Book Review: Remote - Office Not Required
Remote - Office Not Required is a 2013 manifesto for remote work written by authors who successfully run the software company 37 Signals. It provides advice on working remotely, managing remote workers, hybrid models, and more. I learned that communication and collaboration must be approached strategically by remote or hybrid teams, otherwise difficulties will arise.
There are 5 key takeaways I took from the book:
- The Office is not a productive place
- You need a strategy for communication
- The best workers are both smart and get stuff done
- Real life interactions are still valuable, but should be scarce.
The office is not a productive place
If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will reply "the office". If they do, it will usually be "in the office before anyone else gets in", or "at the office super late in the evening". A busy office is like a food processor, it chops your day into tiny bits. 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there, each segment is filled with meetings, calls, questions, etc.
Meaningful, creative, thoughtful, important work takes stretches of uninterrupted time.
Commuting is also a waste of time, money, and energy for the majority of people.
The city has lost it's monopoly on talent. Remote work is the new luxury (or, now, expectation) for talented people. Talent isn't bound by location anymore- Film making will leave Hollywood, and Tech will leave Silicon Valley.
You need a strategy for communication
"First, it takes recognizing that not every question needs an answer immediately—there’s nothing more arrogant than taking up someone else’s time with a question you don’t need an answer to right now. That means realizing that not everything is equally important."
Not everything is equally important. Dire emergencies can be dealt with using a phone call. Questions that need answers within minutes can be asked via IM. Questions that can wait hours, can be asked via Email.
As we have established, interruption from colleagues is unfortunately a cause of poor productivity. Maybe it would be nice to work all night, when nobody else is online and then sleep during the day. However this is also a poor strategy. What works best is approximately 4 hours of overlap, during which IM's can be shot back and forward and meetings joined if needed. But then workers will also get 4 hours of radio silence, in which they can choose to focus deeply on important work.
In large organisations working across multiple time zones, it's probably impossible to get this perfect 4 hours of overlap and 4 hours of focus. But most workers should be able to carve out a few hours per day during which they can turn off their IM client and focus deeply.
In remote teams workers may login to find they are the only ones online. It is essential that they know "what do I do next" and have all the resources available. Otherwise James in London wastes most the day waiting for Katie in New York to login and tell him what to do. Ticket tracking tools can help with knowing what to do, while distributed version control systems, shared calendars, and wikis help with making resources available.
Final note on communication: Writing Skills. When most discussions are had by Email and IM, workers must be able to inform and persuade using their writing. ChatGPT still isn't quite replying to Slack messages, or autonomously editing Wikis, so this skill is still important (for now).
The best workers are both smart and get stuff done
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/
It is temping to define a good worker by this formula:
they're a nice person + they're in the office 8-6 = Must be a good worker
However this is misleading. Nice people don't always do good work. And spending 10 hours per day in the office, while admirable, is not an indicator of good work and may not even be sustainable long term.
During remote work, you are judged on your output. The workers with the edge are quiet-but-productive. Great remote workers are simply great workers. As a manager, if you can't trust an individual to work without you looking over their shoulder why do you trust them at all?
Real life interactions are still valuable, but should be scarce.
The fact remains that it is much easier to work remotely with people you have met in real life and shared laughs and meals with. So even fully remote companies should ideally meetup a few times per year.
Scarce resources should be respected, conserved, appreciated, and valued. Make face-to-face harder and less frequent, and the value of the interactions you do have will go up.
Other Quick Notes
- Screensharing on calls is super helpful
- Share your progress with regular meetings to ask "what have you been working on". This provides accountability. It's important to share your work with your colleagues, not just your manager, since it's often harder to bullshit your peers than your boss.
- Meetings and Managers are the two biggest reasons why work doesn't get done at an office. Meetings should be treated as a rare delicacy, Managers should not spend all day doing worthless "managing".
- You can get Cabin Fever when working from home too long. Do some social activities in the real world.
- Open Source is a triumph of asynchronous collaboration and communication like few the world has ever seen. It has 1. Intrinsic Motivation. People are excited to work on the project, despite not having a manager looking over their shoulder 2. "What to work on next" is clear and public, for all to see at any time.
- Overwork, not underwork, is the real threat from remote work. Time zones can encourage people to start early and stay late. As a remote worker, there is less delineation between work and home. Unless you are careful, work can become your only hobby. Work can slowly fill up evenings and saturdays, since you may feel like you have nothing better to do.
- Try to do a "good days work" by 5pm. If you have not done a good day's work, ask the 5 why's and improve tomorrow.