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. You lose time, patience, possibly even your will to eat anything other than convenience food with plastic utensils. Maybe you skip the gym, miss your child’s bedtime, feel too tired for a meaningful conversation with your significant other. The list goes on.

Even your weekends get truncated by that wretched commute. All those chores you don’t have the will to complete after slugging it out with the highway collect into one mean list due on Saturday.

By the time you’ve tak...

trash, picked up the dry cleaning, gone to the hardware store, and paid your bills, ...

long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness. According to the research,fn1 commuting is associated with an increased risk of obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure, and other stress-related ills such as heart attacks and depression, and even divorce.

Screen sharing using WebEx, coordinating to-do lists using Basecamp, real-time chatting using instant messages, downloading the latest files using Dropbox—

The beauty of relaxing workday hours is that the policy accommodates everyone—from the early birds to the night owls to the family folks with kids who need to be picked up in the middle of the day. At 37signals, we try to keep a roughly forty-hour workweek, but how

our employees distribute those hours across the clock

and days just isn’t important...

Imagine describing to a city dweller of the 1960s a world in which everyone has access to every movie ever made, every book ever written, every album ever recorded, and nearly every sports game live (in higher quality and better colors than at any time in the past). Surely, they would have laughed. Hell, even in the 1980s they would have laughed. But here we are living in that world. There’s a difference, though, between taking it for granted and taking it to the logical conclusion. If we now have unlimited access to culture and entertainment from any location, why are we still willing to live bound by the original deal? Is that overpriced apartment, the motorized sardine box, and your cubicle really worth it still? Increasingly, we believe that for many people the answer will be no.

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.

remote work isn’t primarily about the money—but who doesn’t like saving as a side effect? It certainly makes a great argument if you’re trying to convince a manager. Money, in fact, is the perfect Trojan horse for getting the bean counters on your side. Make them see dollar signs where you see greater freedom, more time with the family, and no commute, and you’ll both get what you want. When trying to convince said bean counters, there’s no logic like big company logic—so here’s some from IBM,fn2 the bluest of blue chips: Through its telework strategy, since 1995, IBM has reduced office space by a total of 78 million square feet. Of that, 58 million square feet was sold at a gain of $1.9B. And sublease income for leased space not needed exceeded $1B. In the U.S.,

continuing annual savings amounts to $100M, and at least that much in Europe. With 386,000 employees, 40 percent of whom telework, the ratio of office space to employee is now 8:1 with some facilities as high as 15:1.

And the savings aren’t just for the company. While the firm’s owners get to save on office space, the employee gets to save on petrol. HP’s Telework Calculatorfn3 shows a savings of almost $10,000 per year for an SUV driver who spends an hour a day commuting ten miles round trip. Cutting back on commuting also means huge savings for the environment. That same IBM study showed how remote work saved the company five million gallons of fuel in 2007, preventing more than 450,000 tons of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere in the United States alone.

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

Your company may already be working remotely without your even knowing it. Unless it has its own lawyers on staff, it likely outsources legal work to an independent lawyer or a law firm. Unless your company has its own accounting department, it likely outsources accounting to a CPA. Unless your company has its own HR systems, it likely outsources payroll, retirement, and health care to outside firms. And what about all those companies that hire ad agencies to help communicate their message to the market? Legal, accounting, payroll, advertising—all essential business activities. Without outside people to perform these key functions you might not even be in business. All these activities are carried out outside your company’s walls, away from your company’s network, and outside of your management’s direct control—and yet there’s no doubt it’s

being done efficiently. 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?

Worth counting too is the number of days you spend at the office emailing someone who sits only three desks away. People go to the office all the time and act as though they’re working remotely: emailing, instant messaging, secluding themselves to get work done. At the end of the day, was it really worth coming to the office for it?

“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.” That’s just it—if you can’t

Either learn to trust the people you’re working with or find some other people to work with.

1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a

company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones

and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to thin...

work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.fn4 We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C...

Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your ...

phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new passwo...

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.

With a graduated system like this, you’ll quickly realize that 80 percent of your questions aren’t so time-sensitive after all, and are often better served by an email than by walking over to someone’s desk.

Even better, you’ll have a written record of the response that ca...

The next 15 percent can be handled in a chat or by instant message. Most people don’t like to type that much in a chat anyway, so there’s a tendency to get to the point. What would have been a lingering fifteen-mi...

Handling 80 percent of your questions with email won’t work out well if you get upset when people don’t answer within ten minutes. Once you’re ASAP-free, however, you’ll be amazed at how your former self was able to get anything done in the face of constant in-person interruptions. 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.

Sunk cost means that the money spent on the office is already spent. Whoever paid for it is not getting it back whether it’s being used or not. So, rationally, the only thing that matters regarding where to work is whether the office is a more productive place or not. That’s it.

Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to fix. WebEx, GoToMeeting, Join.me,

Screen sharing doesn’t require a webcam—it’s more like sitting next to each other in front of a computer or a projector. It’s about collaborating on the work itself, not about reading facial expressions (although that too has a time and place).

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.

QuickTime Player and select “New Screen Recording.” Show what you want to show, narrate the experience using the computer’s microphone, and voilà, everyone will be on the same page about what you’ve been working on.

We pair Basecamp with GitHub, a code depository, so that all our code is available at all times to everyone, including change suggestions that can be discussed in slow time—over a couple of hours or days—as programmers comment on the thread.

We also use a shared calendar, so we know when Andrea’s coming back from maternity leave or Jeff’s going on vacation. If your company is too large to share one calendar, break it up by teams.

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.

Working remotely doesn’t automatically create that flow. Sure, there might be a project manager who checks in with everyone via email or chat, but that just gives her an idea what’s going on. To instill a sense of company cohesion and to share forward motion, everyone needs to feel that they’re in the loop.

also serves as a friendly reminder that we’re all in it to make progress. Nobody wants to be the one to report that “this week was spent completing Halo 4, eating leftover pizza, and catching up on Jersey Shore.” We all have a natural instinct to avoid letting our team down, so when that commitment becomes visual, it gets reinforced. It’s also a lot

harder to bullshit your peers than your boss. In talking to a project manager without tech chops, programmers can make a thirty-minute job sound like a week-long polar expedition, but if their tall tale is out in the open for other programmers to see, it won’t pass the smell test.

What you’re left with is “what did this person actually do today?” Not “when did they get in?” or “how late did they stay?” Instead it’s all about the work produced. So instead of asking a remote worker “what did you do today?” you can now just say “show me what you did today.”

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 p...

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. But here’s the thing: if you’re going to give it a shot, give it a real shot. Try it for at least three months. There’s going to be an adjustment period, so let everyone settle into their new rhythm. You can even start with two days remote, three days in the office. Then, if all goes well, flip it—two days in the office, three days remote. Work up to a full week out of the office. This practice will provide the conditioning you need prior to hiring your first truly remote (read: far away) employee. You’ll be prepared, you’ll know what to expect, and you’ll have a successful experiment under your belt.

systems design there’s the notion of a Single Point of Failure, or SPoF. Much of the work required to achieve high reliability goes into finding and removing SPoFs. Everything eventually breaks, so if you don’t have a backup system, it means you’ll be out of commission. Forcing everyone

Too many meetings can destroy morale and motivation.

Further, meetings are major distractions. They require multiple people to drop whatever it is they’re doing and instead do something else.