Remote work with a healthy (?) Employer
In 2019, remote work in IT has long been surprising no one - it is perceived as one of the available ways to organize a team. You can read about it in enthusiastic feedback from employees, slightly boastful stories of employers, boring analytical articles by recruiters, and even in completely unexpected places ( Cosmopolitan will not lie). However, it is much more difficult to find information about the reasons that prompted a particular employer to start experimenting, and honest results - and you want to rely on this data, wondering about the introduction of innovations to your team. This article is intended to try to fill this gap.
Looking ahead - the reader will not find here a word about the pros and cons of remote work from the perspective of an employee. The article is written by the employer and for the employer, so we apologize in advance for the cynicism of some passages.
Briefly about the experimental conditions:
There were no prerequisites on the part of the employer - besides, perhaps, the historical division into two offices. It so happened that in Moscow there were more analysts, and in Perm there were developers and testers, so we didnât have a single project that would be done by a team sitting completely in the same room. At the same time, the distance was not formally banned - several people from Perm worked from home from the moment of hiring, but this question was not raised among those sitting in the office, although each team was divided between two cities, and all the work was based on this territorial gap.
')
The decision to move one of the teams to the remote was made at a meeting with the developers in the bar. The topic arose spontaneously - no one set goals to discuss it before the meeting, but there were reasons why the team talked about it:
We decided to try and see what will happen in 2 months - first of all, of course, with the projects, but also with the sensations of the guys too.
The only technical obstacle we encountered was the need to agree on the procedure for removal of equipment from the office for a long time and describe it in the wiki (in our case, this is Confluence) - otherwise nothing else had to be done.
The results of two months of the pilot from the point of view of the employer were very simple:
We wrote a short article in the wiki, which boils down to three points:
We notified the entire department that from now on the remote was legal and sat down to watch what would happen next.
In the first three months of the new rules, about a third of the staff members went away, and almost everyone else started to practice it occasionally. The guys began to shift their working hours more often in order to take care of their personal affairs during the day, because they no longer had the responsibility to come to the office.
Spoiler - nothing happened with the projects again. You can try to figure out why this is so, but for our experiment it was not so important - the main thing was that nothing stopped us and we could move on. It seems that if the factor of finding a team in one room is important, it is not at all decisive, and its influence is smoothed out by other factors.
Only one person returned from the remote office to the office, and this was due to the unreliability of the Internet at a particular provider.
Gradually, we began to disassemble or transfer to newbies the jobs of children who did not appear at the office at all. Of course, we did this with their consent, and despite the clear violation of our own promises, the discontent did not go any further than good-natured trolling.
The matter was not limited to the primary mass outcome - many of those who remained in the office gradually became invisible, spending more and more time on the remote.
Approximately in the middle of the experiment, in the summer of 2017, the department increased almost twice, absorbing two large teams that had previously worked in other departments. We extended the same rules to them, but took advantage of the proposal to move to the remote unit. Itâs difficult to speak about the reasons - there are no obvious differences between the teams, so itâs just to state that all the teams are different, and at the start you shouldnât firmly count on some exact number of transitions to the remote, the variation can be from 0 to 100%. We would not advise anyone to try to predict this.
Itâs hard to say why weâve been swinging for so long, but trying to hire newbies not in Moscow and Perm, we started only a year after the start of the experiment, although all the necessary results of the form âand nothing happenedâ were in our hands already in 3-4 months . Apparently, we just did not really need it.
No organizational difficulties arose. Documents are sent via courier services (this is inexpensive), in the employment contract one article was changed concerning the place of work (âremotelyâ instead of specifying a specific office) - otherwise the reception of employees from other cities is no different from hiring an office.
At the time of this writing, we have 14 people in 14 cities where we have no offices, from Petrozavodsk to Krasnodar and from Kursk to Novokuznetsk. Another five people managed to work a fairly long period (more than a year) and quit for reasons not related to the work schedule.
We did not feel any difference in working with remote workers from other cities compared to former office workers.
Let's try to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the remote for the employer. Immediately make a reservation that they are relevant only for our conditions, and therefore extremely subjective, but some conclusions based on them can be made.
