Ten years away
Even while we were in college (go ahead, Broncos !) Alec and I started a startup. We were young, inexperienced and naive. Our first project was called YippieMail: an email aggregator. Simply put, YippieMail displays all your mailboxes (for example, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) in one web interface. That was before most providers implemented IMAP, so you couldnāt use your email client. Looking back, YippieMail seems like a pretty dumb idea, but thanks to her, we met venture investors from Sequoia Capital and other funds. Keep in mind that around that time, Meebo attracted many millions from Sequia and DFJ, implementing the exact same idea for IM messengers. So at that time, the startup looked promising.
In the first days of YippieMail (later renamed to YippieMove , RIP 2008ā2019), my ten years experience of remote work began, sometimes I lived as a digital nomad .
When we started working on YippieMail, Alex lived in San Jose and I lived in Mountain View. If you do not know, these two cities are very close, but because of the terrible traffic, the road can easily take more than an hour (or 20-30 minutes without traffic jams). That's when we decided to work remotely, and not to rent an office somewhere in the middle. And they continued the tradition in all subsequent startups ( Blotter , and then Screenly ).
Although Alex and I both live in London now, we still only meet once every two months. Moreover, in my new company ( WoTT ) we also adopted this philosophy of remote work, although both are founders in London.
')
So, what have I learned over this decade of working and managing remote teams? Let's take a look at the details.
Just want to note: remote work is not for everyone. Over the years, we came across several employees who could not work that way. In some cases, they themselves understood this and left, in other cases it was gradually becoming clear that this was not a coincidence.
Usually, people who cannot cope with remote work either do not have the necessary self-discipline, or are simply socially oriented and need to be surrounded by other people. In the latter case, working in the general office can help, but if you lack self-discipline and necessary habits, most likely, the experience will still be unsuccessful. Young people of 20ā25 years old usually suffer from this problem more than older people, although there are many exceptions to this rule.
The bottom line is that some succeed in remote work, while others work better in a regular office. It is difficult to check at the interview, but everything becomes obvious in the first year. It is important for the manager to pay attention to this moment.
If you do not have a completely remote team, then you do not support remote work. Many companies boast that they give employees the opportunity to work remotely. But the reality is that if the remote is not embedded in the company's DNA, it will inevitably favor the members who sit in the office (next to the management). The reason is largely related to the flow of information. People chatting over a water cooler, for coffee, for drinking after work. This leads to an uneven distribution of information, which is why remote employees can easily feel abandoned, and other team members simply assume something as everyone knows, although this has never been on official channels. In a remote culture, the information flow, as a rule, occurs in a more organized way, either by email or in chat rooms (or even in Github comments).
Corporate are important. Even if you have a remote team, meeting every year (or twice a year) is of great importance. Although video chats provide a higher context than e-mail or instant messenger, but this is still not a complete replacement for a personal meeting. When we conducted the first Screenly corporate party at the beautiful Lava villa in Croatia (a great place for corporate events), our employees first met each other in person, although they worked together for many years.
Looking back, it is necessary to admit a big mistake that we did not hold such meetings before, because after the corporate party, the communication on the Internet has changed dramatically. Since text chat is a low context environment, it is very easy to misinterpret messages and intentions of the interlocutor. But if you met this person in real life, everything becomes much clearer, you get the necessary context and you can read the same message in a new light.
Now the developers of Screenly meet in person each quarter (approximately) for a week, and the whole company meets annually. (You can read more in the article āHow we work at Screenly,ā which I wrote several years ago).
Hiring remote employees means an increase in personnel reserve. I am not the first to point this out, but here is one of the main reasons why it makes sense to support purely remote work. You are no longer limited by your geographic area. In the ten years since I started working remotely, recruiting tools have changed a lot. However, finding a qualified employee is far from easy. But if people from all over the world can apply for your vacancies, then you open the gateway. The reality is that 99.9% of applicants for remote work are those who send hundreds of resumes en masse. Filtering them out is pretty easy, but at best you have several worthy candidates for every 100 applicants.
As a rule, a good filtering process involves strict screening questions. They must be unique, and preparation will take some time. This will help weed out all candidates who simply write "Call to discuss" in all points (or worse).
Yes, the selection process will take quite a lot of time, but tools like Upwork allow you to quickly reject candidates who are not making an effort (or are clearly not suitable).
From experience, I am also very reluctant to work with agencies and prefer to hire employees directly. The reason is that in a number of agencies that we came across over the years, there are only a few talented engineers. They conduct screening, perhaps the first few weeks, and then gradually transfer the work to younger employees, charging the same rate.
