On Working Remotely
Welcome to Early Hints.
A newsletter to help busy business leaders to stay on top of new developments.
This edition: Lessons from 6 years of Working Remotely. TL;DR
My insights on remote work:
My best practices on remote work:
My Remote Experience
I started working remotely in 2014 and was part of remote teams ever since. In most companies I worked with, I started off onsite or in a hybrid setting, then switched to remote after half a year. In total, I have 6 years of remote work experience across companies like Google, Mckinsey, and AWS.
The Covid outbreak happened as I was part of a co-located team. Like many others, we suddenly had to change our working mode from being onsite to being a remote team. Some handled it better than others. The company introduced Miro, Box, Slack, and training on remote best practices in a short amount of time. Yet going remote was still unusual for most. Some people struggled, others quit.
At the same time, many experienced and enjoyed the benefits of remote work for the very first time in their lives. Some used the opportunity to work from a different country, others moved to the countryside.
However, with schools and public places closed, the situation was quite different from the remote work that I had known. That’s why many people were turned off from remote work as the experience during the pandemic was the only thing they knew about it.
Well, in this edition, I’ll share how remote work can help you build your dream life.
First, I’ll share my insights with you, then my tips on how to excel at remote work.
Here are my 3 insights:
1) Most people don’t know how to work remotely.
“Man, I don’t know how to handle this.” he told me. My colleague was super smart, 5 years older than me, and my senior. He wasn’t handling being away from the office well. He still was a top 1% performer at the company. But 2 weeks after our call, he quit and took a break. He was not alone.
People struggled with loneliness and isolation, finding it hard to build relationships and missed the social element. Many were distracted and lacked the discipline to focus, especially if household chores and the family lured away from work. Some blurred the work-life boundaries and were always on, working from the kitchen, in underwear, or at breakfast. Others mistook flexibility with a lack of integrity, spending time on social media, watching movies, or gaming.
Some found themselves so dependent on IT and tech-savy colleagues that they felt helpless in creating a proper remote setup. Others simply didn’t understand or cared that investing in stable internet, a good microphone, headphones, webcam, and lighting is like putting on a suit.
It’s difficult to take a director of something seriously if they appear as a fuzzy silhouette in a hallway speaking in barely audible half-cut sentences.
People do not know what best practices fully remote individuals have. I’ll share them below.
2) Companies without a remote first culture won’t adapt.
That’s not saying that they can’t, it is just saying that they don’t want to.
At the start of the pandemic, most companies first continued to run their webex, sharepoint, email stack of the workplace only to find out that this sucks. Considering the fact that most enterprise software takes 18 months on average to be introduced, and then another 6 - 12 months to be fully adopted, it’s no wonder that everyone is being called back to office.
Beyond software, hardware, and adoption issues, management struggles with concerns around time management and productivity. That’s because companies lack structures and processes that are optimized for remote work. Visibility and credit still requires onsite presence, as does a recognition of workloard or informal praise.
Add to that difficulties in onboarding and exiting employees, or managing mental health impacts of work. People who were already stressed at work pretty much lost it during the pandemic. That’s why many looked for a career change. Not because their workplace was that terrible, but because it was not adapted to be remote.
Finally, the investment into office space, onsite practices, and organization in physical space were high. Management saw it as sunk cost that would be difficult to explain to a board or shareholders. The cost to transform was too high for a “one time event”. You’d think that top tech companies like Google and Amazon would be different, but guess who called their people back in first?
There are ways in which a company can wholly transform or to be set up for remote work in the first place. Many renown companies like 37 Signals, Hotjar, Atlassian, or Github have been completely remote for years. The makers of the popular CMS Wordpress, Automattic, have 1000+ employees and no office.
I’ll share how to create a remote first company below.
3) Hybrid does not work.
Some companies leave it to individual departments or allow remote work for some roles and not for others. That is a recipe for disaster. If you really want to screw up the vibe, put some people in a room and spread the rest around the world. What you get is a team that is colocated and a bunch of frustrated people who feel left out of the conversation and decision making, because, well, they are.
Hybrid means inequity and a two-tiered culture. Those onsite receive a preferential treatment through proximity bias. Remote people are out of Sight, out of mind. That leads to resentment and division, which leads to changes in collaboration and communication. Those on site or in the same timezone will start showing synchronicity bias.
What you’ll get over time is a loss of informal communication, which will lead to a temptation of micromanagement. Inconsistent policies between onsite and remote workers will create differences in performance. Hot-desking onsite will become a logistical nightmare. Unequal tech will expand security risks, and IT support will be strained.
Your company culture, your identity, your brand will be diluted over time. You cannot run hybrid teams, workshops, events, etc. no matter how you try. It doesn’t matter what tech you have or who you are.
I’ll share how to get out of that mess if you’re thrown into it.
