Remote principles: how to organize remote work
In my hands the book "Remote" from 37signals. This is a book about what remote work is, how to use its advantages and how to smooth out the disadvantages. The book is very useful to entrepreneurs who are thinking about a full or partial transition to remote work. But the book is also useful and, in fact, 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 achieved 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 messaging and chatter. But meaningful and creative work requires long periods of concentration, when nothing distracts and you can immerse yourself in what you do.
In the office, a colleague may come up to slap you on the shoulder in a friendly way, another colleague may come up for “urgent” advice, etc. etc. So when we come to work on the weekend, we manage to do a lot more.
')
Stop wasting your life on the road.
Traveling to and from work takes a certain amount of your time. You are losing time in traffic jams, you have to do everything quickly to be in time for work. 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 whole list of chores and your weekend becomes not a day of rest, but just an opportunity to pay attention to housework.
How long does the road take? If you get to work 30 minutes and spend another 15 minutes on charges, this is 1.5 hours a day on the road. This is 7.5 hours per week and about 300-400 hours per year. So, 400 hours a year you spend on a secondary occupation, which does not bring any benefit at all. You can go ahead and express it in rubles. For the regions it will be 33000/21/8 * 400 = 78571 rubles. losses. For Moscow, this will no longer be 400 hours a year, but one and a half times more: 76,000/21/8 * 600 = 271,428 rubles. in year.
It will be good to discuss in the comments with the residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, who spends how much time traveling to and from work. Personally, it seems to me that it is silly for a good specialist to move from his native provincial city to the capital, because finding a distant job is easy, and you can find work for the capital’s money while living in Krasnozhopsk.
Why almost no one could afford to work remotely before? The answer is simple: there was no technology. Most likely, it will not be possible to organize a remote work of a publishing house using fax and express paper mail. But now everything is different. There are many tools that allow you to perfectly deliver remote work. 37Signals use such things:
Miracles happen when we are together.
The thing is that when you are going to be at the same table or just in the same room, you can organize some kind of brainstorming and invent some very cool idea. But the question is: how many brainstorming sessions do you spend per year? It seems to me not very much. Besides, how many brilliant ideas can your company digest and embody? As a rule, it is not too much and to waste time on a detailed reflection on what you will not be able to realize the next year anyway does not make any sense.
How do I know if employees work if I don’t see them?
This is what Chris Hoffman from IT Collective says about this: “If you stop trusting employees, then we are mistaken in hiring. A person who is not able to give a good result, does not maintain his own schedule and does not cope with the load, we will not work. We take only experienced professionals who are able to manage their time and make a significant contribution to the common cause. And we are not going to be their nannies. ”
It's simple. Employee performance is evaluated by the result. If not, the employee must be dismissed.
At home, people are constantly distracted
Really at home the temptations and opportunities to escape are much more. The whole question is in the organization. Sitting on a sofa is harder 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 engaged in an unpromising business, you need to think not about how to work on it remotely but about a new job.
Only in the office can ensure security.
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 equal this. But there are quite a few large companies that use remote work: IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Mersedes-Benz.
Corporate culture
Culture is not a table tennis tournament or a joint campaign on nature to eat dead roasted pigs. In fact, it is a set of articulated and implied values ​​and corresponding actions of the organization. A couple of examples:
I need the answer right now
When everyone works in an office, it is easy to acquire a bad way to disturb each other at any moment for any reason. This gives rise to the same crushing of the working day for a bunch of small 15-minute segments between distractions: telephone, colleague's question, answer in Skype, a letter, lunch, again a colleague's question, a break for tea, etc.
At a minimum, urgent issues can be avoided. It should be recognized that not every question requires an immediate answer. Yes, we may want to get an answer as soon as possible, but what happens if the answer is in two hours? Most likely, you will succeed that 80% of the questions can be asked via email and get an answer asynchronously. In cases of more important cases, you can ask a question on Skype. And when everything is already collapsing, you can call.
It will not work for our company / industry.
Here is a small list of areas where you can work perfectly remotely: audit, public services, design, film production, publishing, consulting, marketing, recruitment, computer production, software production, advertising, insurance, finance, legal services, translation. In fact, the case is not limited to this list. There are many industries in which remote work is applicable. Half of the 35,000 employees of Aerna (part of the Fortune 100) work remotely. Intel regularly work remotely 82% of employees.
Overlap.
The working hours of your employees should overlap. Those. There should be several hours to work 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, because an important matter due to the difference in working hours will be postponed for a day. Some things can't wait that long.
Screen sharing
Without this, in IT projects in general and not at all. Share your screen and discuss with your colleagues a new interface that you developed. You can also record screencasts. This 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 spent. Just take it and write it down.
