LLM Book Knowledgebase

Remote: Office Not Required

38 min read

Remote: Office Not Required

Metadata

Highlights & Notes

The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed. —WILLIAM GIBSON

If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond “the office.”

The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done.

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work—this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone.

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.

According to the research,* 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.

Commuting isn’t just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment—it’s bad for business. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration. Not only do we not have to be in the same spot to work together, we also don’t have to work at the same time to work together.

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.

Release yourself from the 9am-to-5pm mentality. It might take a bit of time and practice to get the hang of working asynchronously with your team, but soon you’ll see that it’s the work—not the clock—that matters.

We traded the freedom and splendor of country land and fresh air for convenience and excitement.

So here’s a prediction: The luxury privilege of the next twenty years will be to leave the city.

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?

You don’t need to be extraordinarily lucky or hardworking to make your work life fit with your passions—if you’re free to pick where to work from and when to work.

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.

When you have dozens, even hundreds, of competitors within walking distance of your office, it should come as no surprise when your employees cross the street and join the next hot thing.

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. That it may also end up reducing costs spent on offices and result in fewer-but-more-productive workers is the gravy, not the turkey.

Besides, the key intellectual pursuits that are the primary fit for remote working—writing, programming, designing, advising, and customer support, to mention just a few—have little to do with the cutthroat margin wars of, say, manufacturing. Squeezing slightly more words per hour out of a copywriter is not going to make anyone rich. Writing the best ad just very well might.

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.

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

Embracing remote work doesn’t mean you can’t have an office, just that it’s not required. It doesn’t mean that all your employees can’t live in the same city, just that they don’t have to. Remote work is about setting your team free to be the best it can be, wherever that might be.

Now we have thirty-six employees and a West Loop Chicago office we helped design. It’s got a small theater for presentations and a ping-pong table, and on any given day ten employees work there. Is it worth it? We think so, but we wouldn’t have said the same thing ten years ago, and probably not even five. Is it required? Absolutely not, but we’ve earned it. It’s a luxury, not a necessity—although it sure is nice that a few times a year all our employees can fly in for a company-wide gathering, and we have an awesome space to meet.

At first, giving up seeing your coworkers in person every day might come as a relief (if you’re an introvert), but eventually you’re likely to feel a loss. Even with the substitutes we’ll discuss, there are times when nothing beats talking to your manager in person or sitting in a room with your colleagues, brainstorming the next big thing. The same goes for the loss of imposed structure and regimen. It requires a new level of personal commitment to come up with—and stick with—an alternative work frame. That’s more responsibility than may be apparent at first, especially for natural procrastinators—and who isn’t from time to time?

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? Why do companies have no problem working with a lawyer who works in the next town over and yet distrust their own employees to work anywhere other than their own desks? It just doesn’t make sense. 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? Look around inside your company and notice what work already happens on the outside, or with minimal face-to-face interaction. You may be surprised to discover that your company is more remote than you think.

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.

Given that, you’re only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.

By rationing in-person meetings, their stature is elevated to that of a rare treat. They become something to be savored, something special. Dine out every once in a while on those feasts and sustain yourself in the interim on the conversation “snacks” that technology makes possible. That will give you all the magic you can handle.

Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust.

If you run your ship with the conviction that everyone’s a slacker, your employees will put all their ingenuity into proving you right. If you view those who work under you as capable adults who will push themselves to excel even when you’re not breathing down their necks, they’ll delight you in return.

“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 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.

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?

As Sir Richard Branson commented in his ode to working remotely: “To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision.”

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

Keep in mind, the number one counter to distractions is interesting, fulfilling work.

Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us—when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them—that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we’re engaged in is fundamentally pointless.

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.

Only the office can be secure

  • Importante

Of course, this might not be as easy if you’re a tiny company with just one or two people responsible for dealing with clients. In that case, yes, you may well have to assign “regular working hours” to those employees whose chief function is to answer customers. But why subject everyone in the company to those hours? False equality benefits nobody.

Working remotely isn’t without complication or occasional sacrifice. It’s about making things better for more people more of the time.

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.

Different jobs, different requirements. People get that.

The best way to defuse the “everyone must be bound by the same policy” line of argument is to remind your boss, yourself, and any other concerned party that you’re all on the same team. You’re all in the game to find the best way to work: the most productive and happiness-inducing setup wins. Hearing that pitch, only the most closed-minded are likely to continue digging in their heels.

No, 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?

Culture is incredibly important when it comes to loosening the leash. The stronger the culture, the less explicit training and supervision is needed.

