Remote work, for all of its momentum, has gained its share of critics over the years. Corporate and government leaders regularly reissue return-to-office mandates, citing performance concerns. Professor and bestselling author Scott Galloway has described remote work as one of the worst things to happen to young people. The New York Times recently reported on a study finding that “younger workers suffered career-wise by working from home, receiving less training and fewer opportunities for advancement.”
As the leader of Tulsa Remote, the largest remote worker attraction program in the country, you might be surprised to know that I agree with most of these critiques — just not their solutions. While COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of remote work, too few resources and organizational investments have been made to support employees and managers in this new professional environment.
How Tulsa succeeded with remote work
As a legacy oil and gas town that suffered from population decline — and a “brain drain” of college graduates like many of its regional counterparts — Tulsa launched an experimental program in 2018 to attract remote workers and diversify its economy. While the program depended on workers’ ability to perform their job from anywhere, its success would hinge on redefining what it meant to “work remotely.” If newcomers to town worked in isolation in their new apartments, spending most of their days on video calls with no connection to the community around them, we knew they wouldn’t be likely to stay. To combat this, our program overcorrected for the deficiencies of remote work, investing in in-person experiences and human connection.
In practice, this meant that a remote worker would be assigned a “member integration specialist” when they arrived in Tulsa, who would provide one-on-one support to connect them to groups, activities, and volunteer opportunities that fit their interests. Tulsa Remote offered free coworking space so that members could work alongside their peers and hosted several events each month, from happy hours to baseball games and trips to museums, to facilitate in-person engagement. To further encourage connection, the program leveraged Slack, with hundreds of available channels broken down by shared interests, origin city, or industry, for remote workers to find others who share their interests or backgrounds.
By facilitating connection, we created natural opportunities for mentorship and reproduced the opportunities that arise from being in proximity to coworkers. Members would help each other through professional challenges such as learning new tools, dealing with management issues, advocating for promotions, and even negotiating salaries. We began offering professional development opportunities led by our members to support upskilling in remote careers. Our members were so hungry for these trainings that we recently launched a remote work certification course in partnership with NYU to help workers navigate this new professional environment and manage distributed or hybrid teams. Staying true to our belief in the value of in-person connection, three-quarters of this course will be offered virtually, with the culminating module hosted in Tulsa.
Remote work programs need to fill in the gaps
Put simply, Tulsa Remote filled the gaps that were left when the office shifted from a building to a laptop. Leaders need to do the same rather than expecting remote workers to rebuild the office themselves. For our remote and hybrid team members, we must retool the same organizational structures that break down silos, increase information sharing, and boost engagement in productive in-person environments.
This can be accomplished with a serious commitment to facilitating connection. Leaders should focus on curating both remote and in-person interactions across the organization, helping employees gain mentors and mentees, and introducing remote workers to communities inside and outside of the organization. The same rigor needs to be applied to training that is tailored to the distinct skills needed to thrive in a remote setting or manage distributed teams. Finally, leaders of remote employees need to invest in in-person resources and experiences, whether that be coworking space, regional team meetups, all-company summits, or all of the above.
We’ve seen this work in Tulsa. Since 2018, we’ve helped nearly 4,000 remote workers move to our city, with work satisfaction doubling and more than 80 percent of members choosing to stay after completing the year-long program. Our thousands of engaged remote workers have generated over $600 million in economic impact, created more than a thousand local jobs, launched new companies and non-profits, and volunteered their time to support other Tulsans in need.
When remote work is practiced correctly, there are serious organizational benefits as well. A 2024 Stanford study, for example, found that “employees who work from home for two days a week are just as productive and as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers.” A Harvard Business School study of the adoption of a “Work-From-Anywhere” policy in the United States Patent and Trademark Office resulted in a 4.4 percent increase in output.
Remote work is not failing our workers. We are failing to lead them. Until we invest in connection and build the infrastructure that helps our employees perform better and stay engaged, we will keep mistaking poor management for a flawed model. If Tulsa, Oklahoma, can create this support system from scratch and help thousands of strangers succeed in a new town, any organization can adapt to support their employees in our brave, new remote world.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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