Everything is shared
Schedule, presentation files, project materials, state of negotiations with clients: everything should be publicly available. Why? Because when a question arises when working remotely, a situation may arise “ask I don’t know who”. The solution is simple: at any moment everything should be accessible to everyone. The most important thing is to exclude situations when something important is stored on a computer or in the mail of one person.
Virtual cooler
Apparently, in the US, employees are going to chat with a cooler. In our company this happens in a hookah room. I heard that it happens that people chat in smoking rooms.
The idea is that, in addition to work, there must also be simple human communication. You can discuss the latest series of a series, the release of a new product from Apple or something else. All this is much more complicated when working remotely. To do this, 37signals use a general chat in Campfire, and we use Slack.
Get everyone up to date
The office has a common information flow. Especially when the office is built on the principle of open-space. Most of the 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. A remote employee communicates mainly in the task manager and usually is one person (project manager). As a result, the only person who owns the full picture is this very project manager.
In order not to lose this connection, you can hold meetings / phoned / correspondence in a separate thread, where everyone writes what he is working on. Personally, I blog for each project. Met with a client, immediately wrote about it. I got hold of new photos, - I posted it out to the public and immediately described how I managed to do it and what will happen to them next.
Willingness to trouble
The office can be a single point of failure. Suppose you have all the necessary infrastructure deployed in your office. Question: what will happen if the repair of heating networks damage the electrical cable that is suitable to the building? You can be insured from such troubles, having provided all necessary infrastructure for work from outside of office.
Be careful with meetings and supervisors.
When you organize a meeting, remember that you are wasting time. At the same time, 30 minutes of meeting for 8 people translate into total time costs of 4 man-hours. Thus, when paying at 300 rubles per hour, you spent 1,200 rubles. the company. There is nothing wrong with meetings, but it is important to pay attention to the frequency of these meetings. They greatly distract from work.
A leader is someone who takes leadership action. If he tries to occupy his entire day with these very leading actions, in fact, he does not let anyone work.
Customer service
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. To hire an employee you have enough to possess professional skills in a given field, he knew the language of communication very well and was able to express his thoughts in writing.
Avoid tricks, deceptions and strange methods when hiring. Just give a test task and pay for it. At the same time, the task must be practical, necessary and from real life. No need to come up with vacuum horses for test tasks.
Pay employees as much as you need without discrimination based on geography. In the end, remote work is an opportunity to hire the best, and not the ability to hire cheaper. Those. if you founded a company in Moscow, pay Moscow salaries to remote employees. Your employee should not receive 25 thousand just because it 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.
Some recommendations on how to effectively organize your remote work.
Daily routine . Make for yourself a certain daily routine. It disciplines. It happens so that when we don’t need to go anywhere, we can lie in bed until lunch, and then sit at work until late, although it’s better to spend the evening with family. It is good to break the working day itself into temporary zones: “routine”, “work with colleagues”, “serious work”.
Border . Spend a clear and clear border between work and home. Organize the 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 in the office. This can be a very good scheme. At home, you (maybe) can work on something serious in a more or less relaxed 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 the mode of communication with colleagues, if it is required.
Different computers. Place one computer in the work area for work. And get a separate computer for entertainment. Let them be incompatible and you will not be able to work on a leisure computer. They may have different operating systems and different software. Do not place work tools on a non-working computer. This will help you to avoid the temptation to “quickly check your mail” or to respond to a message from a colleague on Skype. Theoretically, on the iPad you can make a design, but they say it is not very convenient.
When you do not 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 a cafe, coworking center, library or office. By the way, you can remove one or two tables in the office of another company. This, by the way, is useful in terms of changing the scenery. If you are very tired of doing the same things every day, change the scenery.
Motivation . The only way to raise motivation is to encourage people to work on what they like and only with people who do not leave them indifferent.
---------
PS: I started using remote work a few months ago, and I read a book recently. I suspect that this reading will not pass without a trace and will result in some positive changes. If such changes have already happened to you and you have something to share, I ask in the comment.
Why the office does not work
Personally, I noticed such a thing for myself: maximum performance is achieved 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 messaging and chatter. But meaningful and creative work requires long periods of concentration, when nothing distracts and you can immerse yourself in what you do.
In the office, a colleague may come up to slap you on the shoulder in a friendly way, another colleague may come up for “urgent” advice, etc. etc. So when we come to work on the weekend, we manage to do a lot more.
')
Stop wasting your life on the road.
Traveling to and from work takes a certain amount of your time. You are losing time in traffic jams, you have to do everything quickly to be in time for work. 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 whole list of chores and your weekend becomes not a day of rest, but just an opportunity to pay attention to housework.
