Why do we (still) believe in remote work
In the yard of 2013, almost three years have passed since we earned the first amount of money and started growing from a company of four employees. Jeff recently wrote a good post about remote work, mostly about our plan for how to make it work. Now, after a few years, I would like to write what is actually happening.
So what are we at the moment? The Stack Exchange currently employs 75 people, about half are engaged in sales (marketing and advertising), while the rest is in product development (development, design, community management). Most of the remotely working employees are engaged in the development: 16 remote and 18 office developers, system administrators, designers. We have a hybrid team, which, I think, is the best in the world. I am in charge of the design department, so I’ll talk mainly about developers, but this applies to all posts.
# 1: It allows you to hire people who cannot move. Remote recruitment opens vast horizons. For every person who suits you and is happy to move in, there will be a hundred others who are not ready for this. They cannot change their place of residence because of a spouse who has been employed, children in school, the impossibility of obtaining a visa or an unpaid mortgage. If you hire a person for a technical specialty, then remote work is a dazzlingly obvious secret of finding specialists. Hiring people remotely, we have assembled a team of wonderful people with a huge store of knowledge, which are located in different states, and even in other countries.
# 1a: You will not lose an employee because of ridiculous things like studying in medical school. My previous job, before the Stack Exchange, was Fog Creek. I saw at least five excellent specialists left because their families had to move, and there was a policy at Fog Creek - no remote work. It pissed me off. These magnificent employees, in which the company invested a lot, simply left because they did not have the opportunity to live in New York. Now they live happily doing the same thing as in their previous work. If we did not allow remote work, we would have lost at least two great developers.
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# 2: With the right approach, remote work makes employees incredibly productive. Personal office, flexible schedule, rapid movement from work to home. Let me tell you a secret: some developers work remotely longer than in the office. This is not necessary and, most likely, it will never be mandatory, but when going to work is as easy as climbing the stairs, people work more and more productively.
# 3: Remote work allows you to focus on more important things. As a manager, I cannot say straight away how many hours a certain developer from my team works. In fact, this is even good, because instead I follow what they are working on. This is also good for those who work from home: in this situation, they can’t be fooled by simply working in the office and scrolling Reddit hour after hour. It's incredible how easy it can be to imagine that “being in the office” = work.
# 1: Remote work is not for everyone. Many people think that working from home in pajamas is very easy, simple and generally concentrated good. This is not true. You stop being among people, having fun (playing ping-pong with colleagues, for example), having lunch together, and, worst of all, separating work from everything else. Some people thrive when they work from home, while others fade. We had both types of such employees: someone moved into the office, someone on the contrary, went to work home. Our goal is to offer a job, let people decide how it is more convenient for them to do it.
# 2: Remote work is a skill for which you can hire. Since this is not suitable for everyone, you need to be sure that the employee hired for remote work will be able to work in these conditions. The most important criteria are self-motivation and activity. Our remote developers are one of the most active and influential employees in the entire company, because they were hired to be such. We love people with their own opinions. In each project they will find things that they care about and are interested in developing.
# 3: If at least one person is not in the office, communication is transferred online. Decisions must take place outside the office, because you can no longer go to the table of a colleague or gather everyone in the conference room. Everything has to be solved online, even if the employee working remotely is not online. Otherwise, he will be cut off from current news and all that is happening in the team.
# 4: Communication is hard (but it has always been hard). I am not the first to notice this, but the most difficult problem in a company growing from 4 to 75 people is communication. When there were only four of us, we all knew each other. Then we became 75. Methods of communication between employees should be worked out, especially if there are employees working remotely, because you can no longer rely on overheard dialogue or rumors crawling away. You need to force yourself to express your thoughts.
# 1: Google Hangouts. An indispensable tool for organizations. If you haven't tried Hangouts for video conferencing, you live in the Stone Age. We constantly have a conference for each team located on the well-known URL. We use hangout for quick video chats, meetings, for sharing time (seriously), for demonstrations, for training ... yes for everything. There is no better alternative for face to face communication.
# 2: Constantly running chat. Chat is good for short conversations or to quickly ask someone a couple of questions. He has two indisputable advantages: the departed participant can always return “to the stream” in seconds, and also answer the accumulated questions as soon as the free moment appears. Each company should have a chat, regardless of whether the team is scattered around the country or sitting in the same office. This is better than going to someone's table and distracting a person.
# 3. Email. No matter how many flaws she has found, she still lives and lives. Email is completely asynchronous (so you do not need to use it if you need an answer on the same day). We have a rule that states that all decisions must be sent to the team by email. Each team sends a weekly report on the status of the project, allowing you to understand what is happening and create a complete picture of the development.
# 4: Trello + Google Docs. We use Trello to track who is working on what. Google Docs is good for notes, documentation, design. Two great tools that should be used even if no one works remotely.
Distributed teams are not for everyone, but in our conditions they work incredibly productively. Yes, for the organization you need to make an effort, but for us it is worth it, because it brings qualified specialists to our team. We do not know whether this system will work as effectively with 500 employees? I don't know, but would be glad to find out.
