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A busy office is like a food processor—it chops your day into tiny bits.
Where do you go when you really have to get work done? Your answer won’t be “the office in the afternoon.”
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.
Do you think today’s teenagers, raised on Facebook and texting, will be sentimental about the old days of all-hands-on-deck, Monday morning meetings? Ha!
A swanky corner office on the top floor of a tall building, a plush company-provided Lexus, a secretary. It’s easy to laugh at old-money corporate luxuries. But the new-money, hip ones aren’t all that different: a fancy chef and free meals, laundry services, massages, a roomful of arcade games. They’re two sides of the same coin.
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 all being done efficiently.
if you can’t let your employees work from home out of fear they’ll slack off without your supervision, you’re a babysitter, not a manager.
Being a good writer is an essential part of being a good remote worker.
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?
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.
The fact is, it’s just easier to work remotely with people you’ve met in so-called “real life”
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.
What is the case is that people are often scared to make a decision because they work in an environment of retribution and blame. That style of work is very incompatible with remote work. As a manager, you have to accept the fact that people will make mistakes, but not intentionally,
mistakes are the price of learning and self-sufficiency.
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.
Think of that iPad as your sweatpants—perfect for lounging around the house, but not something you’d think of taking to the office.
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.fn3 The ship carrying the innovators has already sailed, but there are still plenty of vessels for the early adopters. Come on board.
