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The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed. —WILLIAM GIBSON
If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond “the office.”
The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Helping the company’s bottom line, adding to your pocketbook, and saving the planet: check, check, check.
Embracing remote work doesn’t mean you can’t have an office, just that it’s not required. It doesn’t mean that all your employees can’t live in the same city, just that they don’t have to. Remote work is about setting your team free to be the best it can be, wherever that might be.
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? 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? It just doesn’t make sense.
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.
Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust.
If you run your ship with the conviction that 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.
“If we’re struggling with trust issues, it means we made a poor hiring decision. If a team member isn’t producing good results or can’t manage their own schedule and workload, we aren’t going to continue to work with that person. It’s as simple as that. We employ team members who are skilled professionals, capable of managing their own schedules and making a valuable contribution to the organization. We have no desire to be babysitters during the day.”
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire people 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?
Either learn to trust the people you’re working with or find some other people to work with.
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.
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.
Of course, this might not be as easy if you’re a tiny company with just one or two people responsible for dealing with clients. In that case, yes, you may well have to assign “regular working hours” to those employees whose chief function is to answer customers. But why subject everyone in the company to those hours? False equality benefits nobody.
Working remotely isn’t without complication or occasional sacrifice. It’s about making things better for more people more of the time.
Different jobs, different requirements. People get that.
The best way to defuse the “everyone must be bound by the same policy” line of argument is to remind your boss, yourself, and any other concerned party that you’re all on the same team. You’re all in the game to find the best way to work: the most productive and happiness-inducing setup wins. Hearing that pitch, only the most closed-minded are likely to continue digging in their heels.
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.
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. That means realizing that not everything is equally important.
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.
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.
At 37signals, we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.
This works just as well for asynchronous collaboration in slow time. When someone wants to demonstrate a new feature they’re working on at 37signals, often the easiest way is to record a screencast and narrate the experience. A screencast is basically just a recording of your screen that others can play back later as a movie. It can be used in several ways, including for presenting the latest sales figures or elaborating on a new marketing strategy.
Here’s the key: you need everything available to everyone at all times. If Pratik in London has to wait five hours for someone in Chicago to come online in order to know what he should work on next, that’s half a workday lost. A company won’t waste time like that for long before declaring that “remote working just doesn’t work.” As we talked about earlier, this problem of materials and instructions being out of reach is almost entirely solvable by technology. (The rest is a culture of good communication.)
The point is to avoid locking up important stuff in a single person’s computer or inbox. Put all the important stuff out in the open, and no one will have to chase that wild goose to get their work done.
shops use IRC servers to achieve the same. The idea is to have a single, permanent chat room where everyone hangs out all day to shoot the breeze, post funny pictures, and generally goof around. Yes, it can also be used to answer questions about work, but its primary function is to provide social cohesion.
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.
Simply put, progress is a joy best shared with coworkers.
When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work.
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.
The great thing about this is the clarity it introduces. When it’s all about the work, it’s clear who in the company is pulling their weight and who isn’t.
Additionally, 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.
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.
What a manager needs to establish is a culture of reasonable expectations.
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?”
It feels good to be productive. If yesterday was a good day’s work, chances are you’ll stay on a roll. And if you can stay on a roll, everything else will probably take care of itself—including not working from when you get up in the morning until you go to sleep.
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.
Give remote work a real chance or don’t bother at all. It’s okay to start small, but make sure it’s meaningful.
There isn’t a secret. But we do have some tips. First, when pitching businesses, let the prospective client know up front that you don’t live where they live. You want to begin building trust right at the beginning. You don’t want to drop the line “Oh yeah, we won’t be able to regularly meet with you face-to-face every week ’cause we’re in Chicago and you’re in Los Angeles” right before you sign the contract. Second, provide references before the client even asks. Show right up front that you have nothing to hide. Trust is going to be the toughest thing to build early on, so make it as easy as
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The world has never been smaller and markets have never been more open. Don’t be a cultural or geographical hermit.
Keeping a solid team together for a long time is a key to peak performance. People grow closer and more comfortable with each other, and consequently do even better work. Meanwhile, rookie teams make rookie mistakes.
Remember, doing great work with great people is one of the most durable sources of happiness we humans can tap into. Stick with it.