So what are we at the moment? The Stack Exchange currently employs 75 people, about half are engaged in sales (marketing and advertising), while the rest is in product development (development, design, community management). Most of the remotely working employees are engaged in the development: 16 remote and 18 office developers, system administrators, designers. We have a hybrid team, which, I think, is the best in the world. I am in charge of the design department, so I’ll talk mainly about developers, but this applies to all posts.
Why we believe in the possibility of full day work at home
# 1: It allows you to hire people who cannot move. Remote recruitment opens vast horizons. For every person who suits you and is happy to move in, there will be a hundred others who are not ready for this. They cannot change their place of residence because of a spouse who has been employed, children in school, the impossibility of obtaining a visa or an unpaid mortgage. If you hire a person for a technical specialty, then remote work is a dazzlingly obvious secret of finding specialists. Hiring people remotely, we have assembled a team of wonderful people with a huge store of knowledge, which are located in different states, and even in other countries.
# 1a: You will not lose an employee because of ridiculous things like studying in medical school. My previous job, before the Stack Exchange, was Fog Creek. I saw at least five excellent specialists left because their families had to move, and there was a policy at Fog Creek - no remote work. It pissed me off. These magnificent employees, in which the company invested a lot, simply left because they did not have the opportunity to live in New York. Now they live happily doing the same thing as in their previous work. If we did not allow remote work, we would have lost at least two great developers.
')
# 2: With the right approach, remote work makes employees incredibly productive. Personal office, flexible schedule, rapid movement from work to home. Let me tell you a secret: some developers work remotely longer than in the office. This is not necessary and, most likely, it will never be mandatory, but when going to work is as easy as climbing the stairs, people work more and more productively.
# 3: Remote work allows you to focus on more important things. As a manager, I cannot say straight away how many hours a certain developer from my team works. In fact, this is even good, because instead I follow what they are working on. This is also good for those who work from home: in this situation, they can’t be fooled by simply working in the office and scrolling Reddit hour after hour. It's incredible how easy it can be to imagine that “being in the office” = work.
What we learned
# 1: Remote work is not for everyone. Many people think that working from home in pajamas is very easy, simple and generally concentrated good. This is not true. You stop being among people, having fun (playing ping-pong with colleagues, for example), having lunch together, and, worst of all, separating work from everything else. Some people thrive when they work from home, while others fade. We had both types of such employees: someone moved into the office, someone on the contrary, went to work home. Our goal is to offer a job, let people decide how it is more convenient for them to do it.
# 2: Remote work is a skill for which you can hire. Since this is not suitable for everyone, you need to be sure that the employee hired for remote work will be able to work in these conditions. The most important criteria are self-motivation and activity. Our remote developers are one of the most active and influential employees in the entire company, because they were hired to be such. We love people with their own opinions. In each project they will find things that they care about and are interested in developing.
# 3: If at least one person is not in the office, communication is transferred online. Decisions must take place outside the office, because you can no longer go to the table of a colleague or gather everyone in the conference room. Everything has to be solved online, even if the employee working remotely is not online. Otherwise, he will be cut off from current news and all that is happening in the team.
# 4: Communication is hard (but it has always been hard). I am not the first to notice this, but the most difficult problem in a company growing from 4 to 75 people is communication. When there were only four of us, we all knew each other. Then we became 75. Methods of communication between employees should be worked out, especially if there are employees working remotely, because you can no longer rely on overheard dialogue or rumors crawling away. You need to force yourself to express your thoughts.
How it works for us
# 1: Google Hangouts. An indispensable tool for organizations. If you haven't tried Hangouts for video conferencing, you live in the Stone Age. We constantly have a conference for each team located on the well-known URL. We use hangout for quick video chats, meetings, for sharing time (seriously), for demonstrations, for training ... yes for everything. There is no better alternative for face to face communication.
# 2: Constantly running chat. Chat is good for short conversations or to quickly ask someone a couple of questions. He has two indisputable advantages: the departed participant can always return “to the stream” in seconds, and also answer the accumulated questions as soon as the free moment appears. Each company should have a chat, regardless of whether the team is scattered around the country or sitting in the same office. This is better than going to someone's table and distracting a person.
# 3. Email. No matter how many flaws she has found, she still lives and lives. Email is completely asynchronous (so you do not need to use it if you need an answer on the same day). We have a rule that states that all decisions must be sent to the team by email. Each team sends a weekly report on the status of the project, allowing you to understand what is happening and create a complete picture of the development.
# 4: Trello + Google Docs. We use Trello to track who is working on what. Google Docs is good for notes, documentation, design. Two great tools that should be used even if no one works remotely.
That's our whole story
Distributed teams are not for everyone, but in our conditions they work incredibly productively. Yes, for the organization you need to make an effort, but for us it is worth it, because it brings qualified specialists to our team. We do not know whether this system will work as effectively with 500 employees? I don't know, but would be glad to find out.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/167999/
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