The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work: How to Grow, Manage and Work with Remote Teams

by Wade Foster

Working remotely and running a remote team seem like black magic to many. Yet at Zapier, we've been working remotely since our founding in October of 2011. This book shares everything we've learned about running a remote team—our successes and our failures.

Beginning as a series of posts on the Zapier blog, this book is an ongoing work about our experiences as a remote team, with much of the book written by Zapier CEO Wade Foster along with chapters from our team members and other remote employees. We'll update it periodically so you can learn how our thinking and processes change as we've grown from three to 20+ people and beyond, and will keep the older versions of each chapter archived so you can learn with us over time.

Who Is This Guide For?

Whether you currently work in or run a remote team, or you hope to work in or run a remote team in the future, this book will have nuggets of wisdom that you can apply to your current situation.


It's highly unlikely you could pluck any random set of people, at any random moment in history, dispersed around the globe, put them together, and expect them to build something amazing.

We've found there are three important ingredients to making remote work, well, work:Team,Tools, and Process.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Management, Leadership, Self Help

334 pages, ebook

First published March 29, 2015

Reviews

[Russ Sanderlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essentially this is just a bunch of blog posts looped together with contributions from multiple authors. It is good for companies to read to see how remote work can be successful. Remote workers can benefit from this book to get some good ideas on how to be more efficient. There is some really good tips in Chapter 13 on how to avoid burnout.

[Denis Vasilev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Неплохая книга про удаленную работу. Чем ближе концу, тем более расфокусированная. Интересны практические вещи про найм и рабочие инструменты - в них Zapier профи

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

great hands on experience on remote teams

great book, full of particular examples and advices from remote team workers and managers. also lot of referrals to other great articles and companies.

[Tyson Titensor]

This book reads like a loosely connected series of blog posts. And like any book written by a group of people it lacks continuity.

On the other hand, there are very few books on this topic and this is an instructive and quick read for anyone interested in distributed teams.

[Ashraf Bashir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basic ideas that anyone can come up with without deep thinking, like using chat apps, video tools, having trust in others, care about time management, have rituals, don't work extra hours, keep socializing, be organized, have breaks, get out from time to time, set goals, time box tasks ...etc. Nothing genuine, and nothing specific for remote working. Still good basic content for non tech companies who do not deal with technology on daily basis.

[Sergey Morovshik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Хороший и понятный гайд с описанием опыта компании и конкретными инструментам и процессами.

[Kirill · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent collection of blog posts about remote work. If you need an actionable guide for setting up remote work processes, I suggest reading articles on GitLab’s wiki instead.

[Nikita]

This book does a good job with covering the basics, and provides examples of how people from popular remote-friendly companies approach their work. Though I didn't get as many new insights as I had hoped, I still enjoyed having my own conclusions reaffirmed.

[Susan Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I find it rather amusing to read the Zapier's guides, again, as in my review on the Ultimate Guide to Project Management, I find the chapters sequence to be somehow distracting.

[Pavel Annenkov · Rating 4 out of 5]

О ЧЕМ КНИГА:
Опыт, накопленный за 8 лет построения бизнеса с распределенными командами, от основателя Zapier. В книге много отличных ссылок на статьи и посты от других авторов по теме удаленной работы.

КАКАЯ БЫЛА ЦЕЛЬ ЧТЕНИЯ:
Получить новые навыки и инструменты управления удаленными сотрудниками.

ГЛАВНЫЕ ВЫВОДЫ:
- Многие люди просто не созданы для удаленной работы. Здесь важно это выяснить на этапе собеседования с помощью хороших тестов, чтобы потом не тратить время на обучение неподходящего человека. А вообще надо брать только людей, у которых уже есть опыт удаленной работы. Надо нанимать человека, который подходит под определение "manager of one", то есть умеет управлять собой.

- Если сотрудник сидит в офисе за столом и смотрит в компьютер, то мы спокойны и уверены, что он "работает". Но это часто не так. Надо измерять не работу, а результаты. Для каждого сотрудника надо найти свои метрики, а не считать часы, которые он провел в офисе.

- Выезды всей команды сотрудников - это дорого. Но еще дороже иметь команду, где сотрудники не сработались друг с другом.

- Главная троица инструментов для управления удаленными командами Slack - Asana - Zoom.

- Хороший подход для тех, кто работает из дома - делить свой день на две части. Работать дома только в первой половине дня. Когда закончится первая половина, надо сделать перерыв на обед и прогулку и провести вторую часть дня, работая вне дома.

- 4 обязательных требования к удаленному сотруднику
1. На "ты" с любым ПО.
2. Умеет эффективно общаться онлайн.
3. Надежный и может работать без постоянного контроля.
4. Умеет управлять свои временем.

ЧТО Я БУДУ ПРИМЕНЯТЬ:
- Всё таки надо вводить для некоторых сотрудников ежедневные и еженедельные отчеты.

