Remote: Office Not Required

by David Heinemeier Hansson

Let’s face it: nobody likes commuting. The alarm rings earlier, you arrive home that much later.

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.

So remote work isn’t primarily about the money—but who doesn’t like saving as a side effect?

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?

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?

We’ll let you in on a secret: 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.

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.

So it really doesn’t matter that Multinational, Inc., forbids its employees to work from home. In fact, you should be happy if the 800-pound gorilla in your industry is still clinging to the old ways of working.

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.

The best cultures derive from actions people actually take, not the ones they write about in a mission statement.

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.

If someone has run a business well enough to be able to afford a fancy office, you’d think they’d be familiar with the idea of “sunk cost.”

In health insurance, Fortune 100 provider Aetna has nearly half of its 35,000 U.S. employees working from home.

In accounting, Deloitte, which has about the same number of employees, has a staggering 86 percent working remotely at least 20 percent of the time.

At Intel, 82 percent of their people regularl...

At 37signals, we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.

Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to fix. WebEx, GoToMeeting, Join.me, and similar tools all make it simple to share a screen.

Use a shared screen to collaborate on everything from walking through a presentation, to going over the latest website changes, to sketching together in Photoshop, to just editing a simple text document together.

Here’s the key: you need everything available to everyone at all times.

At 37signals, we use a chat program we created called Campfire.

At 37signals we’ve institutionalized this through a weekly discussion thread with the subject “What have you been working on?” Everyone chimes in with a few lines about what they’ve done over the past week and what’s intended for the next week. It’s not a precise, rigorous estimation process, and it doesn’t attempt to deal with coordination. It simply aims to make everyone feel like they’re in the same galley and not their own little rowboat.

When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away. Criteria like “was she here at 9?” or “did she take too many breaks today?” or “man, every time I walk by his desk he’s got Facebook up” aren’t even possible to tally. Talk about a blessing in disguise!

If you’re an owner or manager, letting local people work remotely is a great first step toward seeing if remote will work for you. It’s low risk, it’s no big deal, and worse comes to worst, people can start working at the office again.

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.

Working remotely makes it easier to spot managers drumming up busywork for themselves and others.

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.

But even if you don’t have friends or family nearby, you can still make it work; you’ll just have to exert a little more effort. For example, find a co-working facility and share desks with others in your situation. Such facilities can now be found in most larger cities, and even some smaller ones.

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.

Working from home gives you the freedom to work wherever you want.

At Accenture, where 81 percent of employees work remotely to some extent, they even have an internal process for this called “Ergonomics for Professionals” to ensure employees get it right.

In fact, variation is often preferable to adopting a single style. Your body wasn’t built to stay in the same position for eight hours a day, but it’s hard to switch things around in most normal office settings.

This very real problem was confirmed by the health insurance company Aetna, which has nearly half its 35,000 U.S. employees working from home. They discovered that the remote-working half tended to be heavier. Now they offer online personal trainers to help employees stay in shape.‡

The important thing is that everyone—or at least a sizable group—feels those trade-offs together. Otherwise, it’s too easy just to focus on the negatives. When everyone else is still at the office, how will they appreciate the time you’re not wasting in traffic, or the extra hours you’re spending with your children, reading, or whatever you enjoy? They can’t.

Fortunately, most of the time you don’t have to start with the Golden Gate when a simple suspension bridge will get you across the river. That is, it’s probably best just to start out hiring people as contractors.

The world has never been smaller and markets have never been more open. Don’t be a cultural or geographical hermit.

Remember, doing great work with great people is one of the most durable sources of happiness we humans can tap into. Stick with it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thankfully, becoming a better writer is entirely possible. Few people are born with an innate talent for writing; most good writers have practiced and studied their way through.

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.

In the end, we make the call on talent and character. It’s always a blend.

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.

If I’m starting a new company today, should I start remote today? What if I already have a company? How do I begin including remote workers in a culture that is already well established?

In general, it’s best if you start as early as possible. Cultures grow over time, and it’ll be a lot easier if your culture grows up with remote workers.

So start early if you can, but if you can’t, start small.

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.

The job of a manager is not to herd cats, but to lead and verify the work.

The fact is, it’s just easier to work remotely with people you’ve met in so-called “real life”—folks you’ve shared laughs and meals with.