Let's start with the benefits:
The disadvantages are more difficult - simply because we ourselves really like the results of the experiment, but we will try to be objective:
And the most important thing - what, in our opinion, the conditions should be created so that remote work will bear fruit and not create additional risks. We were able to formulate only one thing - teams and individual employees must be autonomous enough to understand their maneuver at almost any time. If a rigid hierarchical system is built in the company / division, in which the tasks are personally given out to everyone by the manager (no matter personally, by phone or even via instant messenger), then the remote will hardly take off. We switched to Scrum before the beginning of the experiment, and therefore all teams always have backlog (albeit with varying degrees of quality), from which tasks you can simply take and start working. Of course, this does not negate the need for communication within the team, but everyone should be able to work without constant external kicks.
I hope this article will be useful to someone, and many excellent guys from various parts of Russia will have interesting and well-paid remote work.
Looking ahead - the reader will not find here a word about the pros and cons of remote work from the perspective of an employee. The article is written by the employer and for the employer, so we apologize in advance for the cynicism of some passages.
Briefly about the experimental conditions:
- 3 years - from February 2016 to February 2019. We are not going to stop;
- IT company working in the field of custom development for government and corporate clients;
- a department in the company that implements in parallel 5-6 large and several dozen small projects. The number of employees changed during the experiment from â 35 to â 70 people. The author is the director of this department;
- two offices in Moscow and Perm. The distribution of employees between offices is about 70 to 30 in favor of Perm, and this remains almost unchanged.
Background and pilot
There were no prerequisites on the part of the employer - besides, perhaps, the historical division into two offices. It so happened that in Moscow there were more analysts, and in Perm there were developers and testers, so we didnât have a single project that would be done by a team sitting completely in the same room. At the same time, the distance was not formally banned - several people from Perm worked from home from the moment of hiring, but this question was not raised among those sitting in the office, although each team was divided between two cities, and all the work was based on this territorial gap.
')
The decision to move one of the teams to the remote was made at a meeting with the developers in the bar. The topic arose spontaneously - no one set goals to discuss it before the meeting, but there were reasons why the team talked about it:
- the office was cramped, and the team was not very lucky - it was scattered in 2 rooms;
- for some, the road to the office took an indecent amount of time (by the Perm standards);
- there was a person in this team who was initially hired as a remote driver (although he lived in Perm);
- the team worked on Scrum, practiced daily phoning with Muscovites at a fixed time and kanban board in Jira - and therefore understood that each of them didnât need to jerk each other often for work.
We decided to try and see what will happen in 2 months - first of all, of course, with the projects, but also with the sensations of the guys too.
The only technical obstacle we encountered was the need to agree on the procedure for removal of equipment from the office for a long time and describe it in the wiki (in our case, this is Confluence) - otherwise nothing else had to be done.
The results of two months of the pilot from the point of view of the employer were very simple:
- nothing happened;
- no one came back.
We wrote a short article in the wiki, which boils down to three points:
- must have good internet;
- need the consent of the team;
- each will be assigned a workplace in the office, and it will be possible to return at any time.
We notified the entire department that from now on the remote was legal and sat down to watch what would happen next.
Exodus from office
In the first three months of the new rules, about a third of the staff members went away, and almost everyone else started to practice it occasionally. The guys began to shift their working hours more often in order to take care of their personal affairs during the day, because they no longer had the responsibility to come to the office.
Spoiler - nothing happened with the projects again. You can try to figure out why this is so, but for our experiment it was not so important - the main thing was that nothing stopped us and we could move on. It seems that if the factor of finding a team in one room is important, it is not at all decisive, and its influence is smoothed out by other factors.
Only one person returned from the remote office to the office, and this was due to the unreliability of the Internet at a particular provider.
Gradually, we began to disassemble or transfer to newbies the jobs of children who did not appear at the office at all. Of course, we did this with their consent, and despite the clear violation of our own promises, the discontent did not go any further than good-natured trolling.
The matter was not limited to the primary mass outcome - many of those who remained in the office gradually became invisible, spending more and more time on the remote.
Approximately in the middle of the experiment, in the summer of 2017, the department increased almost twice, absorbing two large teams that had previously worked in other departments. We extended the same rules to them, but took advantage of the proposal to move to the remote unit. Itâs difficult to speak about the reasons - there are no obvious differences between the teams, so itâs just to state that all the teams are different, and at the start you shouldnât firmly count on some exact number of transitions to the remote, the variation can be from 0 to 100%. We would not advise anyone to try to predict this.
