Remote work isn’t the future of work, it’s the present. The forced experiment of the early 2020s turned into a permanent shift, and a large share of paid working days in the US are still done from home compared to before the pandemic. Today, employees not only embrace remote work, they expect it, and many say they would not be prepared to return to a job that didn’t accommodate for some kind of remote working.
The sentiment towards remote work from an employee perspective is largely positive, with a surprisingly large number of workers saying they have been able to maintain or even improve their productivity while working from home. That’s why, in a post-pandemic world, so many of the remote-first companies who had already established effective fully-remote teams are thriving. In this article, I’ll examine some of the best remote-first teams you could be working for, with a focus on what to look for when considering if a company is truly fully-remote, and how the company culture can reflect a remote-first mentality.
Here’s a breakdown of the article:
- State of remote work today
- Remote-first vs remote-friendly
- Questions to consider when looking at remote-first companies
- Best remote-first companies to work for in a post-pandemic world
Let’s start with the current state of remote work; what can we learn from recent reports and statistics?
State of remote work today
Remote work is no longer a crisis response or a temporary perk. It has settled into a permanent, high level, and the data makes clear it is here to stay. Here’s a breakdown of the key findings.
Remote work has settled at a high, permanent level
The pandemic-era spike never fully reversed. Ongoing research from WFH Research puts the share of paid working days done from home in the US at roughly a quarter, many times higher than it was before 2020. Video calls, shared documents, and asynchronous updates are now the default way distributed teams get work done, not a temporary workaround.
Most people are just as, or more, productive working remotely
The productivity fears never materialized. The majority of employees report being just as productive, or more productive, working remotely, and most managers now agree that remote and hybrid teams get more done, not less. For focused, output-driven work, the office is no longer the obvious winner it was once assumed to be.
Flexibility now drives where people choose to work
Workers are willing to change jobs to protect how they work. Gallup has found that around nine in ten remote-capable employees want to keep working remotely at least part of the time, and a large share say they would look for a new job rather than return to the office five days a week. That is why the return-to-office push has cooled: only a small minority of leaders now plan a full return-to-office mandate, and most companies that tried one have settled into some form of hybrid or fully remote work instead.
Remote-first vs remote-friendly
It’s worth distinguishing between remote-first and remote-friendly, or whatever you want to call companies that don’t prioritize remote work but still accommodate it in some capacity.
- Remote-first companies will, by default, be structured around remote teams, and generally will have been built from the ground up to accommodate remote working. These types of companies, typically tech startups around the SMB scale, are often fully-remote, and will generally have more experience with remote work best practices. Often these companies are offering purely digital products or services.
- Remote-friendly companies will generally have some remote capacity alongside a dedicated physical center of operations. Many companies became remote-friendly out of necessity and later pulled people back toward the office. Plenty were remote-friendly even earlier, in the sense that they employed remote workers to fulfil certain functions like marketing or customer service, where there was no material output.
So whether a company is remote-first or remote-friendly, that is, fully- or partially-remote, will often depend on what kind of product or service they are offering. The clearest modern signal of a true remote-first company is that it works asynchronously: instead of expecting everyone online at the same time, it writes things down, documents decisions, and lets people contribute across time zones. If a company still runs on back-to-back meetings and hallway conversations, remote employees will always be second-class citizens, no matter what the job description says.
Questions to consider when looking at remote-first companies
If you’re considering working for a remote-first company, these questions might help you understand whether the company is a good fit for you.
Is the company fully remote?
Culture between a partially- and fully-remote company will be very different. Fully-remote teams generally go to greater lengths to build an accommodating company culture that involves all members of the team, regardless of location or time zone. Sure, this is possible in a partially remote team, but things can become more complicated if only half of the team is remote while the rest are co-working daily in the company office. Consider what kind of work setup would work best for you, and be sure to understand if the company is remote-first (fully remote) or remote-friendly (partially remote with a significant localized workforce).
What kind of remote work software does the company use?
