May 14, 2015 at 07:13Remote principles: how to organize remote work
In my hands the book "Remote" from 37signals. This is a book about what remote work is, about how to use its advantages and how to smooth out the shortcomings. The book is very useful for entrepreneurs who are thinking about a full or partial transition to remote work. But the book will also come in handy, in fact, to remote employees (or freelancers) who want to work efficiently. My previous articles were on the books Getting Real and Rework .
Personally, I noticed such a thing for myself: maximum performance is reached very early in the morning (on my watch, by the way, 05:08) or on weekends. Why? Because at this time the least distractions. In this regard, the office is not very good, because it splits your day into many small segments. 15 minutes one, 15 minutes another, third. The day is filled with meetings, conferences, instant messages and chatter. But meaningful and creative work requires long periods of concentration, when nothing distracts and you can immerse yourself in what you are doing.
At the office, a colleague may come up in a friendly way to slap you on the shoulder, another colleague may come up for an “urgent” consultation, etc. etc. Therefore, when we come to work on the weekend, we manage to do much more.
Stop wasting life on the road.
Traveling to and from work takes up some of your time. You lose time in traffic jams, you have to do everything quickly to get to work on time. You eat semi-finished products, you see children less and less and do not find the strength to devote 15 minutes to your wife (or husband?). By Saturday, you have a list of household chores and your weekend is not a day of relaxation, but simply an opportunity to pay attention to household chores.
How long does it take to travel? If you get to work 30 minutes and spend another 15 minutes on fees, it turns out 1.5 hours a day on the road. This is 7.5 hours per week and approximately 300-400 hours per year. So, you spend 400 hours a year on a secondary lesson that does not do any good at all. You can go further and express it in rubles. For regions, this will be 33000/21/8 * 400 = 78571 rubles. losses. For Moscow, this will not be 400 hours a year, but one and a half times more: 76000/21/8 * 600 = 271428 rubles. in year.
It will be good to discuss in the comments with the residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg who how much time they spend on trips to / from work. Personally, it seems to me that it’s stupid for a good specialist to move from his native provincial city to the capital, because it’s easy to find a remote job, and you can find work for the capital’s money, living in Krasnozhopsk.
Why before, almost no one could afford to work remotely? The answer is simple: there was no technology. Most likely it will not work to organize the remote work of the publishing house using fax and paper express mail. But now everything is different. There are many tools that allow you to perfectly deliver remote work. 37Signals use these things:
Miracles happen when we are together.
The thing is that when you gather at the same table or just in the same room, you can organize some kind of brainstorming and come up with some very cool idea. But the question is: how many such brainstorming sessions do you spend a year? It seems to me not very much. In addition, how many brilliant ideas can your company digest and implement? As a rule, it’s not so much to waste time thinking in detail about what you can’t realize the next year anyway does not make any sense.
How do I know if employees work if I don’t see them?
Here is what Chris Hoffman from IT Collective says about this: “If you stop trusting employees, then we made a mistake when hiring. We will not work with a person who is not able to give a good result, does not maintain his own schedule and can not cope with the load. We only take experienced professionals who are able to manage their time and make a significant contribution to the common cause and are not going to be their nannies. ”
Everything is simple. Employee performance is evaluated by the result. If he is not, the employee must be fired.
At home, people are constantly distracted
Indeed, there are much more temptations and opportunities to get distracted at home. The whole question is in the organization. Sitting on the couch is more difficult to work than in a separate room with a closed door. If this is not possible or does not help, you can try working outside the home walls. Go to a cafe, park, library or coworking center.
Most people want to work, it brings satisfaction. But if you are doing a futile business, you need to think not about how to work on it remotely, but about a new job.
Only in the office can security be ensured.
This is a serious matter, and 37signals has its own set of rules on this subject:
Large companies do not. Why should we?
Many business giants are mired in inefficiency and bureaucracy. Do not be equal. But there are quite a few large companies that use remote work: IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Mercedes-Benz.
Corporate culture
Culture is not a table tennis tournament or a joint camping trip to eat dead fried pigs. In fact, it is a set of formulated and implied values and related actions of the organization. A couple of examples:
I need the answer right now.
When everyone is working in the office, it’s easy to get a bad way of bothering each other at any time for any reason. This gives rise to the same fragmentation of the working day into a bunch of small 15-minute intervals between distractions: telephone, colleague's question, Skype answer, letter, lunch, colleague's question again, tea break, etc.
