Remote: Office Not Required

by David Heinemeier Hansson

adoption of remote work has not been nearly as universal or commonsensical as many would have thought.

a fundamental people problem. The missing upgrade is for the human mind. This book aims to provide that upgrade. We’ll illuminate the many benefits of remote work, including access to the best talent, freedom from soul-crushing commutes, and increased productivity outside the traditional office.

remote work increases both quality of work and job satisfaction. “Office not required” isn’t just the future—it’s the present. Now is your chance to catch up.

If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond “the office.” If they do say the office, they’ll include a qualifier such as “super early in the morning before anyone gets in” or “I stay late at night after everyone’s left” or “I sneak in on the weekend.”

Are offices inherently unproductive? “Work” has become performance, especially in “open plan” offices - showing up early, staying late, replying-all to emails. Actual productivity happens in the margins or elsewhere.

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.

This may the point everyone missed during lockdown: remote work is asynchronous, it’s not about telepresence. Remote work does not equal Zoom meetings.

here’s another set of unremarkable predictions: The world’s share of great technology from Silicon Valley will decline, the best movies of the next twenty years will consist of fewer Hollywood blockbusters, and fewer people will be induced to buy products from admen in New York.

The decline of “superstar” cities and the rise of the rest.

In fact, we don’t have a single employee in San Francisco, the hub where every technology company seems to be tripping over itself to find “rock stars” and “software ninjas.” This hasn’t been a conscious choice on our part, but given the poaching games being played in major hubs, with people changing jobs as often as they might reorder their iPhone playlists, it’s not exactly a net negative.

BTW can people stop referring themselves as “[fill in the blank] ninjas?”

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.

If you can recruit from anywhere, then you’re less prone to talent poaching, where your competitors in a handful of superstar cities snag your best talent.

Helping the company’s bottom line, adding to your pocketbook, and saving the planet: check, check, check.

Pros of remote work: 1) Recruit talent from anywhere; 2) Reduce your office space leases or profit from office subleases; 3) With no commute, you and your employees can reduce your aggregate “carbon footprint,” going car-free or car-lite; 4) With no offices, your employees can free themselves of superstar city (and suburbs) high rent and home prices; 5) Freed of having to live in a superstar city, your employees can move to and contribute to cities and towns across America.

What about culture? Culture isn’t a foosball table. It’s not a paintball outing in the forest. It’s not even the Christmas party where Steve got so drunk that everyone had a good story for the rest of the year. That’s people hanging out and having a good time. No, culture is the spoken and unspoken values and actions of the organization. Here are a few examples: • How we talk to customers—are they always right? • What quality is acceptable—good enough or must it be perfect? • How we talk to each other—with diplomatic tones or shouting matches? • Workload—do we cheer on all-nighters or take Fridays off? • Risk taking—do we favor bet-the-company pivots or slow growth?

The brutal truth: your corporate culture probably sucks - low trust, fear, intimidation, micro-aggressions.

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.

Why work doesn’t happen at/during work: continual interruptions.

Easy on the M&Ms Most of the time when you hear people imagining why remote work won’t work, they’ll point to two things in particular: One, you can’t have face-to-face meetings when people aren’t in the office. And two, managers can’t tell if people are getting work done if they can’t see them working. We’d like to offer a very different perspective on these two points. We believe that these staples of work life—meetings and managers—are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office. That, in fact, the further away you are from meetings and managers, the more work gets done.

Meetings are productivity sinks. Meetings (and untrained/unskilled managers) are impediments to getting work done.

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?”

Guardrails are better than boundaries (Petersen & Warzel, Out of Office).

Michael Bloomberg, accomplished and respected mayor of New York, shows there’s still work to be done in educating people about remote work’s benefits, with this quote from the beginning of 2013:† “I’ve always said, telecommuting is one of the dumber ideas I’ve ever heard. Yes, there are some things you can do at home. But having a chat line is not the same thing as standing at the watercooler.” Old habits die hard. The more entrenched, the harder they die. To someone like Bloomberg, who over the course of decades has kept his coworkers close at hand (never more so than in his mayor’s office, which with its warren of open cubicles mimics a trading floor), being able to peer out and “see” the work being done is as entrenched a habit as they come. Challenging such habits has always been a risky business. The world is flat right up until the day it’s round. Or as Harvey Dent from Batman said: “The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you the dawn is coming.” Remote work is here, and it’s here to stay. The only question is whether you’ll be part of the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, or the laggards.‡ The ship carrying the innovators has already sailed, but there are still plenty of vessels for the early adopters. Come on board.

What to make of Mike Bloomberg? In his memoir, he recounted with pride the weekend he had carpenters saw inches off his employees’ desks so he could stuff more people into the room.