Consider what remote software the company uses. Are they trying to collaborate on company documents or processes with Microsoft Word in the context of a globally distributed workforce, or do they use something like Google Docs, Notion, or purpose-built software to work remotely to facilitate faster, easier collaboration? How do they manage, share, and continuously improve their internal processes? A fully or even partially remote company needs a way to seamlessly collaborate on work-in-progress process documents and allow for frictionless updates. Just as important, do they use asynchronous communication deliberately, and can they leverage remote work tools like Slack and Zoom to full effect, or do they seem to be fumbling with remote communication?
What is the company’s long-term stance on remote work?
Whether a company happened to be remote before 2020 matters far less now than where it stands on remote work for the long term. Is remote a permanent, protected part of how the company operates, or is it under constant review and one leadership change away from a return-to-office mandate? Ask directly. Knowing how committed the company is to operating remotely can help you understand what kind of company culture to expect, and ambiguity or evasiveness here is a red flag: it usually means remote work is tolerated rather than designed for.
Best remote-first companies to work for in a post-pandemic world
It’s almost impossible to say who is the single “best” remote company, but since the aim here is to focus on the best remote-first companies, that is a more reasonable ask. Here’s a list of remote-first companies that stand out, based on the criteria discussed above for what constitutes a genuine remote-first, versus a merely remote-friendly, organization.
Process Street
Process Street is an AI-native Compliance Operations Platform. It brings governed documentation, automated workflow execution, and built-in AI into a single system, so teams can run complex processes correctly and prove every step was followed. It has been fully remote from the start, with a New York base and a small, globally distributed team that works from wherever its people choose to live.
Remote-first or remote-friendly? Remote-first, with no offices at all.
Benefits:
- Work from anywhere. Fully remote-first team with no offices.
- Equity for all full-time roles.
- Great healthcare, dental, and vision coverage for US employees and their families.
- An annual company offsite, focused on building meaningful personal relationships with your colleagues.
- An extremely flexible approach to balancing work and life.
- A genuinely unlimited vacation policy. Most folks take three to four weeks of vacation, plus their major holidays, and a company-wide week off in December.
What employees say: “Our culture was built to be remote from the start, so we’ve long embraced the idea of belonging and collaboration from afar. Our values encourage all employees to act like an owner, empowering them to be autonomous, because we believe the people closest to a problem usually have the best solutions.”
Backed by leading investors including Accel, Process Street runs on the remote-first operating model it helps other companies adopt. If that sounds like your kind of team, you can see current openings on the Process Street careers page.
Close
Close is a sales CRM tool that started out as a semi-remote company. Today they are a fully distributed team spread across the US, EU, and beyond, with no headquarters at all, and they are deliberately async-first, judging people on what they deliver rather than the number of hours worked.
Remote-first or remote-friendly? Remote-first, fully distributed with no office.
Benefits:
- Twice-yearly team retreats.
- Flexible work hours across time zones.
- A monthly coworking stipend for people who want occasional office space.
What employees say: “I can’t stress enough how much emphasis is placed on deliverables instead of the number of hours worked in a week. Managers and the CEO work hard with individual contributors to agree on realistic projects, deadlines, and deliverables, and to empower employees to go out and do what they’re hired to do. You can work from anywhere around the world, and travelling doesn’t need to destroy your PTO. I have a voice in the company.”
Zapier
Founded in 2011, Zapier has always operated as an entirely remote company, and today its team is spread across more than 40 countries around the world. As they put it: “We help people easily connect and automate the apps they use every day so they can get more work done with less effort.” Partners and developers, including Google, Salesforce, Intuit, and Dropbox, use Zapier to offer their customers integrations with thousands of other apps.
Remote-first or remote-friendly? Remote-first, with no office since day one.
Benefits:
- Work from anywhere.
- Competitive salary, profit sharing, and a retirement plan.
- An unlimited vacation policy.
- Great healthcare.
- Twice-yearly company retreats.