You certainly don’t need everyone physically together to create a strong culture. The best cultures derive from actions people actually take, not the ones they write about in a mission statement.

When everyone is sitting in the same office, it’s easy to fall into the habit of bothering anyone for anything at any time, with no regard for personal productivity. This is a key reason so many people get so little done in traditional office setups—too many interruptions.

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.

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.

It’s rarely spelled out directly, but a lot of the arguments against working remotely are based on the fear of losing control. There’s something primal about being able to see your army, about having them close enough that you can shout “Now!!” like Mel Gibson did in Braveheart, and watch them pick up their spears in unison.

The thinking goes, If I can see them, I can control them.

Because reptilian resistance is not rational but deeply emotional—even instinctual—the excuse “but I’ll lose control” is the toughest to overcome. Even equipped with all the great arguments in this book, you may still fail. In that case, it just might be time to saddle up and consider another place to work.

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.

Working remotely, if it is to be successful, usually requires some overlap with the hours your coworkers are putting in.

At 37signals, we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.

Thankfully, there are lots of enjoyable work-life schedules outside the regular 9am to 5pm. Embrace that.

(Saving money on labor is definitely not a valid reason to invite the hassle, but access to one-of-a-kind talent just might be.)

Use a shared screen to collaborate on everything from walking through a presentation, to going over the latest website changes, to sketching together in Photoshop, to just editing a simple text document together.

Much of the magic that people ascribe to sitting together in a room is really just this: being able to see and interact with the same stuff.

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.

Don’t worry about trying to make it perfect, either. Screencasts can easily turn into a time suck if you try to make them Oscar-worthy or without a single mistake. Just let the tape roll and it’ll be more than “good enough.”

Here’s the key: you need everything available to everyone at all times. If Pratik in London has to wait five hours for someone in Chicago to come online in order to know what he should work on next, that’s half a workday lost. A company won’t waste time like that for long before declaring that “remote working just doesn’t work.” As we talked about earlier, this problem of materials and instructions being out of reach is almost entirely solvable by technology. (The rest is a culture of good communication.)

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.

We all need mindless breaks, and it helps if you spend some of them with your team. That’s where the virtual water cooler comes in.

shops use IRC servers to achieve the same. The idea is to have a single, permanent chat room where everyone hangs out all day to shoot the breeze, post funny pictures, and generally goof around. Yes, it can also be used to answer questions about work, but its primary function is to provide social cohesion.

This means that you, the remote worker, are in control of your social interaction—when it happens and how much of it you need. At first it might simply seem like a waste of time, especially if you’re not already used to reading Reddit on the side, but it’s a quality waste of time with your coworkers. We all need that.

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.

We all have a natural instinct to avoid letting our team down, so when that commitment becomes visual, it gets reinforced.

Simply put, progress is a joy best shared with coworkers.

One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance.

When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work.

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 pulling their weight and who isn’t.

Additionally, AFA employees who do not otherwise work remotely are asked to do so at least once or twice per month so they’ll be ready if they have to during a disaster. The company also encourages everyone to stay home during the peak of flu season or during scares like H1N1.

That, in fact, the further away you are from meetings and managers, the more work gets done.

When meetings are the norm, the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem, they become overused and we grow numb to the outcome. Meetings should be like salt—sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings can destroy morale and motivation.

But management, like meetings, should be used sparingly. Constantly asking people what they’re working on prevents them from actually doing the work they’re describing. And since managers are often the people who call the meetings, their very presence leads to less productive workdays.

While monitoring output is sometimes quite important, it’s rarely a forty-hour-per-week position. Ten hours maybe, but few full-time managers have the courage to limit their presence to that.

Working remotely makes it easier to spot managers drumming up busywork for themselves and others. The act of pulling people into a conference room or walking to their desks leaves no evidence of interruption, and it’s all of the synchronous “drop what you’re doing right now to entertain me!” variety. 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.

The occasional drawback of working remotely is that it can feel like you’re surrounded by plenty of people. You have your coworkers on instant messenger or in Campfire, you receive a constant deluge of emails, and you enjoy letting the trolls rile you up on Reddit. But as good as all that is, it’s not a complete substitute for real, live human interaction.

Cabin fever is real, and remote workers are more susceptible to it than those forced into an office. Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to address. Remote work doesn’t mean being chained to your home-office desk.

That’s the great irony of letting passionate people work from home. A manager’s natural instinct is to worry about his workers not getting enough work done, but the real threat is that too much will likely get done. And because the manager isn’t sitting across from his worker anymore, he can’t look in the person’s eyes and see burnout.

