Remote Office Not Required

The Time is Right For Remote Work

Why work doesn’t happen at work

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.” What they’re trying to tell you is that they can’t get work done at work. The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done. That’s because offices have become interruption factories. 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. Each segment is filled with a conference call, a meeting, another meeting, or some other institutionalized unnecessary interruption.

Escaping 9am–5pm

If you can’t get into the zone, there’s rarely much that can force you into it. When face time isn’t a requirement, the best strategy is often to take some time away and get back to work when your brain is firing on all cylinders.

The new luxury

That’s the coin given in exchange for the endless hours spent at the office. Away from your family, your friends, and your extracurricular passions. The hope is that these enticements will tide you over during those long years when you’re dreaming of all the things you’ll do when you retire. But why wait? If what you really love doing is skiing, why wait until your hips are too old to take a hard fall and then move to Colorado? If you love surfing, why are you still trapped in a concrete jungle and not living near the beach? If all the family members you’re close to live in a small town in Oregon, why are you still stuck on the other coast? The new luxury is to shed the shackles of deferred living—to pursue your passions now, while you’re still working. What’s the point in wasting time daydreaming about how great it’ll be when you finally quit?

Talent isn’t bound by the hubs

If you talk to technologists from Silicon Valley, moviemakers from Hollywood, or advertising execs from New York, they’ll all insist that the magic only happens on their sacred turf. But that’s what you’d expect talent hub nationalists to say. You’re the fool if you believe it.

Talent isn’t bound by the hubs

Great talent is everywhere, and not everyone wants to move to San Francisco (or New York or Hollywood, or wherever you’re headquartered). 37signals is a successful software company started in—gasp!—the Midwest, and we’re proud to have hired spectacular employees from such places as Caldwell, Idaho, and Fenwick, Ontario.

Dealing With Excuses

Magic only happens when we’re all in a room

You know the feeling. Everyone’s sitting around a table, ideas are building on ideas, and intellectual sparks are lighting up the room. It’s tempting to think that this kind of magic only happens when people can see and touch each other. Let’s assume for a second that’s true: Breakthrough ideas only happen when people meet face-to-face. Still, the question remains: How many breakthrough ideas can a company actually digest? Far fewer than you imagine. Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it’s making better the thing you already thought of six months—or six years—ago. It’s the work of work.

Magic only happens when we’re all in a room

First, few such rays actually warrant the label “brilliant”—more likely they’re mere rays of enthusiasm (and not to be confused with a priority).

If I can’t see them, how do I know they’re working?

remotely stem from a lack of trust. A manager thinks, Will people work hard if I’m not watching them all the time? If I can’t see them sitting pretty at their desks, are they just going to goof off and play video games or surf the web all day? We’ll let you in on a secret: If people really want to play video games or surf the web all day, they’re perfectly capable of doing so from their desks at the office. In fact, lots of studies have shown that many people do exactly that. For example, at clothing retailer J.C. Penney’s headquarters, 4,800 workers spend 30 percent of the company’s Internet bandwidth watching YouTube videos. * So, coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There’s no guarantee of productivity.

If I can’t see them, how do I know they’re working?

As Chris Hoffman from the IT Collective explains: “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.”

If I can’t see them, how do I know they’re working?

That’s just it—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. Remote work is very likely the least of your problems. Unfortunately, not everyone takes such a sensible approach. The poor employees of Accurate Biometrics have to endure constant remote surveillance by their boss, who uses InterGuard† software to monitor their computer screens. Apparently that’s a growing trend. InterGuard alone claims ten thousand clients, and research group Gartner estimates that 60 percent of employees will suffer from some sort of Big Brother invasion by 2015. Yikes! The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire people you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you. If you’re not trusted to work remotely, why are you trusted to do anything at all? If you’re held in such low regard, why are you able to talk to customers, write copy for an ad, design the next product, assess insurance claims, or do tax returns?

Who will answer the phone?

False equality benefits nobody.

Big business doesn’t do it, so why should we?

That’s a roundabout way of saying that looking to big business for the latest productivity tips is probably not the smartest thing to do. The whole point of innovation and disruption is doing things differently from those who came before you. Unless you do that, you won’t stand a chance. So it really doesn’t matter that Multinational, Inc., forbids its employees to work from home. In fact, you should be happy if the 800-pound gorilla in your industry is still clinging to the old ways of working. It will just make it that much easier to beat them.

Others would get jealous

If you’re pitching your boss to let you work from home a few days a week, a common rebuff is how envious your coworkers would be if you were granted this special privilege. Why, it simply wouldn’t be fair! We all need to be equally, miserably unproductive at the office and suffer in unity!

Others would get jealous

Is the business we’re talking about just an elaborate scheme to keep everyone in their assigned seats for a set number of hours? Or is it rather an organization of people getting work done? If it’s the latter, why not let people work the way they prefer, and judge everyone on what—not where—work is completed?

What about culture?

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?

I need an answer now!

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.

I need an answer now!

With a graduated system like this, you’ll quickly realize that 80 percent of your questions aren’t so timesensitive 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 can be looked up later.

I need an answer now!

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.

