Remote: Office Not Required

I only recently became aware of Jason Fried's writing and his company 37Signals.com, but instantly fell in love with his clear, concise, no-bull, crystal-clear communication style. After reading some of his articles in Inc. magazine, I found the 37Signals blog and instantly bought the book REWORK and felt invigorated by it. Finally, here is someone who understands that securing venture capital funding is not necessarily the key to success nor to a happy, fulfilling life. He simply makes products (the online software Basecamp, Highrise, etc.) that are amazingly simple to use, and therefore valuable and in demand because they save people time and money. The previous book, REWORK basically throws everything you were taught about business out the door and gets back to basics focused on what will work today, in today's world that changes daily. Ridiculous concepts such as five-year business plans are ridiculed and dismissed, and Jason restores sanity to business ideas and concepts. With REMOTE, he applies the real-world experience of running a distributed company and explains the biggest advantages to hiring remote teams. My two favorite facts about remote working that the book explains: Reason #1: Hiring remote employees allows companies to hire the best talent in the world instead of being handcuffed to only the best talent living in a tiny geographical area. Reason #2: Offices are what the authors call "interruption factories" in which anyone can walk into your cubicle or office uninvited and interrupt your work many times throughout the day. Working remotely allows you to get into the zone and focus on the things that make you productive without the productivity-killing environments of the interruption factories. REMOTE lists the most common excuses that bosses often use to dismiss the idea of remote work, and then the authors proceed to blow every one of those excuses right out of the water with common-sense-filled nuclear missiles. The book refutes those common misperceptions about remote work humorously sometimes, but with factual, common-sense reasons why visionary leaders will actually choose to embrace remote work in the very near future if they want to keep up with their more innovative competitors who keep hiring the most talented people in the world right out from under their noses. The remote revolution has already begun. The visionaries were the first to jump on board. This book will sway anyone on the fence toward the huge benefits of remote teams, and those who refuse to read this book will simply get left behind in the dust of their smarter competitors. If you've never worked remotely and have been trapped commuting to an office, this book will set you free. Also, if you have not already read Scott Berkun's book The Year Without Pants, you should read that too. It's a perfect companion piece to REMOTE, and tells the story of Scott's year working as a member of a distributed team at Automattic, the distributed company behind Wordpress.com.

Remote: Office Not Required is a collection of short essays on the benefits of remote working, or working from home. I first discovered Jason Fried when a friend (and at the time, client) asked me to read Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s previous book. Both books use a similar format- short 2-3 page articles, many taken from blog posts, organized into chapters. The benefits of remote work are summarized nicely from the book’s back cover. "Going remote allows the most talented people to produce the best work regardless of their location." Working remotely might sound like a great idea for a small company like 37signals. But what about larger organizations? The authors cite a 2009 IBM White Paper, Working Outside the Box, listing a range of companies from small organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees to large organizations with greater than 100,000 employees. Quality of life is extremely important to the founders of 37signals and remote working is merely one aspect of their corporate culture. Since the publication of Remote, the company has made news for their decision to prune their software offerings down to one offering- Basecamp- and rebrand the company around it. Keeping one’s sanity and managing a small yet extremely successful organization is a higher corporate value to them than creating a monster. Remote work, while having many advantages, doesn’t solve all the organization’s problems. "Remote work is not without cost or compromise. In this world very few leaps of progress arrive exclusively as benefits." There’s an entire chapter dedicated to this topic entitled “Beware the Dragons”. As somebody who currently works remotely, I can attest to many of these dragons. I appreciated the frank advice on how to deal with them. Remote working doesn’t work in all cases and may not work all the time. But smart employers will permit it in some cases (perhaps one day per week?) and put the technical infrastructure in place to support it.

I downloaded the Kindle version of "Remote" before getting on a Honolulu-to-Houston redeye and finished it en route. When I landed, I ordered a copy to be shipped to my boss. "Remote" is not like many traditional "business books," in that it doesn't tell lots of stories from employers and employees who have made remote working work, nor does it include step-by-step plans for how to become a remote worker or how to convince your boss to let you give it a try. It's important to remember, though, that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the authors of "Remote," are not business "coaches" or people who have invented a theory in order to sell books. They are entrepreneurs who, through their company 37Signals, are making remote working work every day. The lessons they share and the arguments they present are ones they've lived and proven themselves. That gave this book a lot more real-world value for me than any "how to transform work"-type book I've yet read. "Remote" addresses remote working on intellectual and philosophical as well as practical levels, explaining why the practice benefits employees and companies alike. "The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done," they write. Allowing people to go to the places where they are the most productive, and to work during the times they're most productive, can only improve a company's bottom line and make for happier employees. So long as the work gets done, "how our employees distribute those hours across the clock and days just isn't important." As those excerpts might suggest, Fried and Heinemeier Hansson are not making the common, if slightly defensive, argument that businesses won't collapse if bosses let people "work from home" sometimes. Instead, they advocate -- even evangelize -- remote work as objectively superior, and the inevitable evolutionary successor, to work processes tied to an industrial-revolution model of all employees laboring together under one roof or performance measured by elapsed butts-in-seats time. Not only will younger workers no longer accept that old model ("The future, quite literally, belongs to those who get it. Do you think today's teenagers, raised on Facebook and texting, will be sentimental about the old days of all-hands-on-deck, Monday morning meetings? Ha!") but neither will those of us oldsters who have tasted the alternative ("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."). For changing thinking -- as well as proving why thinking needs to change, *is* changing, and *should* change -- "Remote" has an awful lot to recommend it. [edited March 2014 to reword the final paragraph slightly]