At least urgent questions can be avoided . Admittedly, not every question requires an immediate answer. Yes, perhaps we would like to get an answer as soon as possible, but what happens if the answer comes in two hours? Most likely, it will turn out that 80% of the questions can be asked by e-mail and receive an answer asynchronously. In cases of more important cases, you can ask a question on Skype. And when everything is completely collapsing, you can call.
This will not work for our company / industry.
Here is a small list of areas where you can work perfectly remotely: auditing, public services, design, film production, publishing, consulting, marketing, staffing, computer equipment manufacturing, software production, advertising, insurance, finance, legal services, translations. In fact, the matter is not limited to this list. There are many industries in which telework is applicable. Half of Aerna's 35,000 employees (part of the Fortune 100) work remotely. Intel regularly remotely employs 82% of its employees.
Overlap.
Your employees ’working hours should overlap. Those. there should be several hours for collaboration with other team members when you can ask a question and answer someone’s letter. This is an important point, because it will be strange that an important business will be postponed due to the difference in working time. Some things cannot wait so long.
Screen Sharing
Without this, in IT projects in general and in no way at all. Share your screen and discuss with your colleagues the new interface that you have developed. You can also record screencasts. It also helps a lot when you want to show a new feature. Just do not need to rewrite the screencast 4 times to make it “perfect”. It is not worth the time. Just take it and write it down.
All to share
Schedule, presentation files, project materials, status of negotiations with customers: everything should be in the public domain. Why? Because when a question arises during remote work, the situation “ask him I don’t know whom” may arise. The solution is simple: at any time, everything should be available to everyone. The most important thing is to exclude situations when something important is stored on the computer or in the mail of one person.
Virtual cooler
Apparently, in the USA, employees gather for chatting with the cooler. In our company, this happens in the hookah room. I heard that it happens that people chat in smoking rooms.
The idea is that in addition to work, there should also be simple human communication. You can discuss the last episode of a series, the release of a new product from Apple, or something else. All this is greatly complicated with remote work. To do this, 37signals use a shared chat in Campfire, and we use Slack.
Put everyone in the know.
The office has a common information flow. Especially when the office is built on the principle of open-space. Most employees are well aware of what is happening in the company and who is working on what. In the case of remote work, this does not work. The remote employee communicates mainly in the task manager and is usually one person (project manager). As a result, the only person who owns the full picture is this same project manager.
In order not to lose this connection, you can hold meetings / phone calls / correspondence in a separate branch where everyone writes what he is working on. Personally, I have a blog for each project. Met with a client, immediately wrote about it. I got new photos, put them in the public domain and immediately described how I did it and what will happen to them next.
Preparedness for troubles
Office can become a single point of failure. Suppose you have all the necessary infrastructure in your office. Question: what will happen if, during repair of heating systems, the electric cable suitable for the building is damaged? You can insure yourself against such troubles by providing all the necessary infrastructure for work from outside the office.
Be careful with meetings and bosses
When you are organizing a meeting, remember that you are wasting time. At the same time, 30 minutes of the meeting for 8 people translate into total time costs of 4 man-hours. Thus, when you pay 300 r / hour, you spent 1200 rubles. company. There is nothing wrong with meetings, but it is important to pay attention to the frequency of these meetings. They are very distracting from work.
A leader is one who takes leadership action. If he tries all his day to take these very guiding actions - in fact, he does not let anyone work.
Serving customers
Your customers may be away from you. In order for this to work successfully, you need to try to follow the following recommendations.
Just search around the world or country. In order to hire an employee, it is enough for you to have professional skills in a given field, to have a very good command of the language of communication, and be able to express your thoughts in writing.
Avoid tricks, deceits and strange tricks when hiring. Just give a test task and pay for its completion. At the same time, the task should be practical, necessary and from real life. No need to come up with vacuum horses for test tasks.
Pay employees as much as needed without discrimination based on geography. After all, remote work is an opportunity to hire the best, and not an opportunity to hire cheaper. Those. if you founded a company in Moscow, pay remote employees Moscow salaries. Your employee should not receive 25 thousand just because this is the average salary of a programmer in Uryupinsk.
If you decide to work with a specific person, arrange a personal meeting. Pay him a ticket, accommodation and meet him. If this is problematic, at least Skype.
A few recommendations on how to effectively organize your remote work.
Daily routine . Make yourself a specific daily routine. It disciplines. It happens that when we do not need anywhere, we can lie in bed until noon, and then stay up late for work, although it is better to spend the evening with family. It is good to break up the working day itself into time zones: “routine”, “work with colleagues”, “serious work”.