It is also worth noting that with the growth of the movement of digital nomads in the Angelist database and others, much more offers of purely remote work appeared.
The last warning for hire: do not take people who have chosen your company just because of remote work and flexibility of the schedule. Although not always, but sometimes it means that a person wants to relax in a working environment with minimal supervision over his actions (perhaps, at the same time, he runs his own business). You need people who believe in your mission and product, and remote work is just a bonus, not a reason for choosing an employer.
(I deliberately did not mention the legal features of hiring remote employees. I am not a lawyer, so make sure that you do not violate local laws).
Probably, remote work is better suited for programmers than for other professions. My companies have always specialized in development. Yes, we had a number of other posts, but in the total number of engineers there were always a majority. And I noticed that it is usually easier for programmers to remotely manage, compared to other positions (such as sales). This is probably due to a number of factors, but in general, engineers are more self-motivated and require less supervision. Of course, there is a big correlation with age. Regardless of the position, older employees usually require less supervision and, thus, work better remotely than their younger colleagues.
Remote work saves a lot of time. First, it should be noted that this is not necessarily work from home. Many of our employees preferred to work from the common office (including myself for a while). To each his own. But if you work from home, every day you save a lot of time (and money). When I had an office in Shoordic, the road took 30ā40 minutes each way. If you count the lost time by weeks and months, it turns out a lot. At home I have been allocated a special room for work, a home office (I highly recommend this when working from home). This means that the morning trip "to work" takes about 60 seconds, and this is taking into account the arrival to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. What to do with the time released - decide for yourself, personally, I usually go in for sports 1ā1.5 hours a day.
Habits will make you an effective remote worker or break you. As mentioned earlier, the remote is not for everyone. It requires much more self-discipline than regular office work, where you are constantly āsupervisedā. For many years I have experimented with different habits, and at the moment I have developed a set of rituals that help me quite well (but I continue to experiment). The most important habit for remote work is to mentally establish the beginning and end of the working day . It is easy to sit in pajamas or work all day just because you can, but in the long run this will lead to the opposite result.
For specifics, here is my current daily routine:
Clarification : this does not necessarily mean that I work 10 hours every day (only sometimes). I'm still having lunch. In addition, on a particularly productive and successful day, I happily finish work at 17:30. Half past seven is just a hard stop, and not a mandatory requirement to work like this every day.
As my good friend Milos noted, looking through the draft of this article, the early rise is not for everyone. Changing work schedule is also great. It's not about when you start your day and when you finish, but about habits that make you more productive.
If you want to know more about the importance of habits, I highly recommend reading the āStrength of Habitā by Charles Dahigg. Only I warn you, do not dwell on books about performance. I myself was a victim of such literature and immediately say that you will spend much more time reading than you will ever save.
Perhaps this is not due to remote work, but rather to the culture of startups. Venture investors drove into the heads of young and naive 20-year-olds, that it is cool (and even sometimes necessary) to work all night and sleep under the table. It seems to me that this fashion is finally leaving. Yes, you still have imitators Gary Weinerchuk with their endless bustle, but I think (and hopefully) that they will die out.
In remote work, it is important to clearly complete the work day. As you noted above, I finish it at 19:30. After that, I do not enter the office (only in emergency cases). I also try in the evenings to look minimally at any screens. In my youth, I often worked late. But even sitting at the computer more hours, I did less.
Disconnecting from work is very important. And it is much more difficult when you work remotely.
If you want to know more about this, I recommend Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep .
Kill distractions. Working at home is a difficult task for many. Itās easy to be distracted by household chores, but my distractions were always of a digital nature. Cal Newport in his latest book , Digital Minimalism, tells how distracting mobile phones and social networks are. I know it from experience. For a long time the phone lay on the table next to me. And when he called, I lost concentration every time. Although I did not check the phone myself, it still distracted me. Salvation was the transfer of all the distractions in the living room (that is, the phone and Apple Watch) and just a periodic check of gadgets during the day. Another great way to kill noise is flight mode on your devices.
Hackers will love tools like i3 for filtering desktop noise. I use i3 on my ādeveloperās workstationā (which is different from my other workstation).
Although good equipment is always important, in your home office you usually have more control over your configuration than in an office where everything is provided to you on the first day. You will spend a lot of time in front of your computer. Your body will thank you for spending a little more money and buying:
That's all. At least now. I am sure that I missed some things, but I hope this article will be useful for other (new and old) employees on the remote side.
If you want to know more, I can recommend additional literature:
In the first days of YippieMail (later renamed to YippieMove , RIP 2008ā2019), my ten years experience of remote work began, sometimes I lived as a digital nomad .
