Remote: Office Not Required

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• The future is already here-it’s just not evenly distributed. (William Gibson)
• The technology is here; it’s never been easier to communicate and collaborate with people anywhere, any time. But that still leaves a fundamental people problem. The missing upgrade is for the human mind.
• A world where we leave behind age the dusty old notion of outsourcing as a way to increase work output at the lowest cost and replace it with a new ideal-one in which remote work increases both quality of work and job satisfaction.
• If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond “the office.” If they do say the office, they’ll include a qualifier such as “super early in the morning before anyone gets in” or “I stay late at night after everyone’s left” or “I sneak in on the weekend.”
• Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work-this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can’t be found. Instead, it’s just one interruption after another.
• The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm you at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done the same work that you couldn’t get done at work!
• Let’s face it: nobody likes commuting. The alarm rings earlier, you arrive home that much later. You lose time, patience, possibly even your will to eat anything other than convenience food with plastic utensils. Maybe you skip the gym, miss your child’s bedtime, feel too tired for a meaningful conversation with your significant other. The list goes on.
• Smart people in white coats have extensively studied commuting-this supposedly necessary part of our days-and the verdict is in: long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness.
• Commuting isn’t just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment-it’s bad for business. And it doesn’t have to be that way.
• But past generations have been bred on the idea that good work happens from 9am to 5pm, in offices and cubicles in tall buildings around the city. It’s no wonder that most who are employed inside that model haven’t considered other options, or resist the idea that it could be any different. But it can.
• The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration. Not only do we not have to be in the same spot to work together, we also don’t have to work at the same time to work together.
• The beauty of relaxing workday hours is that the policy accommodates everyone-from the early birds to the night owls to the family folks with kids who need to be picked up in the middle of the day. At 37signals, we try to keep a roughly forty-hour workweek, but how our employees distribute those hours across the clock and days just isn’t important.
• Release yourself from the 9am-to-5pm mentality. It might take a bit of time and practice to get the hang of working asynchronously with your team, but soon you’ll see that it’s the work-not the clock that matters.
• So here’s a prediction: The luxury privilege of the next twenty years will be to leave the city. Not as its leashed servant in a suburb, but to wherever one wants.
• But why wait? If what you really love doing is skiing, why wait until your hips are too old to take a hard fall and then move to Colorado? If you love surfing, why are you still trapped in a concrete jungle and not living near the beach? If all the family members you’re close to live in a small town in Oregon, why are still stuck on the you other coast?
• You don’t need to be extraordinarily lucky or hardworking to make your work life fit with your passions-if you’re free to pick where to work from and when to work.
• 1. Caldwell, Idaho USA 2. Evanston, Illinois USA 3. Fenwick, Ontario Canada 4. Tulsa, Oklahoma USA 5. Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA 6. Oxford, United Kingdom 7. Uppsala, Sweden 8. Petoskey, Michigan USA 9. Eichstätt, Germany 10. Dunedin, New Zealand
  • Prosperable
• As we’ve observed, star employees who work away from the echo chambers of industry spend far less time brooding about how much greener the grass is on the other side and, generally, seem happier in their work.
• Letting people work remotely is about promoting quality l of life, about getting access to the best people wherever they are, and all the other benefits we’ll enumerate. That it may also end up reducing costs spent on offices and result in fewer-but-more productive workers is the gravy, not the turkey.
• Besides, the key intellectual pursuits that are the primary fit for remote working writing, programming, designing, advising, and customer support, to mention just a few-have little to do with the cutthroat margin wars of, say, manufacturing. Squeezing slightly more words per hour out of a copywriter is not going to make anyone rich. Writing the best ad just very well might.
• When trying to convince said bean counters, there’s no logic like big company logic-so here’s some from IBM,’ the bluest of blue chips: Through its telework strategy, since 1995, IBM has reduced office space by a total of 78 million square square feet. Of that, 58 million square feet was sold at a gain of $1.9B. And sublease income for leased space not needed exceeded $1B. In the U.S., continuing annual savings amounts to $100M, and at least that much in Europe. With 386,000 employees, 40 percent of whom. telework, the ratio of office space to employee is now 8:1 with some facilities as high as 15:1.
• At first, giving up seeing your coworkers in person every day might come as a relief (if you’re an introvert), but eventually you’re likely to feel a loss. Even with the substitutes we’ll discuss, there are times when nothing beats talking to your manager in person or sitting in a room with your colleagues, brainstorming the next big thing.