My best practices on remote work
As an individual
Work Modes
Instead of managing time, manage working in different modes. The majority of your time should be spend in working on your delivery items, whether that is code, text, numbers, or something else. At the office, this is 30% of your time at best. That’s due to office culture driven by distractions and interruptions. In a remote setting, you can get this up to 50% of your time.
Here are the 4 work modes:
Monk: Deep work. Turn off all notifications, messaging tools, and your phone. Be unreachable. Hunker down in your workspace. Get all information for your delivery first so you don’t start searching online. For online tools, turn on a webblocker. Put on headphones and listen to a study music radio to increase focus.
Social: Connect intentionally. Turn all notifications and messaging on. Invite people for an ad hoc video chat. I always asked people if they had time for 5 minutes, then talked to them outside on the phone while walking. The purpose is purely to socialize, talk about work, gossip, and have a watercooler moment.
Office: Multitask intentionally. Be deliberate about answering emails, replying in chat, working on that document, or having the video call all at the same time. This is how most people spend most of their time, but it should not be more than 25% as this is draining especially if you are on video calls.
Presenter: Facilitating or presenting something. Like monk mode, but while being on video with other people. Typically customer calls, demos, virtual workshops, etc. I prepared these meticulously, setting the stage, isolating myself and locking the door. I turn off the view of my own video, push the participant faces aside to a different screen, and look and talk directly into the webcam.
The way I split my time was 50% monk, 15% social, 20% office, 15% presenter.
Space
I used different spaces to manage my work modes. For monk and presenter, I used my office at home. For social, I took walks or spent time in the garden or balcony. For office tasks, I used any space with wifi and isolated with headphones. You can ease the cost of context switching by switching the space you work in.
Physical space: Consider video calls as a performance, not as a communication channel. People always remarked on my setup and asked if I am a YouTuber or create podcasts. I am not. I don’t. But a real physical backdrop with the company logo and my name, a high quality microphone, webcam, studio lights, etc will make an impression. I also dressed up the room and myself. Make sure the video makes an impression.
I decluttered the workspace - it’s only the screens, keyboard, mouse and an empty desk. Initially, I had a gaming chair to rest and support my back but I noticed that this only caused me to spend more time sitting. So I changed it to a swivel chair, a standing desk, and a treadmill.
Here is my setup:
Key learning: Appear professional on videos and presentations. There are lots of tutorials on creating a great setup on YouTube for all kinds of budgets. Designing your space intentionally has a great impact on how people interact with you.
Digital space: build a second brain for yourself. All notes, research, temporary outputs should be organized and easy to find. Don’t be that person who asks where a certain file was saved. I put key files and folders to shortcuts on my elgato streamdeck so I could call them up at the push of a button.
In my line of work, I have to talk to customers using different communication tools, so I had everything installed: skype, webex, zoom, teams, slack… you name it, I got it. That said, only the company internal tool was on, and only if I wasn’t in monk mode.
领英推荐
I use automation, nocode, and AI tools heavily to set up and organize workflows, create deliverables and do research. In remote work, you want to make sure you find what you need and have all the tools you need to process your work. You don’t want to interrupt others or appear helpless. Remote workers need to be self-directed, have a bias for action, and be able to self-sustain themselves. There is nobody to babysit you.
Key learning: Save time for yourself and do not waste anyone else’s.
As a team
Remote teams default to offline, asynchronous work. This is contrary to most people’s experience during covid, which was full of back to back video calls. But go read on the blogs of Automattic, Atlassian, or Buffer and you will see that all of these remote-only companies have one thing in common:
They avoid video calls.
Instead, they put a heavy focus on documentation and asynchronous communication.
As you do your work, document what you are doing and why, so that someone else can connect to it or pick up on it. When you talk to colleagues using a messenger like slack, assume that they will answer on their own time. Better yet, use internal forums or post feeds where immediate answers are not expected.
Instead of using push methods for project management, use a pull method like Kanban. Discuss and document the outcomes that need to be done, then let people pull their own part to it and contribute any way they see fit.
This is opposite to daily video standupts, weekly video team meetings, weekly video project syncs, weekly customer calls, etc. At the height of the insanity, I had 20h of video calls pushed on me. Video drains focus, is unproductive and takes too much time. Again, avoid it at all costs.
When you do video, make sure everyone has a highspeed internet connection, great audio, and great video. You want this to be pleasant, not a drag.
I put a team wiki in place, made sure we all had one cloud folder, and everyone used good equipment for their calls. I didn’t jump into video but instead asked people to document their work and create tutorials for others. This initially seems like extra work, but if you compare against calls saved, it’s actually far less.
If part of the team meets in physical space, the rule is that only one of them speaks, or they all put on headphones - like gamers in a lan session. No crosstalk in the room while everyone else is remote.
Avoid hybrid.
As a company
Go full on remote, or go onsite. Do not do hybrid.
That said, it makes sense to pull everyone together in one room every once in a while. It should not be monthly. For a company spread across the globe, quarterly is also too much. 1-2x per year as an onsite meeting is enough. This will help socialize and preserve the culture.