What a manager needs to establish is a culture of reasonable expectations.

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?”

Answering that question is liberating. Often, if the answer is an easy “yes,” you can stop working feeling satisfied that something important got accomplished, if not entirely “done.” And should the answer be “no,” you can treat it as an off-day and explore the Five Whys* (asking why to a problem five times in a row to find the root cause).

It feels good to be productive. If yesterday was a good day’s work, chances are you’ll stay on a roll. And if you can stay on a roll, everything else will probably take care of itself—including not working from when you get up in the morning until you go to sleep.

Ergonomic basics

The important thing is that everyone—or at least a sizable group—feels those trade-offs together. Otherwise, it’s too easy just to focus on the negatives. When everyone else is still at the office, how will they appreciate the time you’re not wasting in traffic, or the extra hours you’re spending with your children, reading, or whatever you enjoy? They can’t.

Give remote work a real chance or don’t bother at all. It’s okay to start small, but make sure it’s meaningful.

There isn’t a secret. But we do have some tips. First, when pitching businesses, let the prospective client know up front that you don’t live where they live. You want to begin building trust right at the beginning. You don’t want to drop the line “Oh yeah, we won’t be able to regularly meet with you face-to-face every week ’cause we’re in Chicago and you’re in Los Angeles” right before you sign the contract. Second, provide references before the client even asks. Show right up front that you have nothing to hide. Trust is going to be the toughest thing to build early on, so make it as easy as possible for the client to get to know your character by letting them speak with other clients—especially other clients who may be remote. Third, show them work often. This is the best way to chip away at a client’s natural situational anxiety. Look, they’re paying you big bucks for your work, and it’s totally natural for them to begin feeling anxious the moment they send you the deposit. So show them what they’re paying for. When they see the results of your efforts, they’ll feel a lot better about the relationship. Fourth, be very available. Since you can’t meet face-to-face, you better return phone calls, emails, instant messages, etc. This is basic business stuff, but it’s tenfold more important when you’re working remotely. It may be irrational but, if you’re local, the client often feels that, if worse comes to worst, they can knock on your door. They “know where you live.” But when you’re remote, they’re going to be more suspicious when phone calls go unreturned or emails keep getting “lost.” Stay on top of communications and you’ll reap the benefits. Lastly, get the client involved and let them follow along. Make sure they feel that this is their project too. Yes, they’re hiring you for your expertise, but they have plenty of their own. Set up a space online where you can use a shared schedule, show them work in progress, ask them for feedback, listen to their suggestions, and assign them some tasks (or let them assign some to you).

When they feel part of the project, their anxieties and fears will be replaced by excitement and anticipation.

Fundamentally, there are two ways to hire people internationally: establish a local office or hire people as contractors.

That is, it’s probably best just to start out hiring people as contractors.

This is also exactly how it works if you’re a remote worker wanting to work for a company in a foreign country. Set up that personal company and bill your “salary” as invoices every month. Most countries make it very easy to set up a personal company and, with such a simple invoice setup, taxation is not hard either. You’ll have to consider which currency your invoice is going to be billed in, though. Most companies will want to pay in their currency, which means you carry the fluctuation risk—but as with anything in business, everything is negotiable.

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.

You need solid writers to make remote work work, and a solid command of your home language is key.

The world has never been smaller and markets have never been more open. Don’t be a cultural or geographical hermit.

Given how hard it is to find great people, you should be doing your utmost to keep them. That sounds self-evident, yet plenty of companies are willing to let their stars disappear when life forces them to move. That’s just plain dumb.

Keeping a solid team together for a long time is a key to peak performance. People grow closer and more comfortable with each other, and consequently do even better work. Meanwhile, rookie teams make rookie mistakes.

Remember, doing great work with great people is one of the most durable sources of happiness we humans can tap into. Stick with it.

  • Importante

If anything, the human connection is even more important when hiring remote workers because it has to be stronger to survive the distance.

That’s one of the key challenges of remote work: keeping everyone’s outlook healthy and happy. That task is insurmountable if you’ve stacked your team with personalities who tend to let their inner asshole loose every now and again.

Even for people with the best intentions, relations can go astray if the work gets stressful (and what work doesn’t occasionally?).

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.

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.

Smart solutions, friendly service, and edgy design all happen at the intersection of professional skill and life experience.

That sets a challenge for a manager directing a remote workforce. He has to ensure that this diversity of human experience happens for his troops as well. The job starts with putting together a team of people who are naturally interested in more than just their work—and it continues with encouraging those other interests to bloom.