Border . Draw a clear and understandable boundary between work and home. Organize a work area and work only in it. You can even change into work clothes. One of the 37signals employees uses separate work slippers for this.
In the morning at home, in the afternoon at the office.This can be a very good scheme. At home, you (possibly) can work on something serious in a more or less calm atmosphere and wait out the morning traffic jams. And by the middle of the day you can go to the office and work there in a mode of communication with colleagues, if it is required.
Different computers. Place one computer in the work area for work. And get a separate entertainment computer. Let them be incompatible and you will not be able to work on a vacation computer. They can have different OSes and different software. Do not place work tools on a non-working computer. This will help you avoid the temptation to “quickly check your mail” or reply to a colleague’s message on Skype. Theoretically, on the iPad you can make a design, but, they say, this is not very convenient.
When you don't want complete isolation. You don’t always want to sit alone and work at home. Sometimes there is a strange desire to see other people. Then get up and go to the cafe, coworking center, library or office. By the way, you can rent one or two tables in the office of another company. This, by the way, is also useful in terms of changing the scenery. If you are very tired of doing the same thing every day in the same environment, change the scenery.
Motivation . The only way to increase motivation is to encourage people to work on what they like and only with those people who do not leave them indifferent.
---------
PS:I started using remote work a few months ago, and I read a book just recently. I suspect that this reading will not pass without a trace and will result in some positive changes. If similar shifts have already occurred with you and you have something to share, I ask in the comments.
Why the office is not working
Personally, I noticed such a thing for myself: maximum performance is reached very early in the morning (on my watch, by the way, 05:08) or on weekends. Why? Because at this time the least distractions. In this regard, the office is not very good, because it splits your day into many small segments. 15 minutes one, 15 minutes another, third. The day is filled with meetings, conferences, instant messages and chatter. But meaningful and creative work requires long periods of concentration, when nothing distracts and you can immerse yourself in what you are doing.
At the office, a colleague may come up in a friendly way to slap you on the shoulder, another colleague may come up for an “urgent” consultation, etc. etc. Therefore, when we come to work on the weekend, we manage to do much more.
Stop wasting life on the road.
Traveling to and from work takes up some of your time. You lose time in traffic jams, you have to do everything quickly to get to work on time. You eat semi-finished products, you see children less and less and do not find the strength to devote 15 minutes to your wife (or husband?). By Saturday, you have a list of household chores and your weekend is not a day of relaxation, but simply an opportunity to pay attention to household chores.
How long does it take to travel? If you get to work 30 minutes and spend another 15 minutes on fees, it turns out 1.5 hours a day on the road. This is 7.5 hours per week and approximately 300-400 hours per year. So, you spend 400 hours a year on a secondary lesson that does not do any good at all. You can go further and express it in rubles. For regions, this will be 33000/21/8 * 400 = 78571 rubles. losses. For Moscow, this will not be 400 hours a year, but one and a half times more: 76000/21/8 * 600 = 271428 rubles. in year.
It will be good to discuss in the comments with the residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg who how much time they spend on trips to / from work. Personally, it seems to me that it’s stupid for a good specialist to move from his native provincial city to the capital, because it’s easy to find a remote job, and you can find work for the capital’s money, living in Krasnozhopsk.
Technology
Why before, almost no one could afford to work remotely? The answer is simple: there was no technology. Most likely it will not work to organize the remote work of the publishing house using fax and paper express mail. But now everything is different. There are many tools that allow you to perfectly deliver remote work. 37Signals use these things:
- Basecamp . This is their main product, bringing them happiness and profit. This thing allows you to set tasks, create todo lists, share project files and organize work in time.
- WebEx is a thing that makes it possible to share a screen, conduct a product demonstration for a remote viewer, and organize a conference call. (If anyone can advise an inexpensive alternative, I ask in the comment)
- KnowYour Company. A piece for companies with a staff of 25-75 employees. If you find it difficult to constantly be aware of what your employees think about the company.
- Skype
- Campfire . Also a product 37signals. This thing allows all team members to communicate in one common chat. There was a free minute - put in a general chat cat. We use Slack for the same purpose.
- The Hangouts google . Maybe no less than skype.
- Dropbox
- Google docs
- Coworking centers . If you don’t have the opportunity to work at home, you can always try to work in a coworking center. They began to appear in many cities of Russia. In my Cherepovets such a center appeared 2 months ago.
Excuses
Miracles happen when we are together.
