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Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work—this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone.
The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.
Your place, your zone, is yours alone.
Remoye mertings
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.
That’s the coin given in exchange for the endless hours spent at the office.
Shed the resentment of golden handcuffs that keep you from living how you really want to live.
The new luxury is the luxury of freedom and time. Once you’ve had a taste of that life, no corner office or fancy chef will be able to drag you back.
Fucking true
Letting people work remotely is about promoting quality 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.
Acknowledging that the office is there to impress clients sets an owner or manager free to make it the best theater experience it can be—and employees can remain free to work from home when they’re not needed as extras for the scene.
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.
It requires a new level of personal commitment to come up with—and stick with—an alternative work frame. That’s more responsibility than may be apparent at first, especially for natural procrastinators—and who isn’t from time to time?
Every day this kind of remote work works, and no one considers it risky, reckless, or irresponsible. So why do so many of these same companies that trust “outsiders” to do their critical work have such a hard time trusting “insiders” to work from home?
Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it’s making better the thing you already thought of six months—or six years—ago. It’s the work of work.
“To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision.”
the home may contain more distractions and temptations than the average office cubicle.
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.
some big companies already get it. Just to mention a few who’ve fully embraced working remotely: IBM, S.C. Johnson & Son, Accenture, and eBay. Are those big enough for you?
If you’re pitching your boss to let you work from home a few days a week, a common rebuff is how envious your coworkers would be if you were granted this special privilege. Why, it simply wouldn’t be fair! We all need to be equally, miserably unproductive at the office and suffer in unity!
it takes recognizing that not every question needs an answer immediately—there’s nothing more arrogant than taking up someone else’s time with a question you don’t need an answer to right now.
So if you’re fighting against someone’s fear of losing control, you have to start small and show that the world doesn’t fall apart if you start working from home on Wednesdays. Not only didn’t it fall apart, but look at all this extra stuff I got done! Then you can ramp it up to two days, and more flexible hours, and before you know it you’re ready to move to another city and the wheels just keep on turning.
At 37signals, we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.
At first it might simply seem like a waste of time, especially if you’re not already used to reading Reddit on the side, but it’s a quality waste of time with your coworkers. We all need that.
Virtual water cooler
To instill a sense of company cohesion and to share forward motion, everyone needs to feel that they’re in the loop.
At 37signals we’ve institutionalized this through a weekly discussion thread with the subject “What have you been working on?”
It’s also a lot harder to bullshit your peers than your boss. In talking to a project manager without tech chops, programmers can make a thirty-minute job sound like a week-long polar expedition, but if their tall tale is out in the open for other programmers to see, it won’t pass the smell test.
AFA employees who do not otherwise work remotely are asked to do so at least once or twice per month so they’ll be ready if they have to during a disaster. The company also encourages everyone to stay home during the peak of flu season or during scares like H1N1.
Meetings should be like salt—sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings can destroy morale and motivation.
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.
even more satisfying interaction comes from spending time with your spouse, your children, your family, your friends, your neighbors:
Cabin fever is real, and remote workers are more susceptible to it than those forced into an office. Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to address. Remote work doesn’t mean being chained to your home-office desk.
Now that you’ve saved time by skipping the commute, there really is no excuse for not finding the minutes to exercise or cook healthy meals.
We’re talking about people who go out of their way to make sure everyone is having a good time.
a manager of remote workers needs to make an example of even the small stuff—things like snippy comments or passive-aggressive responses.
Harsh
The old adage still applies: No assholes allowed. But for remote work, you need to extend it to no asshole-y behavior allowed, no drama allowed, no bad vibes allowed.
This method of identifying the best and the brightest is hogwash. The correlation between people who are really good at solving imaginary puzzles and people who best fit your company is likely to be tenuous at best, even with respect to engineering positions.
The mental shortcut usually goes: In the office from 9–5 + nice = must be a good worker.
On Writing Well by William Zinsser The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White Revising Prose by Richard Lanham
Making sure that the little worker bees arrive by nine in the morning and giving them an extra star on their score card if they stay past six—this is how much of management has operated since forever. It’s only through the determination of said worker bees that anything ever got done over the years, given such ludicrous measures of productivity.
“John and I talked about this in the office yesterday and decided that your idea isn’t going to work.” Fuck that.
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.
Just chat, nothing more, and see what comes up. You’ll be surprised at how much you’ll unearth during just your first one-on-one.
The fact is, it’s easy to turn work into your predominant hobby.
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.
Take those comfy sweatpants, for example. They might be great for your physical comfort, but there’s good reason to ponder whether they’re a great fit for your state of mind.
Catch-up, Collaboration, and Serious Work.
still want people in the office every day, change that requirement to every afternoon instead.
Motivation is the fuel of intellectual work. You can get several days’ worth of work completed in one motivation-turboed afternoon. Or, when you’re motivation starved, you can waste a week getting a day’s worth of work done.
So instead of trying to treat motivation as something that can be artificially ginned up with just the right tricks, treat it as a barometer of the quality of work and the work environment.
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 not, is that you are not the problem; it’s the world you’re working in.
Motivation is pivotal to healthy lives and healthy companies. Make sure you’re minding it.