How long does the road take? If you get to work 30 minutes and spend another 15 minutes on charges, this is 1.5 hours a day on the road. This is 7.5 hours per week and about 300-400 hours per year. So, 400 hours a year you spend on a secondary occupation, which does not bring any benefit at all. You can go ahead and express it in rubles. For the regions it will be 33000/21/8 * 400 = 78571 rubles. losses. For Moscow, this will no longer be 400 hours a year, but one and a half times more: 76,000/21/8 * 600 = 271,428 rubles. in year.
It will be good to discuss in the comments with the residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, who spends how much time traveling to and from work. Personally, it seems to me that it is silly for a good specialist to move from his native provincial city to the capital, because finding a distant job is easy, and you can find work for the capital’s money while living in Krasnozhopsk.
Technology
Why almost no one could afford to work remotely before? The answer is simple: there was no technology. Most likely, it will not be possible to organize a remote work of a publishing house using fax and express paper mail. But now everything is different. There are many tools that allow you to perfectly deliver remote work. 37Signals use such things:
- Basecamp . This is their main product, bringing them happiness and profit. This thing allows you to set tasks, make todo-lists, share project files and organize work in time.
- WebEx is the thing that gives you the opportunity to open a general access to the screen, hold a product demonstration for a remote viewer and organize a conference call. (If anyone can advise an inexpensive alternative, please in the comments)
- KnowYour Company. Stuck 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 37signals product. This thing allows all team members to chat in one general chat. There was a free minute, - put it in the general chat kit. We use Slack for the same purpose.
- Google Hangouts . Maybe nothing 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 co-working 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 are going to be at the same table or just in the same room, you can organize some kind of brainstorming and invent some very cool idea. But the question is: how many brainstorming sessions do you spend per year? It seems to me not very much. Besides, how many brilliant ideas can your company digest and embody? As a rule, it is not too much and to waste time on a detailed reflection on what you will not be able to realize the next year anyway does not make any sense.
How do I know if employees work if I don’t see them?
This is what Chris Hoffman from IT Collective says about this: “If you stop trusting employees, then we are mistaken in hiring. A person who is not able to give a good result, does not maintain his own schedule and does not cope with the load, we will not work. We take only experienced professionals who are able to manage their time and make a significant contribution to the common cause. And we are not going to be their nannies. ”
It's simple. Employee performance is evaluated by the result. If not, the employee must be dismissed.
At home, people are constantly distracted
Really at home the temptations and opportunities to escape are much more. The whole question is in the organization. Sitting on a sofa is harder 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 engaged in an unpromising business, you need to think not about how to work on it remotely but about a new job.
Only in the office can ensure security.
This is a serious matter, and 37signals has its own set of rules on this subject:
- Data Encryption on Hard Drives
- Disable automatic login to the system, exit from sleep by password
- Turn on safe mode on all sites, especially on critical Gmail types
- 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 authentication on Gmail or other critical services.
Large companies do not. Why should we?
Many business giants are mired in inefficiency and bureaucracy. Do not equal this. But there are quite a few large companies that use remote work: IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Mersedes-Benz.
Corporate culture
Culture is not a table tennis tournament or a joint campaign on nature to eat dead roasted pigs. In fact, it is a set of articulated and implied values ​​and corresponding actions of the organization. A couple of examples:
- How we talk with customers. Do we think the customer is always right?
- How do we treat the quality of the products? We strive for the perfect or content with good?
- How do we talk to each other? Politely or hard?
- What kind of workload do we consider correct? We encourage workaholics or those who ask for leave from time to time on Friday?
- How do we take risk? Prefer to take risks or try to grow slowly but surely?
I need the answer right now
When everyone works in an office, it is easy to acquire a bad way to disturb each other at any moment for any reason. This gives rise to the same crushing of the working day for a bunch of small 15-minute segments between distractions: telephone, colleague's question, answer in Skype, a letter, lunch, again a colleague's question, a break for tea, etc.
At a minimum, urgent issues can be avoided. It should be recognized that not every question requires an immediate answer. Yes, we may want to get an answer as soon as possible, but what happens if the answer is in two hours? Most likely, you will succeed that 80% of the questions can be asked via email and get an answer asynchronously. In cases of more important cases, you can ask a question on Skype. And when everything is already collapsing, you can call.
It will not work for our company / industry.
Here is a small list of areas where you can work perfectly remotely: audit, public services, design, film production, publishing, consulting, marketing, recruitment, computer production, software production, advertising, insurance, finance, legal services, translation. In fact, the case is not limited to this list. There are many industries in which remote work is applicable. Half of the 35,000 employees of Aerna (part of the Fortune 100) work remotely. Intel regularly work remotely 82% of employees.