• Worth counting too is the number of days you spend at the office emailing someone who sits only three desks away. People go to the office all the time and act as though they’re working remotely: emailing, instant messaging, secluding themselves to get work done. At the end of the day, was it really worth coming to the office for it?
• This is why at 37signals we don’t meet in person all that often. Our attitude is, we need a clean plate before going up for seconds. Only about three times a year does the whole company get together in the Chicago office. And even that can be a tad too frequent if our goal is to really blow it out on the free-riff idea ramp!
• Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust. A manager thinks, Will people work hard if I’m not watching them all the time? If I can’t see them sitting pretty at their desks, are they just going to goof off and play video games or surf the web all day?
• So, coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There’s no guarantee of productivity.
• People have an amazing ability to live down to low expectations. If you run your ship with the conviction everyone’s a slacker, your employees will put all their ingenuity into proving you right. If you view those who work under you as capable adults who will push themselves to excel even when you’re not breathing down their necks, they’ll delight you in return.
• The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire people you you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you. If you’re not trusted to work remotely, why are you trusted to do anything at all? If you’re held in such low regard, why are you able to talk to customers, write for an copy ad, design the next product, assess insurance claims, or do tax returns?
• Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us-when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them-that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we’re engaged in is fundamentally pointless. Instead of reaching for the video game controller or turning on soap operas, is it perhaps time to raise your voice and state the obvious? If you’re feeling like this, chances are others are too.
• Most people want to work, as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling. And if you’re stuck in a dead-end job that has no prospects of being either, then you don’t just need a remote position-you need a new job.
• First of all, if working remotely is such an obvious good thing that everyone would want it, why shouldnt we let everyone do it? Is the business we’re talking about just an elaborate scheme to keep everyone in their assigned seats for a set number of hours? Or is it rather an organization of people getting work done? If it’s the latter, why not let people work the way they prefer, and judge everyone on what-not where-work is completed?
• You certainly don’t need everyone physically together to create a strong culture. The best cultures derive l from actions people actually take, not the ones they write about in a mission statement. Newcomers to an organization arrive with their eyes open. They see how decisions are made, the care that’s taken, the way problems are fixed, and so forth.
• When everyone is sitting in the same office, it’s easy to fall into the habit of bothering anyone for anything at any time, with no regard for personal productivity. This is a key reason so many people get so little done in traditional office setups-too many interruptions. Still, when you’re used to this mode of working, it can seem hard to envision a world where you can’t get an answer to any question, no matter how insignificant, the second you think of it. Such a world does exist, though, and it’s quite habitable.
• With a graduated system like this, you’ll quickly realize that 80 percent of your questions aren’t so timesensitive after all, and are often better served by an email than by walking over to someone’s desk. Even better. you’ll have a written record of the response that can be looked up later.
• Once you’re ASAP-free, however, you’ll be amazed at how your former self was able to get anything done in l the face of constant in-person interruptions. It’s almost zen-like to let go of the frenzy, to let answers flow back to you when the other party is ready to assist. Use that calm to be even more productive.
• If you want to get all mathematical about it, take out a napkin and jot down a few numbers. Say you can get five productive hours out of the office (ha!) and six productive hours out of working from home. That’s 20 percent more productivity by working in your living room. Who’s going to argue against that?
• Some of the disdain toward working remotely is based on the fallacy that all remote collaboration happens blindfolded. We’ve all sat on a conference call and spent minutes describing something that would take seconds to show. It’s no bueno.
  • Even easier now with Loom, Tandem, etc.
• Before you know it, you’ll be so used to sharing a screen that starting a call without one will feel pointless. Much of the magic that people ascribe to sitting together in a room is really just this: being able to see and interact with the same stuff.
• We also use a shared calendar, so we know when Andrea’s coming back from maternity leave or Jeff’s going on vacation. If your company is too large to share one calendar, break it up by teams.
  • https://twitter.com/jeanvaljean689/status/1276929521732616192?s=21
• Simply put, progress is a joy best shared with coworkers.
• What you’re left with is “what did this person actually do today?” Not “when did they get in?” or “how late did they stay?” Instead it’s all about the work produced. So instead of asking a remote worker “what did you do today?” you can now just say “show me what you did today.” As a manager, you can directly evaluate the work-the thing you’re paying this person for-and ignore all the stuff that doesn’t actually matter.
