently.

As an employee who joined a company as a remote worker, it would feel like a bait-and-switch move if the CEO then decided to change the remote work policy. I would find that very disconcerting.

I think it would not be good for company morale, and I have no intention of mandating a return to the office. While there are pros and cons to both, the pros outweigh the cons for us as an organization.