- 14 weeks of paid leave for new parents.
- A full computer and software setup, plus a professional development allowance.
What employees say: “The people. The team makes working from home much easier than I expected, and they are the nicest group I’ve ever worked with. The work is challenging and everyone helps each other succeed.”
Atlassian
Atlassian is a tech giant responsible for major collaboration tools used worldwide like Jira, Trello, and Confluence. It maintains a physical HQ in Australia alongside a globally distributed company, and it has turned distributed work into a formal program called Team Anywhere. Employees can work from home, from an office, or from anywhere they are legally able to, and Atlassian has stuck with the model rather than reversing it. The vast majority of its people say Team Anywhere lets them do their best work, and it has helped land Atlassian on best-workplace lists.
Remote-first or remote-friendly? Distributed by design through the Team Anywhere program.
Benefits:
- Freedom to work from home, an office, or anywhere in between.
- A dedicated budget for a coworking space or home office setup.
- Paid days of leave for volunteering.
- An annual education budget for growth and development opportunities.
What employees say: “Team Anywhere means I get to design my own workday. Remote onboarding was smooth and organized, management genuinely asks for our input, and there is a long list of remote events that keep everyone motivated.”
GitLab
GitLab is one of the largest all-remote companies in the world. It has no offices at all, and its team of several thousand works across more than 65 countries. GitLab is best known for its public company handbook, an openly published guide to how the company operates that has become a reference point for remote-first teams everywhere.
Remote-first or remote-friendly? All-remote since it was founded, with no offices and team members in 65-plus countries.
Benefits:
- Truly location-independent work, with no office to commute to.
- Flexible hours built around results, not attendance.
- A documented, transparent culture anyone can read before applying.
- Growth and equity opportunities at a public company.
What makes it stand out: because GitLab documents almost everything in the open, you can read exactly how the company runs remote work before you ever apply. Few employers give candidates that level of transparency.
The future of remote work
It’s clear that remote work isn’t going away any time soon; in fact, it seems like the opposite is true, as more and more companies adopt remote work as the default. The live tension is no longer whether remote works, but how companies handle the pull between flexibility and return-to-office pressure.
One of the most important things employers can do, whether fully- or partially-remote, is communicate clearly with their employees about their future plans for remote work. As an employee, ambiguity or uncertainty from your employer when you seek this kind of clarification can be a big red flag, indicating that perhaps the company is not as well-equipped to deal with remote work as they might like you to think. Lack of communication leads to anxiety, and anxious employees are known to consistently perform worse.
At Process Street, we prioritize clear, over-communicated process, and we have run as a fully remote company from the beginning. If you want to work somewhere that was built for remote from the ground up, you can see the positions currently available on our careers page.
Frequently asked questions about remote-first companies
What is the difference between remote-first, remote-friendly, and hybrid?
A remote-first company is structured around distributed work by default, usually with no central office and an async-first culture. A remote-friendly company keeps an office as its center of gravity and allows remote work on top of it. Hybrid sits in between, with employees splitting time between home and an office, often on a set number of in-office days per week.
How can I tell if a company is truly remote-first before I accept a job?
Look for a company with no mandatory office days, an async-first culture, documented processes, and a clear public stance that remote work is permanent. Ask how decisions get made, what tools the team uses to collaborate, and whether leadership itself works remotely. Genuine remote-first companies answer those questions easily.
What are the red flags of a fake remote job posting?
Watch for phrases like “remote, but must be able to come on-site as needed,” vague answers about how long remote will last, heavy reliance on synchronous meetings, and monitoring or activity-tracking software. Those signal a company that tolerates remote work rather than one designed for it.
Which companies have stayed fully remote despite return-to-office mandates?
Companies like Process Street, Close, Zapier, and GitLab have remained fully remote and have no plans to change, while Atlassian continues its distributed Team Anywhere model. These companies built their cultures around distributed work, so remote isn’t a policy they can quietly reverse.