• Meetings. Ah, meetings. Know anyone out there who wishes they had more meetings? We don’t either. Why is that? Meetings should be great-they’re opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.
• Further, meetings are major distractions. They require multiple people to drop whatever it is they’re doing and instead do something else. If you’re calling a meeting, you better be sure pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity. How often can you say that a given meeting was worth it? Remember, there’s no such thing as a one hour meeting. If you’re in a room with five people for an hour, it’s a five-hour meeting.
• Hell might be other people, but isolation sure ain’t heaven. Even the most introverted are still part of Homeous Socialitus Erectus, which is why prisoners fear The Hole more than living with other inmates. We’re simply not designed for a life of total solitude.
• That’s the great irony of letting passionate people work from home. A manager’s natural instinct is to worry about his workers not getting enough work done, but the real threat is that too much will likely get done. And because the manager isn’t sitting across from his worker anymore, he can’t look in the person’s eyes and see burnout.
• One way to help set a healthy boundary is to encourage employees to think of a “good day’s work.” Look at your progress toward the end of the day and ask yourself: “Have I done a good day’s work?” Answering that question is liberating. Often, if the answer is an easy “yes,” you can stop working feeling satisfied that “ something important got accomplished, if not entirely “done.” And should the answer be “no,” you can treat it as an off-day and explore the Five Whys’ (asking why to a problem five times in a row to find the root cause).
  • Daily log; self-reflection
• Given how hard it is to find great people, you should be doing your utmost to keep them. That sounds selfevident, yet plenty of companies are willing to let their stars disappear when life forces them to move. That’s just plain dumb.
• Remember, doing great work with great people is one of the most durable sources of happiness we humans can tap into. Stick with it.
• Remember: sentiments are infectious, whether good or bad, That’s also why it’s as important to continuously monitor the work atmosphere as to hire for it. It’s never a good idea to let poisonous people stick around to spoil it for everyone else, but in a remote-work setup it’s deadly.
  • Negativity and complaining and infectious.
• Magic and creativity thrive in diverse cultures. When you’re seeking remote workers, you have to do even more to encourage and nurture diversity and personal development. It’s a small price to pay for a more interesting workplace and to keep people engaged for the long term.
• It’s a recruiter’s dream. If we could just give everyone a riddle or a quiz that would tell us whether they’re smart or not, we wouldn’t have to bother looking at their past work history or give them a test project. In the 1990s, Microsoft was infamous for using all sorts of riddles and quizzes and other parlor tricks to separate the wheat from the chaff. The approach was ballyhooed in the book How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, which is subtitled Microsoft’s Cult of the PuzzleHow the World’s Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers.
  • Hiring; books to read
• There is a time and a place for using personality assessments, like those provided by companies such as Caliper (which do include logic aptitude sections). But the assessments are strictly there to remind you of traits you’ve already observed by meeting someone in person.
  • Personality assessments; multiple intelligences
• Instead of thinking I can pay people from Kansas less than people from New York, you should think I can get amazing people from Kansas and make them feel valued and well-compensated if I pay them New York salaries.
  • Gitlab salary calculator
• These days few companies offer remote work (though, of course, the point of this book is that remote work is on the rise), and even fewer do so with equal pay for equal work across geographies. The ones that do are at an almost unfair advantage in attracting and keeping the best people in the world. So don’t look at remote work as a way to skimp on salaries; you’ll save on lots of other things. Your star designer out in the sticks is just as valuable (maybe more so) to the team as those working from the big-city home office. Make sure she feels that way. By the same token, as a remote worker, shouldn’t you let employers get away with paying you less just because you live in a cheaper city. “Equal pay for equal work” might be a dusty slogan, but it works for a reason. If with regard to compensation you accept being treated as a second-class worker based on location, you’re opening the door to being treated poorly on other matters as well.
  • Gitlab salary calculator
• It’s a lot harder to fake your way as a remote worker. As the opportunities to schmooze in the office decrease, the focus on the work itself increases. Additionally, central online repositories for tracking tasks and reporting progress, like Basecamp, create an irrefutable showing what everyone is getting done and how long it’s taking.
• Remote work pulls back the curtain and exposes what was always the case, but not always appreciated or apparent: great remote workers are simply great workers. They exhibit the two key qualities, as Joel Spolsky labeled them in his “Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing”: Smart, and Gets Things Done.