When we started working on YippieMail, Alex lived in San Jose and I lived in Mountain View. If you do not know, these two cities are very close, but because of the terrible traffic, the road can easily take more than an hour (or 20-30 minutes without traffic jams). That's when we decided to work remotely, and not to rent an office somewhere in the middle. And they continued the tradition in all subsequent startups ( Blotter , and then Screenly ).
Although Alex and I both live in London now, we still only meet once every two months. Moreover, in my new company ( WoTT ) we also adopted this philosophy of remote work, although both are founders in London.
')
So, what have I learned over this decade of working and managing remote teams? Let's take a look at the details.
Remote is not for everyone
Just want to note: remote work is not for everyone. Over the years, we came across several employees who could not work that way. In some cases, they themselves understood this and left, in other cases it was gradually becoming clear that this was not a coincidence.
Usually, people who cannot cope with remote work either do not have the necessary self-discipline, or are simply socially oriented and need to be surrounded by other people. In the latter case, working in the general office can help, but if you lack self-discipline and necessary habits, most likely, the experience will still be unsuccessful. Young people of 20ā25 years old usually suffer from this problem more than older people, although there are many exceptions to this rule.
The bottom line is that some succeed in remote work, while others work better in a regular office. It is difficult to check at the interview, but everything becomes obvious in the first year. It is important for the manager to pay attention to this moment.
Company or completely remote, or not
If you do not have a completely remote team, then you do not support remote work. Many companies boast that they give employees the opportunity to work remotely. But the reality is that if the remote is not embedded in the company's DNA, it will inevitably favor the members who sit in the office (next to the management). The reason is largely related to the flow of information. People chatting over a water cooler, for coffee, for drinking after work. This leads to an uneven distribution of information, which is why remote employees can easily feel abandoned, and other team members simply assume something as everyone knows, although this has never been on official channels. In a remote culture, the information flow, as a rule, occurs in a more organized way, either by email or in chat rooms (or even in Github comments).
Corporate and employee meetings
Corporate are important. Even if you have a remote team, meeting every year (or twice a year) is of great importance. Although video chats provide a higher context than e-mail or instant messenger, but this is still not a complete replacement for a personal meeting. When we conducted the first Screenly corporate party at the beautiful Lava villa in Croatia (a great place for corporate events), our employees first met each other in person, although they worked together for many years.
Looking back, it is necessary to admit a big mistake that we did not hold such meetings before, because after the corporate party, the communication on the Internet has changed dramatically. Since text chat is a low context environment, it is very easy to misinterpret messages and intentions of the interlocutor. But if you met this person in real life, everything becomes much clearer, you get the necessary context and you can read the same message in a new light.
Now the developers of Screenly meet in person each quarter (approximately) for a week, and the whole company meets annually. (You can read more in the article āHow we work at Screenly,ā which I wrote several years ago).
Larger Talent Pool
Hiring remote employees means an increase in personnel reserve. I am not the first to point this out, but here is one of the main reasons why it makes sense to support purely remote work. You are no longer limited by your geographic area. In the ten years since I started working remotely, recruiting tools have changed a lot. However, finding a qualified employee is far from easy. But if people from all over the world can apply for your vacancies, then you open the gateway. The reality is that 99.9% of applicants for remote work are those who send hundreds of resumes en masse. Filtering them out is pretty easy, but at best you have several worthy candidates for every 100 applicants.
As a rule, a good filtering process involves strict screening questions. They must be unique, and preparation will take some time. This will help weed out all candidates who simply write "Call to discuss" in all points (or worse).
Yes, the selection process will take quite a lot of time, but tools like Upwork allow you to quickly reject candidates who are not making an effort (or are clearly not suitable).
From experience, I am also very reluctant to work with agencies and prefer to hire employees directly. The reason is that in a number of agencies that we came across over the years, there are only a few talented engineers. They conduct screening, perhaps the first few weeks, and then gradually transfer the work to younger employees, charging the same rate.
It is also worth noting that with the growth of the movement of digital nomads in the Angelist database and others, much more offers of purely remote work appeared.
The last warning for hire: do not take people who have chosen your company just because of remote work and flexibility of the schedule. Although not always, but sometimes it means that a person wants to relax in a working environment with minimal supervision over his actions (perhaps, at the same time, he runs his own business). You need people who believe in your mission and product, and remote work is just a bonus, not a reason for choosing an employer.
(I deliberately did not mention the legal features of hiring remote employees. I am not a lawyer, so make sure that you do not violate local laws).
Some professions are better suited than others.
