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.”
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.
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 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.
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... 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.
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.
Keep in mind, the number one counter to distractions is interesting, fulfilling work. While flipping burgers is unlikely to keep anyone intellectually stimulated for long, most modern remote-friendly jobs are certainly capable of doing so.
If you’re sitting in the kitchen, you may find yourself thinking of emptying the dishwasher. But if you’re sitting in a dedicated room intended for work with the door closed, you stand a far better chance of staying on task.
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. Ironically, you’ll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team. Instead of spending the entire day dealing with Urgent!!! emails and disruptive phone calls, you’ll have the entire start (or end) of the day to yourself.
Before you know it, you’ll be so used to sharing a screen that starting a call without one will feel pointless. 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. Note that the type of screen sharing we’re talking about is different from video conferencing, where the objective is to see each other’s face. 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).
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.
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.
If you’re calling a meeting, you better be sure pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity. How often can you say that a given meeting was worth it? Remember, there’s no such thing as a one-hour meeting. If you’re in a room with five people for an hour, it’s a five-hour meeting.
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.
It starts innocently enough. You wake up by opening your laptop in bed and answering a few work emails from last night. Then you make yourself a sandwich and work through lunch. After dinner, you feel the need to check in with Jeremy on the West Coast about that one thing. Before you know it, you’ve stretched the workday from 7am to 9pm.
Here’s how to guarantee a remote-work failure: Pick one employee who gets to “give this remote thing a try,” then just carry on with business as usual. Three months later, mourn how it just didn’t work out for your organization. “Jim simply wasn’t connected enough anymore.”
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.
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.
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).
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. Both of these weaknesses are easier to miss when you see someone at the office every day. Especially if they’re just generally a nice person. The mental shortcut usually goes: In the office from 9–5 + nice = must be a good worker.
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.
If you treat remote workers like second-class citizens, you’re all going to have a bad time. The lower the ratio of remote worker to office worker, the more likely this is to happen. It’s the normal dynamic and it won’t get solved unless you tackle it head-on.
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. That’s easier said than done, but one way to better your chances is to have some of the top brass working remotely. People with the power to change things need to feel the same hurt as those who merely have to deal with it.
While we advocate frequent check-ins with all your employees, it’s a good idea to check in a bit more frequently with remote workers (since you’ll bump into people in your office as a matter of course anyway).
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. 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?
If you’ve read about remote-work failures in the press, you might think that the major risk in setting your people free is that they’ll turn into lazy, unproductive slackers. 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. The fact is, it’s easy to turn work into your predominant hobby.
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.
If you don’t have to be anywhere at a certain time, you can easily end up lying in bed until close to noon, just casually working away on the laptop. Or you can let work drift into that evening you’re supposed to share with your spouse and kids. “Daaad, why aren’t you watching the show with us?”
Take those comfy sweatpants, for example. They might be great for your physical comfort, but there’s good reason to ponder whether they’re a great fit for your state of mind. In the same way that there’s a benefit to creating a separation between personal and work computing, it can also be helpful to separate the clothes you wear, depending whether you’re in work or play mode.
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.
Finally, you can use the layout of your house as a switch. 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.
Jason usually spends the mornings at home, then heads into the office around 11. That doesn’t mean he starts work at 11. He starts around 7:30 or 8am. But he uses the morning to catch up on things that require zero office distractions, and then heads into the office for more collaborative work in the afternoon.
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?
Working remotely—especially from home and especially on flexible hours—can dramatically change that dynamic. Imagine eating breakfast with the family without the stress, taking half an hour over lunch to play in the yard together, or being there for a sick child without missing a whole day of work. Having family close and available is a good way to counterbalance the loss of daily in-person contact with coworkers. And the corollary is that family people are more likely to be a good fit for remote working because of the existing social day-to-day interaction.