ЕЩЕ НА ЭТУ ТЕМУ:
"How To Embrace Remote Work" by Trello
Джейсон Фрайд «Remote»

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book on the subject from people handling its practical problems.

I will note, though, there are some anti-patterns. The comments about global security access, for example, for everyone. Some of its discussions of microservices and the "managers of one." These all seem good, and it's not that they're wrong, but they bring a lot of problems in terms of alignment and long-term ownership of software. This is always the trick, incidentally, with any productivity-focused analysis -- productivity in terms of what? They're all customer-focused companies and that's what saves them, but it's always the issue that less work done for the right reasons is the best approach, not just more productivity.

But I don't want this to appear to be a negative review. Many good things here. As you grow to remote at larger scale, it's just that some of these choices create snags that you'll have to deal with.

[Pablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good actionable book and I'm glad Zappier is releasing it for free. Like most books on remote work, it seems more focused on being a contributor to a distributed team than running a distributed team (which makes sense, it just happens I'm more interested in the latter).

It has the chapter on the tools and as of Jun 2019 it feels resonable up to date. Other books on distributed teams have similar chapters but those go out of date fast.

The book is full of quotes from people at Zapier and other distributed companies. I'm ambibalent about them. They lend creedence to the points being expressed in the book, they offer perspective, but sometimes it's hard to know who is talking, when you are in a quote, or a chapter written by someone else. It ended up feeling a tad disjointed. This doesn't detract in any way from the usefulness of the information being conveyed.

[Ibrahim Zalat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I experienced and enjoyed a lot while reading this book; I'm completely confident to recommend it to any kind of business who really wants to grow and sustain in the future not only because of some circumstances around.

[Gerard Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great compilation of best practices and sharing of how various remote companies operate and address the challenges of remote work. The fundamentals are also very helpful to making colocated work more productive as well. Would recommend, whether or not you work remotely

[Ananggadipa Raswanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short read about best practice and experience from many remote work startup. "Communication is an oxygen in remote works team".

[Kaspars Koo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good piece for remote teams - covers the most important things and does it well.
Would be better if went into more details in some aspects.

[Nacho Bassino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good summary of practices in multi successful remote companies.

[Dalan Mendonca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skimmed the book. Does have good parts. But some of it is just silly.
The answer to "How to build culture in remote work?" Slack GIFS! ಠ_ಠ Bruh, a little more than that.

[Metod Rybár · Rating 2 out of 5]

More of a collection of blog posts than a book. Some nice tips, but I did not find anything substantial inside outside of generic formulas which can be found around the internet.

[Rodrigo Ramos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muitas dicas e ferramentas interessantes para aplicar no trabalho remoto.

[Alberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully concise, straight to the point, real life experience-based guide to working remotely. 70% of the book has a management perspective, 30% is seen from the remote worker's point of view.
I found it very helpful to read at a delicate time when companies that were forced to go remote for a couple of months have to choose whether this should become a permanent feature in their organization. I feel management teams and individual professionals can only make an informed decision if they compare current office-based work with WFH best in class implementation. Through a combination of best practices and smart productivity tools, this helpful guide provides the right information for that.

[Phoom · Rating 4 out of 5]

เป็นหนังสือที่อ่านแล้วเกิดไอเดียและเห็นความเป็นไปได้ของการทำงานแบบ Remote working ซึ่งเป็นการทำงานที่ทำผ่านอินเตอร์เน็ตเป็นหลัก โดยใช้เครื่องมือ กระบวนการ เพื่อให้พนักงานแต่ละคนทำงานต่างที่ ต่างเวลา และ timezone ได้อย่างสำเร็จได้

ความรู้ที่นำมาเขียนในเล่มนี้มาจากบริษัท Zapier (บริษัท IT แห่งหนึ่ง เป็นคู่แข่ง IFTTT) ซึ่งเป็นบริษัทที่ทำงานแบบ remote มาตั้งแต่ก่อตั้ง และทำบริษัทจนมีพนักงาน 20 คน จากหลากหลาย timezone

หนังสือแชร์ประสบการณ์จริงจากบริษัท มาเขียนเรียบเรียงให้อ่านง่ายในรูปแบบ how-to น่าอ่านและแนะนำสำหรับคนที่ต้องการหาแนวทางทำงานแบบ Remote Work ครับ

[Isidro López · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great and very recommended reading for anyone working or thinking about working in a remote o distributed team.

Lots of very interesting hints, tools, references, etc.

I only missed reading about pair programming in a remote team. There's nothing about it in the book :-(

[Tomass Sarts]

Full of actionable advice & insights on the various tools and processes that make distributed teams function well. Great info on how to maximise all the upsides that come with being distributed as well as mitigating the downsides - from Zapier’s own experience.