• When the work product is out in the open, it’s much easier to see who’s actually smart (as opposed to who simply sounds smart). The collective judgment rarely even has to be verbalized. Conversely, if the work keeps getting flagged with problems, it’s evidence that the Smarts aren’t sufficiently present for the work at hand. Also, if the duration between installments of new work or tasks being checked off is persistently lengthy, it’s a sign that the Gets Things Done bit is missing.
• Remote work speeds up the process of getting the wrong people off the bus and the right people on board.
• Being a good writer is an essential part of being a good remote worker. When most arguments are settled over email or chat or discussion boards, you’d better show up equipped for the task. So, as a company owner or manager, you might as well filter for this quality right from the get-go.
• Thankfully, becoming a better writer is entirely possible. Few people are born with an innate talent for writing; most good writers have practised and studied their way through. Besides, it’s not as if you need to be Hemingway or Twain. But you do need to take it seriously.
  • Writing
• You should read, read, and read some more. Study how good writers make their case. Focus on clarity first, style second. Here are a few books to start with if you’re serious about becoming a better writer:
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White Revising Prose by Richard Lanham
  • Books to read
• A lot of companies base their judgments on work already done. We do some of that too. But what’s tricky about that is that work already done is hard to account for. Who really did the work? Was it solo? On a team? What limitations were in place? Did the work take way longer than it should have? Etc. The best way we’ve found to accurately judge work is to hire the person to do a little work before we take the plunge and hire them to do a lot of work. Call it “pre-hiring.” Pre-hiring takes the form of a one- or twoweek mini-project. We usually pay around $1,500 for the mini-project. We never ask people to work for free. If we wouldn’t do it for free, why would we ask someone else to do it?
• Whatever it is, make it meaningful. Make it about creating something new that solves a problem. We don’t believe in asking people to solve puzzles. Solving real problems is a lot more interesting—and enlightening.
• Contract work is an excellent way for both the company doing the hiring and the person being hired to ease into remote work and try it on for size. In a sense, both sides are test driving each other. Part of the appeal of contract work is that if your client is a bozo, then at least you don’t have to work with them forever. Once the contract is up, you’re free to try another fish in the sea. But given how many stories most contractors have about bozo clients, it’s not exactly a stretch to imagine them champing at the bit if they find a client who’s not.
  • Connect to Nat’s tweet about bad clients
• Working remotely blows a big fat hole in that style of management. If I can’t see workers come in and leave their desks, how on earth can I make sure they’re actually working? Or so goes the naïve thinking of a manager of chairs. Thinking on it further, our naïve manager asks himself, What is my managerial role at the company, if not to ensure that the workers are working? Elementary, Watson. The job of a manager is not to herd cats, but to lead and verify the work. The trouble with that job description is that it requires knowledge of the work itself. You can’t effectively manage a team if you don’t know the intricacies of what they’re working on.
• Compared to your average business or consumer software package, all these open source examples are endlessly more complex and involve far more people in their production. If people can manage to build world-class operating systems, databases, programming languages, web frameworks, and many other forms of software while working remotely, you’d probably be wise to look more closely at how it’s done.
  • What other types of work can you open source? - Investing 101 2.0
• The key ingredients of this success follow much of the other advice in this book, but let’s look at a few anyway:
• Intrinsic motivation: Programmers working on open source code usually do it for love, not money. Often the money follows, but rarely does it take the place of motivation. To translate: working on exciting problems you’re personally interested in means you don’t need a manager breathing down your neck and constantly looking over your shoulder.
• All out in the open: Much of open source is coordinated on mailing lists and code tracking systems like GitHub. Anyone who’s interested in helping out can because the information is all out in the open. You can self-select into participating, and the people with the most knowledge about an issue thus get easy access.
• Meeting occasionally: Most successful open source projects eventually grow to the point where they can support their own conferences or, at least, sessions at general ones. This gives contributors a chance to meet in person to top off on social interaction-much like meetups and sprints do for companies. But it’s not a requirement, it’s a nice-to have.
  • Open source; Investing 101 2.0
• As a company owner or manager, you need to create and maintain a level playing field-one on which those in and out of the office stand as equals. That’s easier said than done, but one way to better your chances is to have some of the top brass working remotely. People with the power to change things need to feel the same hurt as those who merely have to deal with it.
• The goal here is really just to keep a consistent, open line of communication. These quick calls prevent issues and concerns from piling up without being addressed. Morale and motivation are fragile things, so you want to make sure to monitor the pulse of your remote workforce. Waiting six months or a year for the next formal review is too long.
