Founders have said it time and time again: “…the most important factor in building a radical company, that can stand the test of time, is culture”.

Company culture that doesn’t reward independent action doesn’t stand a chance fostering repeat innovation; companies that amplify strong personalities, but stifle the quiet operators that keep the ship on course, can only expect to create an environment of internal competition.

Genius isn’t born in a vacuum — flipping the script on what’s possible demands that all hands are on deck. Building a culture like this is not easy; it’s time consuming, there’s no textbook and — according to a lot of founders — it has to be right from day one, if it’s going to be right at all.

It probably shouldn’t surprise us that we hear plenty of ‘company culture horror stories’ in the remote work ecosystem. Surveys have asked questions like ‘what drew you to a digital nomad lifestyle’ and invariably returned the response:

“I wanted to get away from office politics”.

The iglu.net community varies widely from professionals who have effectively converted their employer into their client, to entrepreneurs and full-blown freelancers with their own client base. The story we’re now used to hearing is that remote work brings freedom, but the ‘digital nomad’ lifestyle brings stress, loneliness and sometimes a nagging sense of purposelessness. For many of us, a journey that began with an escape from the office, has its happy ending right back in another office.

Mature remote workers develop a tacit understanding; seeing the same array of faces each day was never the problem. The problem has always been the power imbalance between employer and employee. Strip away the fear of scrutiny and pressure to behave in such a way that gratifies higher ups, and the office is no longer the office that so many professionals dread. Instead, it’s a collaboration space and a home away from home.

Of course, hundreds of founders and HR leaders are passionate about ideas like holarchy, democratic management and two-way accountability. Many companies consider it part of their mission to prove, once and for all, that putting trust and camaraderie first is an effective management strategy.

This is no mean feat; founders need a lot more than patience and benevolence to ensure the values they have in mind permeate through the company as it scales up. When leaders champion real change, there will always be resistance. No matter how great a company’s culture is, it cannot escape the influence of the metaculture.

What’s the metaculture?

Culture doesn’t exist discretely within the four walls of a single company. Suppliers and customers have their own expectations; their own sense of what’s ‘normal’ and what’s ‘good’ when dealing with other businesses; their own ability to put pressure on the wider business community to conform to the habits and judgments. In fast-changing markets like tech, almost every professional pays attention to what thought leaders and competitors are saying — and this too forms part of the metaculture. As a whole, it works to subtly reign in maverick companies.

It’s not that there’s malice intended, but one way or another all professionals will find themselves exposed to the prevailing attitudes of their industry and their locality. As companies scale up, the size of competitors, clients and suppliers tends to increase as well, deepening the influence of older, more established management thinking. This process might go some way to explain how integrity can decay and discrimination can set in even when directors are committed to their values.

No matter how noble a founder’s intentions, any attempt to dictate culture from the top down is doomed to failure in the long term.

In a fast-paced business environment, behavioural pressures come from every direction — the combination of metaculture, strong personalities in the office, and edicts from company directors make it almost impossible for apprehensive young professionals to bring their authentic selves to the workplace. At its worst, detrimental attitudes can go unchallenged, women and members of marginalised groups can be left without a voice, and management can become totally oblivious to the reality of company culture.

The solution to the culture problem is perhaps not for directors to exert more control — and thus add to the multitudinous social pressures in the workplace — but to let go and advocate a bottom-up culture. Such a culture would develop organically; it would be negotiated day-to-day and adapt as new business and social challenges emerge. Unfortunately, the same power dynamic that makes the typical corporate office so unbearable also stands in the way of sincere communication and undermines any ‘organic culture’ project from the get-go.

In the iglu.net community it’s clear to see how well professionals perform when this power dynamic is taken away. As interesting as remote work is as a phenomenon in its own right, it may well be the catalyst for a deeper disruption; it’s not ‘freedom to work anywhere’ that digital expats find so liberating — it’s their status as effectively independent workers immune from the machinations of the corporate world.

There’s a lesson here for founders who believe culture comes first. Benevolent leadership is not enough; it’s letting go of control that lets professionals thrive. This doesn’t have to mean working with mercenaries who aren’t committed to the mission — on the contrary, moving on from the employer-employee paradigm gives teams of independent workers the chance to actively choose work they really believe in. There’s no better formula for authentic communication than that.