Magic and creativity thrive in diverse cultures. When you’re seeking remote workers, you have to do even more to encourage and nurture diversity and personal development. It’s a small price to pay for a more interesting workplace and to keep people engaged for the long term.

The correlation between people who are really good at solving imaginary puzzles and people who best fit your company is likely to be tenuous at best, even with respect to engineering positions.

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.

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.

It’s the work that matters. Look at the work and forget the abstractions.

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.

So don’t look at remote work as a way to skimp on salaries; you’ll save on lots of other things.

By the same token, as a remote worker, you shouldn’t let employers get away with paying you less just because you live in a cheaper city. “Equal pay for equal work” might be a dusty slogan, but it works for a reason. If with regard to compensation you accept being treated as a second-class worker based on location, you’re opening the door to being treated poorly on other matters as well.

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.

When the work product is out in the open, it’s much easier to see who’s actually smart (as opposed to who simply sounds smart). The collective judgment rarely even has to be verbalized. Conversely, if the work keeps getting flagged with problems, it’s evidence that the Smarts aren’t sufficiently present for the work at hand. Also, if the duration between installments of new work or tasks being checked off is persistently lengthy, it’s a sign that the Gets Things Done bit is missing.

The mental shortcut usually goes: In the office from 9–5 + nice = must be a good worker. Of course, someone who’s either not smart enough for the job or doesn’t get things done is always found out eventually. But since few people will tell on a colleague unless the problem is of serious magnitude, it’s common to get stuck with lots of people who put in the hours and are plenty nice, but don’t fit the criteria established for being a great worker.

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

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. There’s simply no getting around it: in hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers.

And it’s the writing in the cover letter that decides which applications live or die.

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

  • Libros kmportante

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 weekends to do the project.

Whatever it is, make it meaningful. Make it about creating something new that solves a problem. We don’t believe in asking people to solve puzzles. Solving real problems is a lot more interesting—and enlightening.

The prospective hire is going to be working with their teammates a lot more than their manager, so it’s important that the team get a good feel for this person.

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.

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.

In general, it’s best if you start as early as possible. Cultures grow over time, and it’ll be a lot easier if your culture grows up with remote workers.

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.

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. Well, that and about a million other things that will ensure work proceeds with as little bother and as few obstacles as possible.

As important as it is to have the entire company get together, it’s also a great idea to occasionally do a sprint with a smaller group to finish a specific project. If the company must make a mad dash to meet a deadline—with the unreasonable hours and pressure that implies—it can be nice to slave through the ordeal together.

Just because you work remotely most of the time doesn’t mean you have to, or should, work remotely all of the time. Fill up the camel’s back every now and then with some in-person fun.

Normally, the path goes like this in software development: old code + lots of new features + lots of different developers = big ball of spaghetti mud!

If you treat remote workers like second-class citizens, you’re all going to have a bad time.

There’s also the annoyance of having every debate end with “John and I talked about this in the office yesterday and decided that your idea isn’t going to work.” Fuck that.

As a company owner or manager, you need to create and maintain a level playing field—one on which those in and out of the office stand as equals.

People with the power to change things need to feel the same hurt as those who merely have to deal with it.

The mechanics of leveling the playing field are pretty simple: Get great intercom systems, use shared desktop apps like WebEx to ensure everyone is seeing the same thing while collaborating, and hold as many discussions as possible on email and other online messaging platforms. Above all, think frequently about how you’d feel as a remote worker.

The goal here is really just to keep a consistent, open line of communication. These quick calls prevent issues and concerns from piling up without being addressed. Morale and motivation are fragile things, so you want to make sure to monitor the pulse of your remote workforce.

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 wrong people.

As a manager, you have to accept the fact that people will make mistakes, but not intentionally, and that mistakes are the price of learning and self-sufficiency.

Second, you must make sure that people have access, by default, to everything they need.

It’s much better to recognize that certain people can take an interest in routing things through their desk even if it serves no logical purpose. Once you identify that tendency, you can work to replace the busywork of permissions and controls with the actual work of creating value for the business and its customers.

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.

But even when you and your colleagues are working together in the same time zone, it can be a problem. Working at home and living there means there’s less delineation between the two parts of your life. You’ll have all your files and all your equipment right at hand, so if you come up with an idea at 9pm, you can keep plowing through, even if you already put in more than adequate hours from 7am to 3pm.

It’s everyone’s job to be on the lookout for coworkers who are overworking themselves, but ultimately the responsibility lies with the managers and business owners to set the tone. It’s much likelier to breed a culture of overwork if managers and owners are constantly putting in He-Man hours.

