Hammer on the office, work remotely

We share key ideas from the book of Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer Hensson, the founders of 37signals and Basecamp, “Remote: no office required.”

The book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer Hennson, the founders of 37signals, “Remote: No Office Required” has a high rating on Amazon and Goodreads book portals, has received mostly positive reviews from critics and readers. The book is recommended for reading by David Allen, the founder of the GTD methodology, Kevin Kelly, the author of The Inevitable, and many others.

According to the authors, the future belongs to remote work, and the traditional 8-hour presence in the office will inevitably wither away over time.

What ideas does their book contain? Tell you more.

With the words “remote work”, the first thing that comes to mind is freelancing. What about him?

The authors consider a permanent job for one company, either under a contract or with registration in the state. If a specialist is from another country, he is most often hired by contract. Our domestic freelancing has its advantages, but it is also full of minuses, both for the employer and for the employee. Therefore, both parties are afraid to commit themselves, preferring one-time orders.

The book also describes the debugged mechanism of permanent distant labor, convenient and beneficial for all.

What is the benefit of a remote office?

According to the authors, an average person spends about 400 hours a year on the way from work and from work — about as much they spent on creating their Basecamp program. And all because, while complying with the obligatory 40-hour week, it was allowed to employees who work at home to allocate time as it suits them. "Owls" do not have to suffer, waking up on an alarm clock at 6 am, parents can safely take or pick up children from school or kindergarten.

For 37signals, a job well done does not matter the time it took during the day.

But in this way, an employee can go about his business all day long, while pretending that he is working hard. How to check it?

Check it out easily - by results of labor. In addition, not so much for control, as for supporting the communication of employees among themselves, new software products are constantly being created - for web conferences, real-time coordination of affairs, and the like.

You need to debug your schedule, notify your colleagues and be constantly in touch. Short-term distraction from work makes it possible after a while to see the problem from a different angle. This is especially useful for creative work.

Can I make a career without being in the office?

Looking in what area. There are professions where remote work is most preferable: in the authors' opinion, these are programming, copywriting, design, financial sphere, law, advertising and marketing, film production and some others. And the salary can grow, and other types of incentives are provided.

You can live on the beach or in an abandoned hut in the forest - as you like. Or wander from place to place, not tied to a big city, traffic jams, loans and gassed air. Many “office slaves” dream of retirement, when they can finally afford to travel or just spend time on what the soul asks for personal life. In this case, it is not necessary to wait for a pension.

At the same time, the rights of the employee are protected in the same way as if he visited a regular office 5 times a week.

Some office careers, according to the authors, are made up of friendship with influential employees, petty bosses, or with the ability to splurge. When working remotely, the criterion of employee value is good work, and only she.

Why do employers go for it? What is their benefit?

There are many benefits, but, according to the authors, not all employers are willing to go for a remote office. People of the old school "must see everything", keep in their field of vision. If this does not happen, they lose confidence that everything is going as it should. They do not want to hear about remote work.

The authors of the book propose to smoothly persuade the authorities. First, get permission to work at home once a week (necessarily showing the next day that the work was very productive). Then, after a while, ask for another day to teach them that it is in the order of things.

(Whether such a strategy will work with our domestic employers is unknown).

But back to the issue of benefits. According to the authors, in offices people spend more time in vain than at home. They still read personal mail, look in on Facebook, chat and somehow get distracted. In some companies, it is customary to monitor the Internet activity of all employees with the help of expensive special programs so that it is distracted.

(Isn't it better not to hire people you don't trust, the authors are surprised).

Often in the same building there are many competing companies that can easily spot and lure a good specialist who is seen every day and heard about him. Renting a large office costs a lot of money that could be spent on something more useful.

Often the company is looking for the right specialist for a long time. Finally, they find him, but he lives in another city and is not ready to move. Remote office will remove this problem. In addition, he will not compare himself with his colleagues or look closely at the company next door, fully concentrating on work. Work from home is one of the attractive aspects of any company, and good specialists take this into account.

One of the benefits for all, the authors consider the benefits for the environment: workers spend less on gasoline, respectively, reduced emissions into the atmosphere (an impressive figure for the year).

When management gathers meetings, people give up all their activities and spend time listening to reasoning. The authors believe that this is tantamount to a demand to drop everything and go to entertain the chef. But when working remotely, the boss’s intervention in the lives of subordinates is more targeted when he sets a specific direction for everyone using chat or e-mail.

In any office there are accidents with electricity, the Internet and other things. Employees take sick leave and in this case drop out of the process. But if they work at home, a cold will not hurt them, as well as the arrival of a plumber or electrician due to a home accident. This makes it difficult to leave the house, but not the work of a remote employee.

There are many benefits, but the employer needs to be prepared to recognize them.

Would not the envy of other employees entail, if someone is allowed to work at home alone?

According to the authors, it is precisely this that most often employers motivate their refusal to let them go home, since the rules are the same for everyone. In this case, it is necessary to transfer all to remote mode, so that no one was hurt. Business is a common cause, and not jointly serving a certain number of hours in one room.

