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A busy office is like a food processor—it chops your day into tiny bits. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, twenty here, five there.
The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.
The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration.
The luxury privilege of the next twenty years will be to leave the city. Not as its leashed servant in a suburb, but to wherever one wants.
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.
“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.
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.
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 best cultures derive from actions people actually take, not the ones they write about in a mission statement.
It’s rarely spelled out directly, but a lot of the arguments against working remotely are based on the fear of losing control.
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. This is one
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It’s the work that matters. Look at the work and forget the abstractions.
This gives back the edge to quiet-but-productive workers who often lose out in a traditional office environment. In a remote setup, you don’t need to constantly boast about the quality of your stuff when it’s already apparent to everyone willing to pay attention. Likewise, if you’re all talk and no walk, it’s painfully clear for all to see.
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 there’s an ideal training regimen for remote workers, it’s being a contractor for a while. As a contractor, you have to be able to set a reasonable schedule, show good progress at regular intervals, and convert an often fuzzy definition of the work into a deliverable. All these are skills perfectly suited for remote work.
Someone who’s had a chance to taste the dysfunction of several companies as a contractor is more likely to appreciate a company that actually gets remote work. Because of the trust needed and the good work practices required, a contractor can be fairly safe in assuming that a company cool with remote work is just cool in general.
At 37signals, we meet up at least twice a year for four to five days. Part of the reason is to talk shop, present the latest projects, and decide the future direction of the company. But the bigger deal is to put moving faces with screen names, and to do it with enough regularity that we don’t forget each other’s in-person personalities.
Going to an industry conference is another good opportunity for team bonding. You’ll learn something new together, and you usually have the evenings free to socialize.
If work is all-consuming, the worker is far more likely to burn out. This is true even if the person loves what he does. Perhaps especially if he loves what he does, since it won’t seem like a problem until it’s too late.
In the same way that you don’t want a gang of slackers, you also don’t want a band of supermen. 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.
Routine has a tendency to numb your creativity. Waking up at the same time, taking the same transportation, traveling the same route, plopping down in the same chair at the same desk in the same office over and over and over isn’t exactly a prescription for inspiration. Changes of scenery, however, can lead to all sorts of new ideas.
So don’t think of working remotely as just shifting your routine from the office to the home. The choice of kitchen table versus cubicle is a false one. 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.
Remote work has already progressed through the first two stages of Gandhi’s model for change: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Old habits die hard. The more entrenched, the harder they die.
Or as Harvey Dent from Batman said: “The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you the dawn is coming.”