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are known for 37signals. David HH is also the creator of Rails, the most used framework for Ruby web programming. I've read and enjoyed both Getting Real and Rework, their previous books. This book shares practical experience about working remotely, taken from 37Signals and some other companies. The authors spend a lot of time explaining the benefits of remote work, the resistance one may encounter against it, and the most common excuses for not allowing remote work. That is, prejudices like that innovation happens only face-to-face, or that people can't be trusted to be productive at home, or that company culture would wither away if remote work is allowed... As a consultant I rely on remote work a lot. I think that a mix of remote work of some kind is in the future of many positions. But I have to say that I was disappointed by this book, specially after the expectations raised by the authors in the Introduction: "Above all, this book will teach you how to become an expert in remote work. It will provide an overview of the tools and techniques that will help you get the most of it, as well as the pitfalls and constraints that can bring you down." This book will give you insights on remote work, but won't help you become an expert, or give you much in tools and techniques. The ideas that the authors share are not new. You don't need to read this book to realize that interruptions are bad for your concentration and productivity. The examples given of companies and their use of remote work are poor. The examples are real, but they barely descend to any detail about the implementation, or the problems encountered. More important, there is no mention of the impact of remote work on things like work climate, productivity, meeting deadlines, client satisfaction, or the bottom line. From a more conceptual point of view, a question one would expect to be answered by the book is what are the key factors for a position to be considered for remote work? The authors often use 37signals as a self-reference for remote working practice. For example, at one point the authors mention than Jason (Fried) usually starts working at home at 7:30 a.m. and arrives at the office at 11 .a.m. Great, but Jason is the CEO of his own company, and as most CEOs do, he organizes his time as he sees fit. But how does this apply to a second-level manager of a big company? Or to a sales supervisor? Many of the ideas mentioned, in my opinion, depend more on the company's culture that on allowing remote work or not. 37Signals grew up being remote from the start, and has managed to remain a small workforce of great talented people. But established companies with years of operation and an established culture need more than good reasons to implement such changes, at least company wide.

For many years I have been working in IT for a company with an old style of management. Throughout those years I had VPN and was expected to routinely do remote work off hours yet expected to warm a chair during traditional working hours. Some days would pass by where I would never see my boss. I kept asking why can I not work from home a few days a week? Their common response was that they had no way to measure my productivity. I thought to myself “how do you measure it when I’m here?!” My first opportunity arose to work for a company with remote option. After 15 years of commuting and chained to a beige cubical I was free. I was now able to do engaging work and deliver without having to come into the office. I even found that I was also able to be more productive. This book is a great primer for understanding the concept of what today’s technology facilitates. From a company perspective, your employee selection opens up from the local market to all corners of the world. For employees it allows you to save time from commuting and spend that extra time with your family promoting even better work life balance. This is the future of work for knowledge workers. As a business owner you will gain insights on the benefits of remote work. As a manager you will gain tools to facilitate remote staff. As a remote worker you will learn additional strategies to address common concerns.

I have the Kindle version. Well written with short segments on different aspects of remote working or telecommuting. I read it in an afternoon. I got the book because COVID-19 has driven me and my co-workers to social distancing by working from home. I'm finding telecommuting to be easier to implement than I expected. Trust is a central theme in the book. A second theme is culture or what I characterize as knowing what's expected. A good remote worker or telecommuters must produce good work. The authors also argue that half-hearted efforts at remote work will likely fail. Who ought to read this book? If social distancing impacts your workplace, then, whether you are a manager or worker, this book has useful lessons for you. Currently, I can see where remote working may become much more common than it has been. I strongly recommend the book. One head's up, the authors head the company that created the base camp software and base camp is mentioned frequently. I simply viewed this as establishing the authors' credentials and I wasn't bothered by this. I don't use basecamp myself.

