It's often rooted in just saving overhead in the the slimmer startup days by experimenting with shortcuts and "innovations".
Big business processes and techniques often take big business capital and big business experience. But as demonstrated by the success of many startups that avoid traditional processes in those early days, the processes are not strictly necessary.
Avoiding them may prove brilliantly competitive, or may prove to be some organizational debt that gets carried forward. Either way, the early days of a startup are very sensitive, and a little savings can make a world of difference.
Agreed. And actually, there's plenty of case studies and efficiency research on this subject.
What it really comes down to is:
Get the right team of remote workers together, provide the right tools, and apply the right policies and you can give yourself a great market advantage.
But it's exceptionally hard to satisfy all those dependencies.
Many individuals aren't nearly as effective in remote positions, and many more might be effective with some practice but don't actually have the experience required to do it well yet. Paying for their inefficiency while they learn the ropes of remote work is a dangerous and competitiveness-risking bet, especially if they never even quite manage to figure it out.
Tools and policies are a whole other issue, as those not only need to be identified but they need to suit the team that you assemble and put constraints on who else can join that team. Not every toolset and not every policy is a good fit for every worker, remote or not -- and it's much more important that they are for remote workers.
So at the end of the day, you absolutely CAN have a great company that works remotely and there are many out there. But it's not reasonable to suggest that many or every company can see benefits from it any time soon.
In almost all cases, it's not that they're dogmatic, stubborn, or difficult just for the sake of it. Don't make it personal and imagine them to be poor empathizers or know-it-alls.
By shouting and getting frustrated, they're really just demonstrating that you and they have poor communication skills - in both directions. They either aren't actually understanding the broad requirements for the decision being made, and/or aren't really articulating why their take on it really is the right way to do it. They have the confidence to think that their solution is the right one for the problem as they understand it -- which is why they get loud and forceful -- but don't make legitimate progress in decision making because either the problem or solution just isn't making its way across the table effectively.
Poor communication skills are indeed very hard to deal with and rampant among people across all divisions. They may be the ones who are having a hard time regulating their emotional investment into the debate, but there are things you can do to make them more comfortable and better heard.
> I have a feeling that the non-American system is better because it fosters closer family ties, but that might just be because that's the system I'm familiar with.
Fostering closer family ties has good sides and bad sides.
Individuals from a toxic family background benefit from being able to keep their family at arm's length or farther, which isn't as acceptable in cultures that so strongly and universally emphasize family loyalty. Not all parents are good parents!
If you want to shift the balance.
1. Start by mixing up your recruitment marketing and messaging to make them more appealing to your target demographic.
2. Then, consider any necessary policy changes to the workplace and culture that would turn away candidates who get a closer look.
3. Lastly, consider using your diversity preference as a tie-breaker among otherwise comparable candidates.
No illegal litmus tests necessary.