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http://www.globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics
We’ll draw on this rich experience to show how remote work has opened the door to a new era of freedom and luxury. A brave new world beyond the industrial-age belief in The Office. A world where we leave behind 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.
The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done.
According to the research,* commuting is associated with an increased risk of obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure, and other stress-related ills such as heart attacks and depression, and even divorce.
If working remotely is such a great idea, why haven’t progressive companies been practicing it all along? It’s simple: they couldn’t. The technology just wasn’t there.
So true. It is not they don't, it is they can't.
Do you think today’s teenagers, raised on Facebook and texting, will be sentimental about the old days of all-hands-on-deck, Monday morning meetings? Ha!
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.
how our employees distribute those hours across the clock and days just isn’t important.
The new luxury is to shed the shackles of deferred living—to pursue your passions now, while you’re still working. What’s the point in wasting time daydreaming about how great it’ll be when you finally quit?
Your life no longer needs to be divided into arbitrary phases of work and retirement.
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.
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.
Why do companies have no problem working with a lawyer who works in the next town over and yet distrust their own employees to work anywhere other than their own desks?
Because: They have their own management and accountability ways.
How many breakthrough ideas can a company actually digest? Far fewer than you imagine.
A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.
If people really want to play video games or surf the web all day, they’re perfectly capable of doing so from their desks at the office. In fact, lots of studies have shown that many people do exactly that. For example, at clothing retailer J.C. Penney’s headquarters, 4,800 workers spend 30 percent of the company’s Internet bandwidth watching YouTube videos.
Either learn to trust the people you’re working with or find some other people to work with.
Keep in mind, the number one counter to distractions is interesting, fulfilling work.
if you’re sitting in a dedicated room intended for work with the door closed, you stand a far better chance of staying on task.
Most people want to work, as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling.
1Password.
False equality benefits nobody.
The whole point of innovation and disruption is doing things differently from those who came before you. Unless you do that, you won’t stand a chance.
All you need is confidence—confidence that you see a smarter way of working even when everyone else in your industry is sticking to business as usual. That’s how great ideas evolve from being fringe crazy to common knowledge.
fully embraced working remotely: IBM, S.C. Johnson & Son, Accenture, and eBay.
culture is the spoken and unspoken values and actions of the organization.
The stronger the culture, the less explicit training and supervision is needed.
First, 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.
Questions you can wait hours to learn the answers to are fine to put in an email. Questions that require answers in the next few minutes can go into an instant message. For crises that truly merit a sky-is-falling designation, you can use that old-fashioned invention called the telephone.
TextMaster (Translations & Copywriting)
At 37signals, we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.
Ironically, you’ll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team.
you need everything available to everyone at all times.
use a shared calendar,
Put all the important stuff out in the open, and no one will have to chase that wild goose to get their work done.
To instill a sense of company cohesion and to share forward motion, everyone needs to feel that they’re in the loop.
One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance.
Remote work isn’t just for people who are out of town, across state lines, or on different continents. You can work remotely from down the street. Remote just means you’re not in the office 9am–5pm, all day long.
Disaster ready
Meetings should be like salt—sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful.
Further, meetings are major distractions. They require multiple people to drop whatever it is they’re doing and instead do something else.
Constantly asking people what they’re working on prevents them from actually doing the work they’re describing.
What a manager needs to establish is a culture of reasonable expectations. At 37signals, we expect and encourage people to work forty hours per week on average. There are no hero awards for putting in more than that. Sure, every now and then there’s the need for a short sprint, but, most of the time, the company is viewing what it does as a marathon. It’s crucial for everyone to pace themselves.
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.