The office was a response to a need. To get work done we needed groups of people in the same place at the same time. To be at work at the same time, 8:30 to 4:30, people needed to live close to their workplaces. Towns grew into cities and housing grew upward. Those who could not or would not live close to their workplaces spend more time in traffic. This book raises the issues of whether we all need offices. Why don’t we work from the place most convenient to us that day, at a time most convenient to us that day. The issue of remote and asynchonomous work could not be realistically raised ten years ago, but can certainly be today. We now have all the enabling technology to allow many types of work to be performed remotely. This includes the obvious call centre staff, but also the specialist repairman who can perform his work from afar. “Office not required,” the subtitle of this book, is not the future, the authors argue, it is the present. Why would anyone want to work remotely? There a many compelling reasons not least the wasted time spent on your daily commute. Stop and calculate the number of hours each week you spend getting to work. You could also add in the time it takes to get to clients for meetings. Then ask yourself what you would do with the time saved by not travelling. So, why do we not work remotely? Some types of office work cannot be done remotely, and that is not at issue. The issue is that much work can be done remotely. Before I pursue the argument for remote work further, let me answer the question of why large, thoughtful companies, are not doing it. The answer is they are. IBM, for example, has had their staff telecommuting since 1995 with a saving on office space of 7.2 million square metres. The authors offer various reasons for the resistance to remote work. A common argument is that innovation only happens through the magic of face to face contact. Let us presume for a moment that it is true and that creativity requires a group of people to be in the same place at the same time. How much time is spent creativity solving big problems? Very little, most of our time at work is spent executing the “big problems” and that can be done in so many cases, remotely. Even if there is a need for people to be together to work on issues, only a few moments on Skype or FaceTime is enough to establish who is present. Thereafter most of the work will be conducted on a shared computer screen where designs, text, or numbers are formulated and manipulated. These modes of collaboration are relatively low tech and inexpensive to use. Many are afraid that people cannot be trusted to be productive at home. The fact is that people can come to work and not be productive either. The real difference between coming to work and staying at home to work is little more than whether you wear a T-shirt or a dress shirt. As the authors point out: “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.” An argument against remote work is the effect it would have on the company culture which would wither away. Remote work is not an “all or nothing” type choice. Staff can be brought together a few times a week or a month to connect and preserve the culture. It is also worth noting that “culture” is not embodied in the company events, but in the manner in which the company works. It manifests in the behaviour of staff to one another, in the manner of treating customers, in the quality of work accepted, and so on. None of these culture building blocks are absent if people work remotely. The real question any discussion on remote work would need to address is why bother with the question of staff working remotely at all? I have already mentioned the time wasted on your daily commute to the office, but there also many work related issues. Where do you go when you want to do serious work? Very few people answer to the office without the qualification – very early in the morning, before anyone gets in, or after everyone leaves, or on weekends. Offices have become “interruption factories,” observe the authors. When a colleague is only a step away why not ask for information or an opinion or a document, now. If you were working remotely, would you send an email or a sms, or if it is really urgent, make phone for the same request. Of course, there are interruptions at home or in a coffee shop, but these are interruptions you can control more easily than a manager or colleague. Remote work allows, in many cases, for better quality work. “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,” the authors note. Not having to live in Johannesburg to work for a firm in Johannesburg could be a huge incentive for someone who enjoys the more gentle life in the Paarl. For the firm it allows the search for talent to extend much wider than the immediate surroundings of the office. There is talent scattered all around the country and the world. Provided the type of work you do does not require you to be present at the office, there is no longer any compelling reason for being there all the time. The most difficult challenge many only be the mental shift – you are still working even if you don’t have an office. Readability Light --+-- Serious Insights High -+--- Low Practical High -+--- Low Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy

I'm a big believer of remote work so this book resonated with me.

If you're interested in remote working you should not miss this one. After reading you will believe that remote working is not so difficult as it's made out to be. This book concentrates on all the relavant stuff including the main tools required for remote working, importance of communication and the importance of trusting the employee to get work done remotely. A short book, but with so much of value, packed in it.

I've worked remotely in the past, and in-house more recently, as an employee and manager, so I certainly didn't need convincing that remote work offers a lot of positives for employees and businesses willing to let go of some traditional staples. What I enjoyed most about Remote was how inspired I felt while reading it, I kept thinking "Yes, they GET it." It's not an in-depth instruction manual, nor an overly analytic case study. Rather, I found it a relatively and refreshingly easy read with some solid examples covering key areas of consideration. I went away feeling hopeful, not just about the state of remote working, because as the authors mention, it's not a new fad and it's not going away. No, I went away feeling hopeful about how 37signals talk about their team and talent, how they view the business value of employees being able to live how and where they want, while still contributing to a driven team. Want to travel? No problem, grab your laptop and go. Want to work in the office, sure thing. Afternoons with your children, easy. You don't/shouldn't have to give up what you love in life just to make a living. It's an ethos I really believe in, and I think this book serves as a great positive introduction.

Ottimo. Illuminante, soprattutto nella decostruzione di falsi miti e nel suggerire un nuovo modello lavorativo, spesso anche più efficace del tradizionale, i cui benefici sono innegabili.

37 Signals is an amazing company that offers a really fresh perspective on business. They really understand the importance of hiring top notch talent and striving to strike the work/life balance that keeps a team most creative and productive. Both their books Rework and Remote --- are worth checking out. They're hardcore, progressive and cut right through the old-school BS that can hold a company back.

自分の会社、組織を上手にマネージできている人なら、このリモートのコンセプトを形にしてゆき、成果を挙げられる可能性があると感じた。昨今のノマドブームは、フリーランスの立場の人の働き場所にフォーカスが当たり過ぎと感じていたが、この本は、組織のリーダーがチームをリーモーとでも生かす方法がかかれていて参考になった。 大企業もリモートしているのが意外だった。