• Second, you must make sure that people have access, by default, to everything they need. Most companies start out by adopting the reverse policy: everyone is only granted access to information and applications on a need-to-know basis. That’s completely unnecessary. Unless you work in the military, or belong to one of the very rare firms that deal with super-confidential information-information that even trusted employees can’t be trusted with-keeping these access barriers in place is just making it difficult for everyone to get their work done.
• This might sound like an employer’s dream: workers putting in a ton of extra hours for no additional pay! But it’s not. If work is all-consuming, the worker is far more likely to burn out. This is true even if the person loves what he does. Perhaps especially if he loves what he does, since it won’t seem like a problem until it’s too late.
• In the same way that you don’t want a gang of slackers, you also don’t want a band of supermen. The best workers over the long term are people who put in sustainable hours. Not too much, not too little-just right. Forty hours a week on average usually does the trick.
• When something’s scarce, we tend to conserve, appreciate, respect, and value it. When something is abundant, we rarely think twice about how we use or spend it. Abundance and value are often opposites.
• This is where remote working shines. When most conversations happen virtually-on the phone, via email, in Basecamp, over instant message, or in a Skype video chat-people actually look forward to these special opportunities for a face-to-face. The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don’t waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.
• It sounds counterintuitive, but the presence of other people, even if you don’t know them, can fool your mind into thinking that being productive is the only proper thing to do. Who really wants to be the slacker sitting in a coffee shop during working hours, watching silly cats on Reddit or playing a video game?
• Should you threaten them with the stick or dangle the carrot? As detailed by Alfie Kohn in his wonderful book Punished by Rewards: neither. Trying to conjure motivation by means of rewards or threats is terribly ineffective. In fact, it’s downright counterproductive. Rather, the only reliable way to muster motivation is by encouraging people to work on the stuff they like and care about, with people they like and care about. There are no shortcuts.
  • Books to read
• But that’s rarely how it goes. Most people suffering from a lack of motivation will blame themselves first. “Ah, it’s because I’m such a procrastinator!” “Why can’t I just get myself together?” The truth, more often than l not, is that you are not the problem; it’s the world you’re working in.
• If you’re a manager and notice that one of your employees is slacking, schedule a one-on-one and find out what’s up. Is the person bored with a project that’s not challenging enough, or are they feeling stuck and, in reaction, procrastinating to avoid a situation that feels impossible? See what you can do to get your employee back on track. The roadblock may be structural, or it may be more personal. Perhaps the employee is feeling burned out. That can be hard to discern when you’re not working in the same office. Sometimes, just giving the person a couple weeks away from the job will be restorative enough to get him or her in the highperforming place they were previously.
• “When I retire, I’m going to travel the world” is a common dream, but why wait for retirement? If seeing the world is your passion, you shouldn’t wait until old age to pursue it. And if you’re working remotely, you can’t use the “but I have a job” excuse to defer living.
• The nomadic lifestyle can be cheaper than you think too. If you don’t burden yourself with a mortgage, car payment, cable TV, and other supposed necessities of modern living, there’s usually more than enough left over for travel and accommodation.
• Routine has a tendency to numb your creativity. Waking up at the same time, taking the same transportation, traveling the same route, plopping down in the same chair at the same desk in the same office over and over and over isn’t exactly a prescription for inspiration.
• Having family close and available is a good way to counterbalance the loss of daily in-person contact with coworkers. And the corollary is that family people are more likely to be a good fit for remote working because of the existing social day-to-day interaction. If, occasionally during your day, you’re going to be interrupted by a tap on the shoulder, wouldn’t you rather It be so you can give your partner a hand for a minute?
• One concern remote workers may have is that they will be ignored. “If I’m not seen, will I be heard?” “If I’m not hanging around, will people know who I am?” On the surface this an understandable fear, but there’s a very simple solution. There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work. One is to make noise. The other is to make progress, to do exceptional work. Fortunately for remote workers, “the work” is the measure that matters.
• “In thirty years’ time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed.” (Richard Branson)
• Between now and the remote work dominated future, the debate is likely to get more intense and the battle lines more sharply drawn. Remote work has already progressed through the first two stages of Gandhi’s model for change: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” We are squarely in the fighting stage-the toughest one-but it’s also the last one before win.
• Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers (1962)
  • Books to read