The thing is that when you gather at the same table or just in the same room, you can organize some kind of brainstorming and come up with some very cool idea. But the question is: how many such brainstorming sessions do you spend a year? It seems to me not very much. In addition, how many brilliant ideas can your company digest and implement? As a rule, it’s not so much to waste time thinking in detail about what you can’t realize the next year anyway does not make any sense.
How do I know if employees work if I don’t see them?
Here is what Chris Hoffman from IT Collective says about this: “If you stop trusting employees, then we made a mistake when hiring. We will not work with a person who is not able to give a good result, does not maintain his own schedule and can not cope with the load. We only take experienced professionals who are able to manage their time and make a significant contribution to the common cause and are not going to be their nannies. ”
Everything is simple. Employee performance is evaluated by the result. If he is not, the employee must be fired.
At home, people are constantly distracted
Indeed, there are much more temptations and opportunities to get distracted at home. The whole question is in the organization. Sitting on the couch is more difficult to work than in a separate room with a closed door. If this is not possible or does not help, you can try working outside the home walls. Go to a cafe, park, library or coworking center.
Most people want to work, it brings satisfaction. But if you are doing a futile business, you need to think not about how to work on it remotely, but about a new job.
Only in the office can security be ensured.
This is a serious matter, and 37signals has its own set of rules on this subject:
- Hard Drive Data Encryption
- Disabling automatic login, password recovery from sleep
- Enable safe mode on all sites, especially on mission-critical types of Gmail
- Use the lock code on smartphones. + the ability to delete all data remotely.
- Use different passwords on different sites and store them in a special program.
- Enable two-factor authorization on Gmail or other critical services
Large companies do not. Why should we?
Many business giants are mired in inefficiency and bureaucracy. Do not be equal. But there are quite a few large companies that use remote work: IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Mercedes-Benz.
Corporate culture
Culture is not a table tennis tournament or a joint camping trip to eat dead fried pigs. In fact, it is a set of formulated and implied values and related actions of the organization. A couple of examples:
- How we talk with customers. Do we think the customer is always right?
- How do we relate to the quality of products? Striving for the ideal or contented with the good?
- How do we talk to each other? Polite or harsh?
- What kind of workload do we think is right - do we encourage workaholics or those who occasionally ask for Friday?
- How do we feel about risk? We prefer to take risks or try to grow slowly, but right?
I need the answer right now.
When everyone is working in the office, it’s easy to get a bad way of bothering each other at any time for any reason. This gives rise to the same fragmentation of the working day into a bunch of small 15-minute intervals between distractions: telephone, colleague's question, Skype answer, letter, lunch, colleague's question again, tea break, etc.
At least urgent questions can be avoided . Admittedly, not every question requires an immediate answer. Yes, perhaps we would like to get an answer as soon as possible, but what happens if the answer comes in two hours? Most likely, it will turn out that 80% of the questions can be asked by e-mail and receive an answer asynchronously. In cases of more important cases, you can ask a question on Skype. And when everything is completely collapsing, you can call.
This will not work for our company / industry.
Here is a small list of areas where you can work perfectly remotely: auditing, public services, design, film production, publishing, consulting, marketing, staffing, computer equipment manufacturing, software production, advertising, insurance, finance, legal services, translations. In fact, the matter is not limited to this list. There are many industries in which telework is applicable. Half of Aerna's 35,000 employees (part of the Fortune 100) work remotely. Intel regularly remotely employs 82% of its employees.
How to organize remote work
Overlap.
Your employees ’working hours should overlap. Those. there should be several hours for collaboration with other team members when you can ask a question and answer someone’s letter. This is an important point, because it will be strange that an important business will be postponed due to the difference in working time. Some things cannot wait so long.
Screen Sharing
Without this, in IT projects in general and in no way at all. Share your screen and discuss with your colleagues the new interface that you have developed. You can also record screencasts. It also helps a lot when you want to show a new feature. Just do not need to rewrite the screencast 4 times to make it “perfect”. It is not worth the time. Just take it and write it down.
All to share
Schedule, presentation files, project materials, status of negotiations with customers: everything should be in the public domain. Why? Because when a question arises during remote work, the situation “ask him I don’t know whom” may arise. The solution is simple: at any time, everything should be available to everyone. The most important thing is to exclude situations when something important is stored on the computer or in the mail of one person.
Virtual cooler
Apparently, in the USA, employees gather for chatting with the cooler. In our company, this happens in the hookah room. I heard that it happens that people chat in smoking rooms.