Probably, remote work is better suited for programmers than for other professions. My companies have always specialized in development. Yes, we had a number of other posts, but in the total number of engineers there were always a majority. And I noticed that it is usually easier for programmers to remotely manage, compared to other positions (such as sales). This is probably due to a number of factors, but in general, engineers are more self-motivated and require less supervision. Of course, there is a big correlation with age. Regardless of the position, older employees usually require less supervision and, thus, work better remotely than their younger colleagues.
Big time saving
Remote work saves a lot of time. First, it should be noted that this is not necessarily work from home. Many of our employees preferred to work from the common office (including myself for a while). To each his own. But if you work from home, every day you save a lot of time (and money). When I had an office in Shoordic, the road took 30ā40 minutes each way. If you count the lost time by weeks and months, it turns out a lot. At home I have been allocated a special room for work, a home office (I highly recommend this when working from home). This means that the morning trip "to work" takes about 60 seconds, and this is taking into account the arrival to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. What to do with the time released - decide for yourself, personally, I usually go in for sports 1ā1.5 hours a day.
The power of routine and habits
Habits will make you an effective remote worker or break you. As mentioned earlier, the remote is not for everyone. It requires much more self-discipline than regular office work, where you are constantly āsupervisedā. For many years I have experimented with different habits, and at the moment I have developed a set of rituals that help me quite well (but I continue to experiment). The most important habit for remote work is to mentally establish the beginning and end of the working day . It is easy to sit in pajamas or work all day just because you can, but in the long run this will lead to the opposite result.
For specifics, here is my current daily routine:
- 07.00: Rise
- 07.05: Reading (observe 7 habits of highly effective people )
- 08.00: Loading of working tools.
- 08.10: Training and shower.
- 09.30: Start of the working day
- 7.30 pm: End of working day
- 23.00: Hang up
Clarification : this does not necessarily mean that I work 10 hours every day (only sometimes). I'm still having lunch. In addition, on a particularly productive and successful day, I happily finish work at 17:30. Half past seven is just a hard stop, and not a mandatory requirement to work like this every day.
As my good friend Milos noted, looking through the draft of this article, the early rise is not for everyone. Changing work schedule is also great. It's not about when you start your day and when you finish, but about habits that make you more productive.
If you want to know more about the importance of habits, I highly recommend reading the āStrength of Habitā by Charles Dahigg. Only I warn you, do not dwell on books about performance. I myself was a victim of such literature and immediately say that you will spend much more time reading than you will ever save.
Sleep matters (surprisingly, I know ...)
Perhaps this is not due to remote work, but rather to the culture of startups. Venture investors drove into the heads of young and naive 20-year-olds, that it is cool (and even sometimes necessary) to work all night and sleep under the table. It seems to me that this fashion is finally leaving. Yes, you still have imitators Gary Weinerchuk with their endless bustle, but I think (and hopefully) that they will die out.
In remote work, it is important to clearly complete the work day. As you noted above, I finish it at 19:30. After that, I do not enter the office (only in emergency cases). I also try in the evenings to look minimally at any screens. In my youth, I often worked late. But even sitting at the computer more hours, I did less.
Disconnecting from work is very important. And it is much more difficult when you work remotely.
If you want to know more about this, I recommend Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep .
Distractions kill productivity
Kill distractions. Working at home is a difficult task for many. Itās easy to be distracted by household chores, but my distractions were always of a digital nature. Cal Newport in his latest book , Digital Minimalism, tells how distracting mobile phones and social networks are. I know it from experience. For a long time the phone lay on the table next to me. And when he called, I lost concentration every time. Although I did not check the phone myself, it still distracted me. Salvation was the transfer of all the distractions in the living room (that is, the phone and Apple Watch) and just a periodic check of gadgets during the day. Another great way to kill noise is flight mode on your devices.
Hackers will love tools like i3 for filtering desktop noise. I use i3 on my ādeveloperās workstationā (which is different from my other workstation).
Do not save on equipment
Although good equipment is always important, in your home office you usually have more control over your configuration than in an office where everything is provided to you on the first day. You will spend a lot of time in front of your computer. Your body will thank you for spending a little more money and buying:
- Large 4K monitor (recently they have dropped significantly in price)
- Desk for standing (I have this from Ikea)
- Good ergonomic keyboard
This is the end!
That's all. At least now. I am sure that I missed some things, but I hope this article will be useful for other (new and old) employees on the remote side.
If you want to know more, I can recommend additional literature:
- Cal Newport's āDeep Workā
- Jason Frayd and David Heinemeyer Hansson (DHH) ReWord
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/453328/
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