Someone is really more comfortable working from the office, but why should it be convenient for everyone? If everyone is united by a common cause, then let them work the way they work best.

Everyone is looking for a way to do the job in the best possible way, and the boss only needs to help the staff with this. This idea, according to the authors, should be gradually brought to the mind of the employer.

But after all, there is a certain corporate culture - common events, which are customarily celebrated?

Common parties on different occasions - this, according to the authors of the book, is just a way of spending time together. The real corporate culture of any office is an understanding of the values ​​of the company, the development of general principles of work and following them.

In companies where corporate culture is up to the mark, employees work without problems remotely, showing discipline and responsibility. The higher the culture, the less control they need.

But what about the coordination of actions when employees are very far from each other?

The authors consider the benefits of the meetings highly overvalued: if the meetings are becoming more frequent, it means that the matter has stalled. But coordination is necessary, and here voice connection programs such as Skype and general remote access to a computer screen using WebEx, Join.me and others come to the rescue.

Many instructions are better discussed by e-mail - then they will always be in front of your eyes. There is a phone, all kinds of instant messengers and chats for every taste. There are special security protocols to protect against competitors when working remotely. In 37signals, to coordinate actions, the authors arrange weekly discussions on the topic “What are you working on?”.

For personal meetings with employees, the authors of the book have a good office, but before that, they used to manage the tables in special co-working centers, where you can book workplaces from several hours to several months. They believe that the less personal meetings occur, the brighter and more productive they are.

In general, a luxurious office is needed only for those companies for whom image is very important.

Do large companies resort to remote work?

Authors cite as an example of successful remote work such companies as IBM, E-bay, Intel, Cisco, Mercedes-Benz, Unilever, the US Department of Education and many others. The number of employees of each of these organizations is about 10 thousand people, and they are employed in completely different fields.

Even the American government is increasingly shifting employees to remote work. It is practiced at NASA, the Patent Office and the Environmental Protection Agency.

What about data security? Does she suffer from remote work?

The authors believe that remote employees will quickly get used to the rules and methods of data protection. On the hard drives of all computers, the data must be encrypted. The system should block automatic entry into it. From sleep mode, you can exit only by entering a password. If it does not work more than 10 minutes, it is automatically blocked.

On the Internet, you need to turn on secure mode and work using HTTPS or SSL secure protocol, and use a lock code on smartphones and tablets and be able to delete all data remotely. The password for logging in to the mail must be quite complicated and stored in a special program.

How to deal with the client - should he know what he is dealing with a remote office?

This, according to the authors, should be reported immediately - it contributes to trust and immediately clarifies. It is recommended to provide feedback about the company immediately, without waiting for requests, giving the opportunity to communicate with other customers. It will not be superfluous to devote him to the current stages of the project so that he understands that the matter is progressing. So he calmer.

The authors recommend to be constantly in touch and emphasize this - often call back, write and respond in chat rooms. For remote work, this is especially important.

It is possible to organize joint access to the work schedule with the client. He should share his thoughts, comment on the work - this is how he feels a sense of belonging to the common cause.

Are there any disadvantages of remote work?

The authors believe that even an introvert, for whom such work is ideal, requires communication with people, and in remote work it is easy to feel lost. But the world is not limited to colleagues and like-minded people - there are family, neighbors, interest clubs, fitness centers and so on.

If a remote employee is too keen on his business, he will recycle the required number of hours and overwork.

Authors consider that managers of a remote office should emphasize that they will not pay 40 hours for processing. The result is important, not time.

A sedentary lifestyle, typical of any office workers, at remote work can be aggravated. Therefore, the authors believe, you need to take care of yourself - walk more, start a simulator and use it during breaks - in a word, try to move as much as possible about and without it, so as not to overgrow with fat.

It happens that the temptation is too great at home to do something else — watch TV or discuss something interesting with the household. In such cases, you can work in a cafe or park, taking with him a laptop. At home it is best to equip yourself a workplace where no one and nothing will interfere. The authors even advise to use two computers: one for rest, the other for work.

What is the practical use of this book? Is it applicable to our realities?

Fully applicable. In our country, many managers are ready to abandon large offices, but do not know how to organize remote work, and rush from one extreme to another: they are looking for cheap freelancers on the stock exchanges, let everyone take their course or simply call remote employees to meetings.

The book will tell you how to act in such cases. She is focused more on managers than on ordinary remote employees. The future is really in remote offices where people from all over the world work.

Does the book have flaws?

Schemes of work are described simply and clearly, but between the lines, sometimes unobtrusively flashes advertising of software products created by the authors. In addition, a person who, in principle, is not close to the idea of ​​remote cooperation, is unlikely to enjoy the book. Some will find that working from home is not freedom, but even more slavery: after all, work and home are usually divided, and combining is annoying. But this is a matter of individual perception.

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