Use the latest and best in digital tooling. Whatever edge you can get, whatever time savings you can effect, however minimal, they are worth it. Nothing is worse than using a cloud storage that is super slow, not having collaborative editing in documents, or using a bad video tool.
You can tell the maturity and experience of a company with remote work by the tools they are using.
Make sure teams have internal wiki pages where they document who they are, what they do, why they do it, what tools and processes they use, what their data and deliverables are, how to access them, etc. Onboarding into a new team should be as easy as reading their wiki for a few days.
Any presentations that are held more than 3 times, record them on video and share them instead. Don’t do live video presentations if you can do recordings. As a general rule, any content or tool should be accessible to anyone, at any time, from anywhere, without asking for permission, and without requiring anyone to hold your hand.
Take a lesson from online games and make sure there are tutorials, video guides, documentation, and discussion in forums everywhere. Nobody should require to be always on.
There is much more to asynchronous work than I can put into this one newsletter edition. These books are a good starting point:
This is a different culture than the one most companies are used to. It is a culture based on text, content, and automation of workflows. It may sound like you are isolated, but it really isn’t. On the contrary, it helps every individual to build work into their own life design.
Design your Life
One of my colleagues was calling in from a farm in rural Montana, another from the beach in Portugal, I was in central Berlin, and another on the outskirts of London. One was just starting their day, another was ready to go surfing after the call, and I was just off baby duty.
However you mix and balance your work and your life, there is noone to tell you how to do it. It is up to you to come up with a routine, to decide when and how to work. There are no office pressures to require presence at all times.
I saw people struggle because they tried to replicate their office routine at home. This changed for me as I started experimenting with different routines, work modes, and environments. There are no blueprints here.
You need to design your own life.
How to get started on remote work
Your employer might ask you to return to office. If it isn’t a remote first company, they will. At some point. If you would like to be safe than sorry, here is how to find opportunity.
Where to find work
There are companies that do not have an office and hire globally. If you want to transform your own company into one of these, I’ll share how to do that below. You can look for remote only companies in these listings:
Or start by freelancing on upwork to adopt remote best practices.
Remote Work Opportunity
Covid changed work. 93% of professionals (!!!) are looking for remote flexibility. 58% of workers would absolutely look for a new job rather than going back to full-time in-office work. You can’t put the genie back into the lamp.
The demand for remote work opportunities increased by a factor of 10 from 2018 to in 2024. The same applies to the supply: while there were only 8-10 remote job sites in 2018, the number is now somewhere between 80 and 110, depending on how you classify the sites.
Companies have to think twice about their return to office policy. If you are a founder or a decision maker in your company, think about this: The tech layoffs make it seem like it is an employers market now. The opposite is the case. Good people can work where ever and however they want now. They can shape their life as they wish.
There are benefits for the company, too. The obvious one is savings on real estate. You do not need an office. Also consider equipment and supplies, commuting subsidies, relocation Costs, less absenteeism and turnover, less “quiet quitting.” There have been many studies on this now and the average savings can range from $2,000 to $10,000+ per remote employee per year.
For employees, the savings are somewhere between $2,000 - $5,000+ per year. This is based on savings in commute, lifestyle changes, and meals. Someone earning $60,000 annually in San Francisco could have a similar quality of life on about $20,000 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. You can compare costs of living on Numbeo to see how much you would need to earn somewhere else.
Then, there are the time savings. Someone with a 1-hour commute each way gains back 10 hours per week! The average commute time is 30m in the USA, 45m for major cities, with similar times in UK and Europe. Include 15m prep time going in and out of work - that is 1 hour per day.
The Current Trend
30-40% of companies are calling employees back to office in 2024, which is a 10% increase over 2023. This is mostly over collaboration and innovation concerns, worries over company culture and identity, outdated management practices, and some practical and client-driven factors.
But here is the thing.
The data doesn’t support the push for back-to-office.
There are many innovative, high-performing, highly profitable businesses across the globe that are fully remote. While companies who did not want to transform are calling people back, a rising number or people are looking for remote work.
16% of the global workforce are looking to work exclusively remotely. That’s 1.3 billion people.
The business opportunity
If you want to start your own remote business, or transition your teams into it, there is a chance here.
There is an opportunity to outperform large established brands and steal the best people away from them. The top talent is among the 16% mentioned above. Go get them.
Or become one of them by upskilling and improving your own remote work practices.
Thrilled to see the evolution of remote work being celebrated! ?? Aristotle said - excellence is a habit, not an act. Embracing flexibility has truly pushed us towards this excellence, enabling innovation and a broader perspective. #FutureOfWork #Innovation
Technology Solutions Executive | Strategic Leader | Cloud & Digital Transformation Expert | Project Management Specialist | MBA
1 年I really enjoyed reading this Ahmet, very insightful.