How to organize remote work
Overlap.
The working hours of your employees should overlap. Those. There should be several hours to work 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, because an important matter due to the difference in working hours will be postponed for a day. Some things can't wait that long.
Screen sharing
Without this, in IT projects in general and not at all. Share your screen and discuss with your colleagues a new interface that you developed. You can also record screencasts. This 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 spent. Just take it and write it down.
Everything is shared
Schedule, presentation files, project materials, state of negotiations with clients: everything should be publicly available. Why? Because when a question arises when working remotely, a situation may arise “ask I don’t know who”. The solution is simple: at any moment everything should be accessible to everyone. The most important thing is to exclude situations when something important is stored on a computer or in the mail of one person.
Virtual cooler
Apparently, in the US, employees are going to chat with a cooler. In our company this happens in a hookah room. I heard that it happens that people chat in smoking rooms.
The idea is that, in addition to work, there must also be simple human communication. You can discuss the latest series of a series, the release of a new product from Apple or something else. All this is much more complicated when working remotely. To do this, 37signals use a general chat in Campfire, and we use Slack.
Get everyone up to date
The office has a common information flow. Especially when the office is built on the principle of open-space. Most of the 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. A remote employee communicates mainly in the task manager and usually is one person (project manager). As a result, the only person who owns the full picture is this very project manager.
In order not to lose this connection, you can hold meetings / phoned / correspondence in a separate thread, where everyone writes what he is working on. Personally, I blog for each project. Met with a client, immediately wrote about it. I got hold of new photos, - I posted it out to the public and immediately described how I managed to do it and what will happen to them next.
Willingness to trouble
The office can be a single point of failure. Suppose you have all the necessary infrastructure deployed in your office. Question: what will happen if the repair of heating networks damage the electrical cable that is suitable to the building? You can be insured from such troubles, having provided all necessary infrastructure for work from outside of office.
Be careful with meetings and supervisors.
When you organize a meeting, remember that you are wasting time. At the same time, 30 minutes of meeting for 8 people translate into total time costs of 4 man-hours. Thus, when paying at 300 rubles per hour, you spent 1,200 rubles. the company. There is nothing wrong with meetings, but it is important to pay attention to the frequency of these meetings. They greatly distract from work.
A leader is someone who takes leadership action. If he tries to occupy his entire day with these very leading actions, in fact, he does not let anyone work.
Customer service
Your customers may be away from you. In order for this to work successfully, you need to try to follow the following recommendations.
- inform customers immediately that you are far away and will work remotely
- Give customers feedback on your company before they ask for it.
- show to the client more often what has been done on the project
- Be underlined to communicate: call back in 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 this and his project too.
How to find and hold?
Just search around the world or country. To hire an employee you have enough to possess professional skills in a given field, he knew the language of communication very well and was able to express his thoughts in writing.
Avoid tricks, deceptions and strange methods when hiring. Just give a test task and pay for it. At the same time, the task must be practical, necessary and from real life. No need to come up with vacuum horses for test tasks.
Pay employees as much as you need without discrimination based on geography. In the end, remote work is an opportunity to hire the best, and not the ability to hire cheaper. Those. if you founded a company in Moscow, pay Moscow salaries to remote employees. Your employee should not receive 25 thousand just because it 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
Some recommendations on how to effectively organize your remote work.
Daily routine . Make for yourself a certain daily routine. It disciplines. It happens so that when we don’t need to go anywhere, we can lie in bed until lunch, and then sit at work until late, although it’s better to spend the evening with family. It is good to break the working day itself into temporary zones: “routine”, “work with colleagues”, “serious work”.
Border . Spend a clear and clear border between work and home. Organize the 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 in the office. This can be a very good scheme. At home, you (maybe) can work on something serious in a more or less relaxed 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 the mode of communication with colleagues, if it is required.
Different computers. Place one computer in the work area for work. And get a separate computer for entertainment. Let them be incompatible and you will not be able to work on a leisure computer. They may have different operating systems and different software. Do not place work tools on a non-working computer. This will help you to avoid the temptation to “quickly check your mail” or to respond to a message from a colleague on Skype. Theoretically, on the iPad you can make a design, but they say it is not very convenient.
When you do not 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 a cafe, coworking center, library or office. By the way, you can remove one or two tables in the office of another company. This, by the way, is useful in terms of changing the scenery. If you are very tired of doing the same things every day, change the scenery.
Motivation . The only way to raise motivation is to encourage people to work on what they like and only with people who do not leave them indifferent.
---------
PS: I started using remote work a few months ago, and I read a book recently. I suspect that this reading will not pass without a trace and will result in some positive changes. If such changes have already happened to you and you have something to share, I ask in the comment.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290542/
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