Hiring remotes
Itâs hard to say why weâve been swinging for so long, but trying to hire newbies not in Moscow and Perm, we started only a year after the start of the experiment, although all the necessary results of the form âand nothing happenedâ were in our hands already in 3-4 months . Apparently, we just did not really need it.
No organizational difficulties arose. Documents are sent via courier services (this is inexpensive), in the employment contract one article was changed concerning the place of work (âremotelyâ instead of specifying a specific office) - otherwise the reception of employees from other cities is no different from hiring an office.
At the time of this writing, we have 14 people in 14 cities where we have no offices, from Petrozavodsk to Krasnodar and from Kursk to Novokuznetsk. Another five people managed to work a fairly long period (more than a year) and quit for reasons not related to the work schedule.
We did not feel any difference in working with remote workers from other cities compared to former office workers.
Resume - advantages, difficulties, conditions for implementation
Let's try to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the remote for the employer. Immediately make a reservation that they are relevant only for our conditions, and therefore extremely subjective, but some conclusions based on them can be made.
Let's start with the benefits:
- Hiring speed increases. To the local labor market is added a lot of applicants, and their number of sensations grows every year, and very quickly;
- The cost of hiring is lower than when working in local markets. Of course, it strongly depends on the location of the office, and if in comparison with Moscow and St. Petersburg the savings are more than palpable, then for the Russian regions there is almost no difference - the distance gradually erases the difference in the price of labor of IT specialists between the millionaire city and the regional center . However, hiring remote workers allows you to save at the expense of a wider choice - if there are 8-10 responses per vacancy from all over the country, the probability of hiring an employee at the best price is higher than with 2-3 responses in one city, especially under time pressure;
- Indirect costs are reduced - rent, utility bills, purchase of equipment and the like. If you are a redneck, you can note a decrease in corporate expenses, although in order to create a healthy corporate culture, we would advise, on the contrary, to spend some of the money saved on the occasional travel of remotes to visit office workers;
- Improving the working environment in the office - a lot of free space, which can be used for recreation areas, negotiations, tea drinking, etc. Of course, if the company is constrained in funds, then it is possible to refuse the vacated office space, but we would advise you to give an opportunity to feel the positive effects not only of the remote workers, but also of their colleagues who have remained in the office;
- Informal communication in a team becomes a bit more interesting - people from different regions are slightly different in mentality, they have less general knowledge and experience (as opposed to fellow countrymen, who are not connected at all), new topics for discussion appear. And it's just interesting - where will the next newcomer come from? Are we going east or west, is there a cold winter, etc.? This advantage can not be felt, measured and even more appreciated in money, but we feel it, and we like it.
The disadvantages are more difficult - simply because we ourselves really like the results of the experiment, but we will try to be objective:
- Small, but still additional organizational work for the back office - sending documents by courier services, carrying equipment and something else (depends on the bureaucratic processes of the employer);
- A little more than a routine one - according to sensations, we have not enough base for statistical research, therefore we will not develop this idea and look for the reasons for what, perhaps, and not;
- Harder to gather for events - for general team calls, for example. In our case, this was not particularly important, since all of our events were always online due to the division of teams between the two offices, but when moving from a fully office to a distributed team, this can be a problem that will have to be stopped somehow (to completely solve it). hardly possible);
- Harder to dismiss - in fact, becoming inaccessible dismissal for absenteeism. For us, this is not essential, since we, in principle, exclude from our tools all actions that could undermine the credibility of the employer and harm the corporate culture. Dismissal on the initiative of the employer under the current legislation of Russia is in itself a rather complicated process, and the removal is not that very difficult.
And the most important thing - what, in our opinion, the conditions should be created so that remote work will bear fruit and not create additional risks. We were able to formulate only one thing - teams and individual employees must be autonomous enough to understand their maneuver at almost any time. If a rigid hierarchical system is built in the company / division, in which the tasks are personally given out to everyone by the manager (no matter personally, by phone or even via instant messenger), then the remote will hardly take off. We switched to Scrum before the beginning of the experiment, and therefore all teams always have backlog (albeit with varying degrees of quality), from which tasks you can simply take and start working. Of course, this does not negate the need for communication within the team, but everyone should be able to work without constant external kicks.
I hope this article will be useful to someone, and many excellent guys from various parts of Russia will have interesting and well-paid remote work.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/442938/
All Articles