Remote: Office Not Required

by David Heinemeier Hansson

If you’re calling a meeting, you better be sure pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth s...

Remember, there’s no such thing as a one-hour meeting. If you’re in a room with five people for an ho...

But when management is forced to manage remotely using email, Basecamp, IM, and chat, its intervention is much more purposeful and compressed, and we can just get on with the actual work.

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?”

But if you’re going to make a real go at working from home for the long term, you’ll need to get the ergonomic basics right.

at home you can completely personalize your space.

Now they offer online personal trainers to help employees stay in shape.fn3

Now that you’ve saved time by skipping the commute, there really is no excuse for not finding the minutes to exercise or cook healthy meals.

hire people as contractors.

The person contracted either has to have incorporated him or herself or be otherwise recognized as a company in their own right, so that they can send invoices. And they unfortunately can’t partake in the regular regime of benefits offered to local employees. (That exclusion includes health care, but to cover that the contracting firm can always roll in additional compensation as part of the monthly invoice.)

manager of remote workers needs to make an example of even the small stuff—things like snippy comments or passive-aggressive responses. While this responsibility naturally falls to those in charge, it works even better if policed by everyone in the company.

All of these other parlor tricks are indirect measures of looking at a candidate—probably even less reliable than looking at their college grade point average. For most of the work that can be done remotely, it’s entirely unnecessary to go the indirect route. 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. This is an important aspect of recruiting in general, but it’s even more

The main way you’ll communicate is through the work itself. 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.

Asking to see work product is pretty easy for positions with natural portfolios, such as designer, programmer, or writer. For positions that don’t lend themselves to portfolio accumulation, you can simply pose real-world problem...

It’s a lot harder to fake your way as a remote worker. As the opportunities to schmooze in the office decrease, the focus on the work itself increases. Additionally, central online repositories for tracking tasks and reporting progress, like Basecamp, create an irrefutable paper trail showing what everyone is getting done and how long it’s taking. 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. Remote work pulls back the curtain

Remote work speeds up the process of getting the wrong people off the bus and the right people on board.fn2

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.

No, the first filter that really matters is the cover letter explaining exactly why there’s a fit between applicant and company.

doesn’t matter if someone is local or remote—we still want to judge their work, not their résumé. A lot of companies base their judgments on work already done. We do some of that too. But what’s tricky about that is that work already done is hard to account for. Who really did the work? Was it solo? On a team? What limitations were in place? Did the work take way longer than it should have? Etc. 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 we...

The project depends on the job they’re applying for. A designer might be tasked with redesigning one screen from our website or one of our products. A programmer might be tasked with building a tiny app from scratch in a week. If you’re hiring a writer, have them write something. Whatever it is, make it meaningful. Make it about creating something new that solve...

more interesting—and enl...

If you don’t have part of the team in the same city as the manager doing the in-person evaluation, you’ll have to simulate the situation in other ways. Using a video chat system that allows for a whole group to be online together, like Google Hangouts, is a reasonable substitute. It won’t be as good, but it’ll do. In the

end, we make the call on talent and character. It’s always a blend. If we offer them the job, and they want to work with us, we virtually shake hands and often invite them back to the office for their first few weeks on the job. This way they can get a bit more acclimated to the team, the culture, the faces, the names, etc. Once oriented, they can go back home with a solid introduction to the company,

the people, and the wa...

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. Contract work is an excellent way for both the company doing the hiring and the person being hired to ease into remote work and try it on for size. In a sense, both sides are test driving each other. Part of the appeal of contract work is that if your client is a bozo, then at least you don’t have to work with them forever. Once the contract is up, you’re free to try another fish in the sea.

Because of the trust needed and the good work practices required, a contractor can be fairly safe in assuming that a company cool with

If you treat remote work as a low-risk experiment, you’ll be able to iterate, adjust, and try a variety of things to see what works best. You may want to offer the remote option to people on different teams. Maybe it’ll turn out that one type of job is easily done remotely, while another really feels as though it should happen in the office.

You never know until you try.

So start early if you can, but if you can’t, start small. Take a tiny step with a few trusted current employees. Let them work outside the office a couple days a week. See what happens. It’s low risk and you’ll i...

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. That doesn’t mean every programming manager has to be a programmer (although it helps) nor that every design director has to design every screen (but again, it helps if they’re able to). 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.

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. Just because you work remotely

working on exciting problems you’re personally interested in means you don’t need a manager breathing down your neck and constantly looking over your shoulder.

You don’t really notice these roadblocks when you work 9am to 5pm in the same office as all your coworkers. Who cares if only Jeff is able to deploy a new version of the software if he’s right across from you and all you have to do is ask? Or whether every refund has to be authorized by Jason before it goes out? The best way to ease the remote worker’s plight is to do away with these roadblocks entirely. 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