Remote

The Time Is Right for Remote Work

• Office during the day has become the last place where people get their work done.
• Required: ability to be alone with your thoughts.
• Stop commuting your life away - commutes make you fat, stressed and miserable.
• Escaping 9am-5pm: synchronous -> asynchronous
• End of city monopoly
  • Industrialism (factories): gather a large number of people into small area.
  • life need not be divided into arbitrary phases: work and retirement
• Talent isn’t bound by the hubs
  • It’s not about the money - promote quality of life, getting best people available

Dealing with Excuses

• If you’re struggling with trust issues, you’ve made a poor hiring decision. We have no desire to be babysitters during the day.
• Most people want to work as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling. If you’re stuck in a dead-end job that has no prospects of being either, then you don’t need just a remote position, you need a new job.
• Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF.
• Reptilian resistance is not rational but deeply emotional. Fight or flight.
• Good for hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.
• Seeing is believing: Record a screencast (animated gif, youtube etc.) and narrate the experience.
• Meetings and managers - are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office.

Big business

• Many big businesses get away with staggering amounts of inefficiency and bureaucracy and seem fine for years. What you need is confidence that you see a smarter way.
• You’re in the game to find the best way to work. The most productive and happiness-inducting setup wins.

Culture

• The stronger the culture the less explicit training and supervision is needed.
• Best cultures derive from actions people actually take, not the ones they write in the mission statements.

I need an answer now

• too many interruptions - little gets done.
• There is nothing more arrogant than taking up someone else’s time with a question you don’t need an answer right now. Email -> IM -> telephone.
• ASAP-free. Use that calm to be even more productive.

Forward motion

• weekly discussion thread with the subject “What have you been working on?” Everyone contributes a few lines about past week and what’s intended for the next week. It’s not a precise, rigorous estimation process. 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.
• Progress is a joy best shared with coworkers.

The work is what matters

• work itself is the best yardstick to judge someone’s performance
• s/what did you do today?/Show me what you did today/

Beware of Dragons

• Cabin fever is real. Remote work doesn’t mean being chained to your home-office desk.
• Solid writing and language skills are required.
• Lessons from open source: triumph of asynchronous collaboration and communication

Ergonomics Basics

• Proper desk, proper chain, proper screen.
• Adopt a healthy lifestyle.
• Give remote work a real chance or don’t bother at all. It’s okay to start small, but make sure it’s meaningful.

Working with clients

• First, when pitching business, let the prospective client know up front that you don’t live where they live.
• Second, provide references before the client even asks.
• Third, show them work often.
• Fourth, be very available.
• Lastly, get the client involved and let them follow along. Make sure they feel this is their project too. So their anxieties and fears will be replaced by excitement and anticipation.

Live moves on

• most companies have fixation on keeping their workers.
• Keeping a solid team together for a long time is a key to peak performance.

Keep the good times going

• when the bulk of your communication happens via email and the like, it doesn’t take much for bad blood to develop unless everyone is making their best effort to the contrary.
• Sentiments are infectious, good or bad.
• No assholes allowed, no drama allowed, no bad vibes allowed.

The cost of thriving / equal work equal pay

• If your entire workforce is located in a hot hub and you pay market salaries, you’ll be under constant attack from poachers
• almost unfair advantage in attracting and keeping the best people in the world. So don’t look at remote work as a way to skimp on salaries

Great remote workers are simply great workers

• two key qualities: smart and GTD
• Beware of mental shortcut: nice person = good workers.

On writing well

• first filter that really matters is the cover letter explaining why is there a fit between the company and the applicant. Sometimes you’ve less than 10 seconds.
• First clarity, second style.

Test project

• never ask people to work for free. Make it meaningful too.
• narrow the field to two or three candidates and meet them in person.

Managing remote workers

• a great place to start is to allow your current employees to begin working remotely.
• one on ones: check with remote workers more frequently. Ideally every month.

Stop managing the chairs.

• The job of a manager is not to herd cats, but to lead and verify work.
• When or where someone is doing the work is irrelevant most of the time.

Remove the roadblocks entirely

• start by empowering everyone to make decisions on their own.
• everyone gets a company credit card and is told to “spend wisely”.
• no need to ask for permission to go on vacation. Just put in in the calendar and coordinate with coworkers.

Be on the lookout for overwork, not underwork

• if work is all-consuming, the worker is far more likely to burn out.
• from May to October, we give everyone an additional weekday.
• sponsor employee’s hobbies

Life as a remote worker

• Morning remote, afternoon local
• Family time is a good way to counterbalance the loss of daily in-person contact with coworkers.
• home office -> coffee shop -> single desk -> plain vanilla single suite.

Building a routine

• separate the clothes you wear depending whether you’re in work/play mode
• divide the day into chunks like: catch-up, collaboration and serious work.
• dedicated home office. No checking work email or just getting a little more done in the living room or your bedroom
• One computer for work and another for fun.
• Separate accounts for work and fun.

Staying motivated

• motivation is the fuel of intellectual work
• trying to motivate by means of rewards or threats is terribly ineffective
• the only reliable way to muster motivation is to encourage people to work on things they like and care about, with people they like and care about. There are no shortcuts.
• Routine has a tendency to numb your creativity.