The idea is that in addition to work, there should also be simple human communication. You can discuss the last episode of a series, the release of a new product from Apple, or something else. All this is greatly complicated with remote work. To do this, 37signals use a shared chat in Campfire, and we use Slack.
Put everyone in the know.
The office has a common information flow. Especially when the office is built on the principle of open-space. Most employees are well aware of what is happening in the company and who is working on what. In the case of remote work, this does not work. The remote employee communicates mainly in the task manager and is usually one person (project manager). As a result, the only person who owns the full picture is this same project manager.
In order not to lose this connection, you can hold meetings / phone calls / correspondence in a separate branch where everyone writes what he is working on. Personally, I have a blog for each project. Met with a client, immediately wrote about it. I got new photos, put them in the public domain and immediately described how I did it and what will happen to them next.
Preparedness for troubles
Office can become a single point of failure. Suppose you have all the necessary infrastructure in your office. Question: what will happen if, during repair of heating systems, the electric cable suitable for the building is damaged? You can insure yourself against such troubles by providing all the necessary infrastructure for work from outside the office.
Be careful with meetings and bosses
When you are organizing a meeting, remember that you are wasting time. At the same time, 30 minutes of the meeting for 8 people translate into total time costs of 4 man-hours. Thus, when you pay 300 r / hour, you spent 1200 rubles. company. There is nothing wrong with meetings, but it is important to pay attention to the frequency of these meetings. They are very distracting from work.
A leader is one who takes leadership action. If he tries all his day to take these very guiding actions - in fact, he does not let anyone work.
Serving customers
Your customers may be away from you. In order for this to work successfully, you need to try to follow the following recommendations.
- let customers know that you are far away and will work remotely
- give customers feedback about your company before they even ask for it
- more often show the client what has been done on the project
- Be emphasized accessible for communication: call back on time, reply to e-mail, reply in instant messengers, etc.
- connect the client to work and let him see the whole process and feel that it is his project too.
How to find and hold?
Just search around the world or country. In order to hire an employee, it is enough for you to have professional skills in a given field, to have a very good command of the language of communication, and be able to express your thoughts in writing.
Avoid tricks, deceits and strange tricks when hiring. Just give a test task and pay for its completion. At the same time, the task should be practical, necessary and from real life. No need to come up with vacuum horses for test tasks.
Pay employees as much as needed without discrimination based on geography. After all, remote work is an opportunity to hire the best, and not an opportunity to hire cheaper. Those. if you founded a company in Moscow, pay remote employees Moscow salaries. Your employee should not receive 25 thousand just because this is the average salary of a programmer in Uryupinsk.
If you decide to work with a specific person, arrange a personal meeting. Pay him a ticket, accommodation and meet him. If this is problematic, at least Skype.
Personal effectiveness
A few recommendations on how to effectively organize your remote work.
Daily routine . Make yourself a specific daily routine. It disciplines. It happens that when we do not need anywhere, we can lie in bed until noon, and then stay up late for work, although it is better to spend the evening with family. It is good to break up the working day itself into time zones: “routine”, “work with colleagues”, “serious work”.
Border . Draw a clear and understandable boundary between work and home. Organize a work area and work only in it. You can even change into work clothes. One of the 37signals employees uses separate work slippers for this.
In the morning at home, in the afternoon at the office.This can be a very good scheme. At home, you (possibly) can work on something serious in a more or less calm atmosphere and wait out the morning traffic jams. And by the middle of the day you can go to the office and work there in a mode of communication with colleagues, if it is required.
Different computers. Place one computer in the work area for work. And get a separate entertainment computer. Let them be incompatible and you will not be able to work on a vacation computer. They can have different OSes and different software. Do not place work tools on a non-working computer. This will help you avoid the temptation to “quickly check your mail” or reply to a colleague’s message on Skype. Theoretically, on the iPad you can make a design, but, they say, this is not very convenient.
When you don't want complete isolation. You don’t always want to sit alone and work at home. Sometimes there is a strange desire to see other people. Then get up and go to the cafe, coworking center, library or office. By the way, you can rent one or two tables in the office of another company. This, by the way, is also useful in terms of changing the scenery. If you are very tired of doing the same thing every day in the same environment, change the scenery.
Motivation . The only way to increase motivation is to encourage people to work on what they like and only with those people who do not leave them indifferent.
---------
PS:I started using remote work a few months ago, and I read a book just recently. I suspect that this reading will not pass without a trace and will result in some positive changes. If similar shifts have already occurred with you and you have something to share, I ask in the comments.