But I’ll lose control

To a lot of people, being the big boss is about achieving such control. It’s woven into their identity. To such alpha males and females, having someone under “direct supervision” means having them in their line of sight—literally. The thinking goes, If I can see them, I can control them. Wresting that antiquated notion of control away from managers isn’t a logical or rational process. It’s often something that needs to be slow-walked—until the person calling the shots gets comfortable with the concept. In some ways it’s similar to phobia therapy. You can’t just tell someone who’s afraid of spiders that their fear is silly and have them snap out of it. You have to work—one step at a time—to move the issue from the reptilian brain to the frontal lobe. So if you’re fighting against someone’s fear of losing control, you have to start small and show that the world doesn’t fall apart if you start working from home on Wednesdays. Not only didn’t it fall apart, but look at all this extra stuff I got done! Then you can ramp it up to two days, and more flexible hours, and before you know it you’re ready to move to another city and the wheels just keep on turning.

Forward motion

How to Collaborate Remotely ?

At 37signals we’ve institutionalized this through a weekly discussion thread with the subject “What have you been working on?” Everyone chimes in with a few lines about what they’ve done over the past week and what’s intended for the next week. It’s not a precise, rigorous estimation process, and it doesn’t attempt to deal with coordination. It simply aims to make everyone feel like they’re in the same galley and not their own little rowboat.

Forward motion

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.

Disaster ready

Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF. If the office loses power or Internet or air conditioning, it’s no longer functional as a place to do work. If a company doesn’t have any training or structure to work around that, it means it’s going to be unavailable to its customers.

Beware the Dragons

Check-in, check-out

What a manager needs to establish is a culture of reasonable expectations. At 37signals, we expect and encourage people to work forty hours per week on average. There are no hero awards for putting in more than that. Sure, every now and then there’s the need for a short sprint, but, most of the time, the company is viewing what it does as a marathon. It’s crucial for everyone to pace themselves.

Mind the gut

At 37signals, we try our best to encourage our remote workers to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Everyone gets a $ 100 monthly stipend for a health club membership, and we cover the cost of weekly fresh fruit and vegetable deliveries from local farmers.§

Hiring and Keeping the Best

It’s a big world

Once you’ve formed good remote working habits, the lack of proximity between coworkers will start mattering so little that you’ll forget exactly where people are. Nobody noticed much of a difference when Anton was working from Thailand instead of Russia. And we keep forgetting what city Jeremy is currently living in (it’s somewhere on the West Coast). It just doesn’t matter.

It’s a big world

With remote work, most communication is written. Many people who can get by with so-so language skills in the spoken realm fall flat when it comes to the written word. There simply isn’t much room for weak communication on teams with tight collaboration. You need solid writers to make remote work work, and a solid command of your home language is key.

Keep the good times going

Even for people with the best intentions, relations can go astray if the work gets stressful (and what work doesn’t occasionally?). The best ballast you can have is as many folks in your boat as possible with a thoroughly optimistic outlook. We’re talking about people who go out of their way to make sure everyone is having a good time.

Keep the good times going

Remember: sentiments are infectious, whether good or bad. That’s also why it’s as important to continuously monitor the work atmosphere as to hire for it. It’s never a good idea to let poisonous people stick around to spoil it for everyone else, but in a remote-work setup it’s deadly.

Seeking a human

The old adage still applies: No assholes allowed. But for remote work, you need to extend it to no asshole-y behavior allowed, no drama allowed, no bad vibes allowed.

The cost of thriving

Instead of thinking I can pay people from Kansas less than people from New York, you should think I can get amazing people from Kansas and make them feel valued and well-compensated if I pay them New York salaries.

The cost of thriving

Now compare this to hiring an ace customer support person from Fayetteville, Tennessee, or a star programmer from Caldwell, Idaho, or a design wiz from Edmond, Oklahoma, and paying them all big-city market salaries. It’s going to be awfully hard for the employee to find a better deal at a local company (since they’ll tend to pay local rates).

Great remote workers are simply great workers

workers. They exhibit the two key qualities, as Joel Spolsky labeled them in his “Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing” :* Smart, and Gets Things Done.

On writing well

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.

On writing well

you’re serious about becoming a better writer: On Writing Well by William Zinsser

On writing well

The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White Revising Prose by Richard Lanham

Managing Remote Workers

Lessons from open source

So when in doubt or down about hitting a roadblock with remote work, just think, At least I’m not trying to corral and merge the work of 3,000 people across the globe on a single project. You’ll instantly feel better about the modest scope of your problem.

Level the playing field

“John and I talked about this in the office yesterday and decided that your idea isn’t going to work.” Fuck that.

Remove the roadblocks

Getting stuff done while working remotely depends, first, on being able to make progress at all hours. It’s no good twiddling your thumbs for three hours waiting for a manager to grant you permission, or hoping a coworker gets up soon so he or she can show you how something works in the remote world.

Be on the lookout for overwork, not underwork

This might sound like an employer’s dream: workers putting in a ton of extra hours for no additional pay! But it’s not. 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.

Using scarcity to your advantage

When most conversations happen virtually—on the phone, via email, in Basecamp, over instant message, or in a Skype video chat—people actually look forward to these special opportunities for a face-to-face. The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don’t waste the time.

Life As A Remote Worker

Building a routine

Another hack is to divide the day into chunks like Catch-up, Collaboration, and Serious Work. Some people prefer to use the mornings to catch up on email, industry news, and other low-intensity tasks, and then put their game face on for tearing through the tough stuff after lunch.

Staying motivated

You can get several days’ worth of work completed in one motivation-turboed afternoon. Or, when you’re motivation starved, you can waste a week getting a day’s worth of work done.

The quaint old office

Progress on fundamental freedoms, like where to work, is largely cumulative. There might be setbacks here and there from poorly designed programs or misguided attempts at nostalgia, but they’ll be mere blips in the long run.

#books #dhh

— Rishi Banerjee
April 2023