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That’s one of the key challenges of remote work: keeping everyone’s outlook healthy and happy. That task is insurmountable if you’ve stacked your team with personalities who tend to let their inner asshole loose every now and again.
Remember: sentiments are infectious, whether good or bad. That’s also why it’s as important to continuously monitor the work atmosphere as to hire for it. 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.
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.
Smart solutions, friendly service, and edgy design all happen at the intersection of professional skill and life experience.
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. It’s a small price to pay for a more interesting workplace and to keep people engaged for the long term.
Instead, you can ask copywriters to show you copy, consultants to show you reports or results, programmers to show you code, designers to show you designs, marketers to show you campaigns, and so on and so forth.
If the quality just isn’t there, it’ll be apparent from the second the person starts—and you’ll have wasted everyone’s time by hiring on circumstantial evidence.
It’s the work that matters. Look at the work and forget the abstractions.
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.
So don’t look at remote work as a way to skimp on salaries; you’ll save on lots of other things.
When the work product is out in the open, it’s much easier to see who’s actually smart (as opposed to who simply sounds smart). The collective judgment rarely even has to be verbalized. Conversely, if the work keeps getting flagged with problems, it’s evidence that the Smarts aren’t sufficiently present for the work at hand. Also, if the duration between installments of new work or tasks being checked off is persistently lengthy, it’s a sign that the Gets Things Done bit is missing.
Remote work speeds up the process of getting the wrong people off the bus and the right people on board.†
Being a good writer is an essential part of being a good remote worker. When most arguments are settled over email or chat or discussion boards, you’d better show up equipped for the task. So, as a company owner or manager, you might as well filter for this quality right from the get-go.
On Writing Well by William Zinsser The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White Revising Prose by Richard Lanham
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. Call it “pre-hiring.” Pre-hiring takes the form of a one- or two-week mini-project. We usually pay around $1,500 for the mini-project. We never ask people to work for free. If we wouldn’t do it for free, why would we ask someone else to do it? If the candidate is unemployed, they get a week. If they currently have a job, they get two weeks, since they usually have to carve out time at night or on the weekends to do the project.
Whatever it is, make it meaningful. Make it about creating something new that solves a problem. We don’t believe in asking people to solve puzzles. Solving real problems is a lot more interesting—and enlightening.
Elementary, Watson. The job of a manager is not to herd cats, but to lead and verify the work. The trouble with that job description is that it requires knowledge of the work itself. You can’t effectively manage a team if you don’t know the intricacies of what they’re working on.
No, it means they should know what needs to be done, understand why delays might happen, be creative with solutions to sticky problems, divide the work into manageable chunks, and help put the right people on the right projects. Well, that and about a million other things that will ensure work proceeds with as little bother and as few obstacles as possible.
Just because you work remotely most of the time doesn’t mean you have to, or should, work remotely all of the time. Fill up the camel’s back every now and then with some in-person fun.
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.
People with the power to change things need to feel the same hurt as those who merely have to deal with it.
The mechanics of leveling the playing field are pretty simple: Get great intercom systems, use shared desktop apps like WebEx to ensure everyone is seeing the same thing while collaborating, and hold as many discussions as possible on email and other online messaging platforms. Above all, think frequently about how you’d feel as a remote worker.
Start by empowering everyone to make decisions on their own. If the company is full of people whom nobody trusts to make decisions without layers of managerial review, then the company is full of the wrong people.
As a manager, you have to accept the fact that people will make mistakes, but not intentionally, and that mistakes are the price of learning and self-sufficiency.
Second, you must make sure that people have access, by default, to everything they need.
If you let them, humans have an amazing power to live up to your high expectations of reasonableness and responsibility.
In reality, it’s overwork, not underwork, that’s the real enemy in a successful remote-working environment.
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.
When something’s scarce, we tend to conserve, appreciate, respect, and value it. When something is abundant, we rarely think twice about how we use or spend it. Abundance and value are often opposites.
So go on—make face-to-face harder and less frequent and you’ll see the value of these interactions go up, not down.
We’re merely suggesting that you demarcate the difference between work and play. Simply looking presentable is usually enough.
Another hack is to divide the day into chunks like Catch-up, Collaboration, and Serious Work. Some people prefer to use the mornings to catch up on email, industry news, and other low-intensity tasks, and then put their game face on for tearing through the tough stuff after lunch.
Different strokes for different folks, so consider all these suggestions for how to build your personal routine as merely that—suggestions. If you’re getting everything you need to get done just freewheeling, more power to you. But most people will need some semblance of structure to get the most out of working remotely. Find what works for you, pants or no pants!
A more plausible, human strategy is to separate the two completely by using different devices: simply reserve one computer for work and another for fun.
As detailed by Alfie Kohn in his wonderful book Punished by Rewards:* neither. Trying to conjure motivation by means of rewards or threats is terribly ineffective. In fact, it’s downright counterproductive.
Rather, the only reliable way to muster motivation is by encouraging people to work on the stuff they like and care about, with people they like and care about. There are no shortcuts.
Motivation is pivotal to healthy lives and healthy companies. Make sure you’re minding it.
Creative work that can be done remotely generally only requires a computer and an Internet connection. The computer you can bring with you, and nearly anywhere in the world you’ll be hard-pressed not to find an Internet connection.
Routine has a tendency to numb your creativity.
Instead, look at the remote option as an opportunity to be influenced by more things and to take in more perspectives than you normally might if you had to be in the same place at the same time every day.
There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work. One is to make noise. The other is to make progress, to do exceptional work. Fortunately for remote workers, “the work” is the measure that matters.
He produced, so he couldn’t be ignored.
In thirty years’ time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed. —RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF VIRGIN GROUP