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.

This is where remote working shines. 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. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.

So go on—make face-to-face harder and less frequent and you’ll see the value of these interactions go up, not down.

We’re merely suggesting that you demarcate the difference between work and play. Simply looking presentable is usually enough.

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.

Make sure that real work only happens when you’re in your dedicated home office. No checking work email or just getting a little more done in the living room or your bedroom.

Different strokes for different folks, so consider all these suggestions for how to build your personal routine as merely that—suggestions. If you’re getting everything you need to get done just freewheeling, more power to you. But most people will need some semblance of structure to get the most out of working remotely. Find what works for you, pants or no pants!

Flexibility is your friend here. Remote isn’t binary. It’s not here or there, this or that. In fact, for many, the hybrid approach is the right place to start. If you still want people in the office every day, change that requirement to every afternoon instead. Then let your troops have their mornings to themselves. You may be surprised to find out more work gets done this way.

A more plausible, human strategy is to separate the two completely by using different devices: simply reserve one computer for work and another for fun.

We’ve found that using a completely different device—say, a tablet instead of a laptop—also brings a healthy change of scenery. If you sit in front of a keyboard all day long, it’s great to “gear down” in the evening by using just taps and gestures. It makes computing feel like something other than work.

It sounds counterintuitive, but the presence of other people, even if you don’t know them, can fool your mind into thinking that being productive is the only proper thing to do. Who really wants to be the slacker sitting in a coffee shop during working hours, watching silly cats on Reddit or playing a video game?

Motivation is the fuel of intellectual work. 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.

As detailed by Alfie Kohn in his wonderful book Punished by Rewards:* neither. Trying to conjure motivation by means of rewards or threats is terribly ineffective. In fact, it’s downright counterproductive.

Rather, the only reliable way to muster motivation is by encouraging people to work on the stuff they like and care about, with people they like and care about. There are no shortcuts.

At first, that’s a hard nut to swallow. Especially for managers. “Work is not all fun and games” is a common objection. Perhaps. But why can’t it be challenging, interesting, and engaging? Characterizing pleasure in work as “fun and games” belittles the intellectual stimulation of a job well done.

If a worker’s motivation is slumping, it’s probably because the work is weakly defined or appears pointless, or because others on the team are acting like tools. If you’re working remotely and find yourself taking a week to do a day’s work, that’s a flashing red light and it should be heeded. The sooner you act on that message, the better.

The truth, more often than not, is that you are not the problem; it’s the world you’re working in. If that’s the case, the hard part is not just forcing yourself over the hump but having the courage to speak up and turn de-motivating work and environments into the opposite.

At 37signals, we let employees who’ve worked with the company three years or more take a monthlong sabbatical if they feel like it. Sure, this won’t work for every company, but if you have the slack and can handle it, it’s a great way to give the employees who need a real break (not just a quick vacation) time away to focus on themselves, or their families, or whatever it is that might be keeping them from feeling fully motivated at work.

Motivation is pivotal to healthy lives and healthy companies. Make sure you’re minding it.

Creative work that can be done remotely generally only requires a computer and an Internet connection. The computer you can bring with you, and nearly anywhere in the world you’ll be hard-pressed not to find an Internet connection. Remember, the work doesn’t care whether it’s being done on a bench in Maui or a boat off the coast of Tampa (3G and LTE connections are plenty fine for most purposes).

The nomadic lifestyle can be cheaper than you think too. If you don’t burden yourself with a mortgage, car payment, cable TV, and other supposed necessities of modern living, there’s usually more than enough left over for travel and accommodation.

One of the benefits of allowing your team to work remotely is that it gives them an opportunity to change their scenery as often as they like. We don’t mean traveling to new and exotic places (though that’s an option too, of course). We mean working from home some days, a coffee shop another day, a different coffee shop another day, the library another day, etc.

Routine has a tendency to numb your creativity.

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.

While nobody on their deathbed wishes they’d spent more time at the office, many sure do wish they’d spent more time with their family.

Not everyone has a spare bedroom to turn into a home office, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work remotely. As we’ve discussed, working remotely doesn’t have to mean working from home.

There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work. One is to make noise. The other is to make progress, to do exceptional work. Fortunately for remote workers, “the work” is the measure that matters.

He produced, so he couldn’t be ignored.

In thirty years’ time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed. —RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF VIRGIN GROUP

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.” We are squarely in the fighting stage—the toughest one—but it’s also the last one before you win.

Challenging such habits has always been a risky business. The world is flat right up until the day it’s round.

“The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you the dawn is coming.”

Backlinks