Remote: (of a place) situated far from the main centres of population; distant.
We have split this into a handful of questions you can ask yourself and your team/company.
Restricting the group of people you can select from (to perform a task) to a geographic region such as a city (where traditional offices are located) is like limiting yourself to only having relationships with people in the your neighborhood. Imagine if we could only select potential friends/spouces from a pre-defined list e.g: the town you grew up in. (Sadly, this is still the reality for many people, but that's a whole other story!) For many of us, this is unthinkable; go on any social network and count how many of your ("real") friends are from the same town you were born in. And yet this is exactly what companies/organisations do every day when they limit themselves to selecting people who already live the city where their office is.
Doesn't it make sense for the whole world to be your potential team?
Forcing people to sit at a desk in an office between a pre-determined start and end time is obsolete. Requiring people to be physically present at an office is a relic of an era in which people were not trusted to get work done without "supervision".
The mindset of everyone having to "clock-in" before a certain time (e.g: 09:00) each day is a remnant of the industrial revolution when it was the easiest way to keep track of (and thus pay) people. But today we have much better ways of measuring the output of people that is not dependent on where they are or when the work is done.
Remote working allows us to find/pick the best people for a project/task irrespective of location/time-zone but a little known benefit is that it also helps to minimize other discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity, faith or disability.
We have selected people for tasks based on their (proven) ability to get the work done. By not forcing people to commute away from their family, new parents can get work done and still spend quality time with their children (instead of of wasting 2 hours each day on transport/traffic!)
The productive office is the exception not the rule. Offices are great for catching up with your colleagues and having meetings but statistically not the place people go to get their best work done.
Watch Jason Fried: Why work doesn't happen at work: https://youtu.be/5XD2kNopsUs
and if you don't identify with what he is saying, close this window and enjoy the rest of your day.
For the rest of us who have felt the pain of working in a noisy environment where constant interruptions prevent meaningful progress, read on.
What if there was a better way to get work done?
Remote working means getting your work done without a fixed location.
37Signals made a great video illustrating their remote working culture: https://vimeo.com/76063825
Do you know how effective the people on your team are? What is your metric? Do you track actual time spent on a task vs original estimate? If not, how do you know people are using their 35+ hours per week well? If you do not already have an un-obtrusive or onerous way of tracking how people invest their time, when they are most productive vs. when they get the most interruptions, then we can help.
By letting your best person/people work one day per week from another location you signal to them that you trust them to get on with their work. Track the output in your existing work tracking system/process
- How the office was invented: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23372401
- A Brief History Of The Office: http://www.deskmag.com/en/a-brief-history-of-the-workspace-coworking-Chicago-Architecture
- Remote (Book) http://37signals.com/remote/ (highly recommended!)
- Remote working banned by Yahoo: https://www.wrike.com/blog/remote-work-reddit-yahoo-banned/ (how's that working out for them...?)
- The benefits and challenges of remote working: https://boagworld.com/digital-strategy/remote-working-2/
- Notes on Managing Remote Teams: http://hueniverse.com/2015/02/23/notes-on-managing-remote-teams/
- What tools/systems do you have to track what work needs to be (and is being) done?