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Chapter 1
I remember having a conversation with a manager when my car had been snowed in. I had a cute little Mini at the time and we had been taken by surprise by a snowstorm. Quaint Hollywood depictions of Christmas aside, you don't often get them in the South of England. I had tried to dig it out for about an hour, but I was frozen. Even if I got it out, there was no guarantee it would be safe to get from where I lived to the main road that had presumably been gritted and was now safe to drive on. Not only that but I risked getting stuck on the wrong side of the River Thames if the snow came again. I rang into work to explain I would be WFH that day as I was essentially a knowledge-worker and had plenty to do without being sat at my desk in another county. What followed from my manager at the time was a sort of passive-aggressive guilt trip that resulted in me taking paid leave. That was 2014.
Less than ten years later and that company has fully embraced remote working. In fact, I had been on the project to pioneer the practice for them in 2015 when the offices had run out of space. But that had only laid the technological and security principles, the real change took place in 2020 long after I had left - like many companies the COVID-19 pandemic had forced their hand and forever changed their mind.
It's strange to now see companies wrangling with systems, processes and behaviours for creating remote work when actually it has been going on for years for others. I remember talking to a Customer Services Director as far back as 2010 about how to take the whole contact centre remote. In fact, enabled by technology many companies have been founded and built on fully remote principles:
As you can see from the list above, entirely remote organisations are heavily biased towards tech, for obvious reasons, and also attract companies providing solutions that are energised by remote work. Rather than thriving in an echo chamber, everyone wants in on the tech that makes remote working easier. If your work culture is focused on in-person working it's ignoring the fact that most collaboration amongst development teams already happens online through platforms like GitHub/GitLab. If you haven't embraced a remote culture then utilising providers such as Toggl to supplement your projects with highly skilled freelancers in another country and timezone could feel like a stretch. On the flip side, many of the chapters in this book are only about how to take some of these ideas mainstream because of the profound shift of knowledge-workers to remote jobs after 2020 and the hard work by companies around the world to make remote working a sustainable solution.
But the point here is to blow away the myth that remote or flexible working is something that can't be used to build a 'proper' company. These companies in many ways are successful both despite a lack of face-to-face interactions, but in some and because of it. If we accept something about personal connection and collaboration is lost in remote working (and we get to exactly what this is later), we have to confront the fact that maybe it isn't as significant as we thought and perhaps the benefits outweigh the costs.
Considering the broader social change that has occurred, mainly around how we consume goods and services, the trend has been towards more flexibility and more choice. If we just look at health we have companies such as Personalised Co. and Nourished that are utilising technology to build individualised nutrition based on personal data and lifestyle. After completing a short questionnaire, users are 'prescribed' a personalised nutrient stack. With this in mind, it's strange the number of companies that hold on to ways of working that limit choices for their employees. Many of these same companies by the way will annually survey their team to ask them how they are feeling and invest thousands in trying to create an 'employee value proposition' that attracts the best talent. In any system that has been established for a long time (and 'going to work' has been around a very long time) there is resistance to change. That resistance is often characterised by fear and later we will discuss why the thinking around change is faulty. But often the main issue is habits and assumptions which have built up around change and often create the foundations on which resistance is built. For example, the challenge of timezones in how you create virtual teams seems to be an obstacle until you realise collaboration can happen asynchronously, not everyone is working a 9-5 and most work takes place independently - the value of collaboration exists as long as it is empowered. If you have a situation that requires work to be done without collaboration it often happens regardless.
In fact, very briefly on the value of meetings and collaboration, it's worth taking time to categorise the reasons why meetings take place. I ran a survey some time ago in an international tech company that looked at the reasons for meetings. Collaboration was five on the list below checking in, connecting as a team, staying close to project work and sharing information. I would argue that all of those things are better done via a medium, outside of a meeting, through documentation. Not only that but collaboration is possible via virtual meetings and documentation as well as in-person meetings.
Why meetings take place
The benefits of remote working are widely known. But the challenges with any widespread movement is to maximise the benefits while minimising the limitations and ensure the needs of some (highly influential people) don't trump the needs of others.
It's worth saying that the 'experiment' is ongoing. People who never would have chosen to work from home or work remotely are, and will be until they leave their organisation and change roles. Conversely many people who would have asked for a more flexible work set-up, but were scared to, have been surprised by a stark turnaround in company policy and expectations. Both groups will continue to adjust to this new way of being with companies and the world at large continuing to learn more about how work gets done, enabled by ever-improving technology.
But we can quickly categorise the potential benefits of a more remote culture (see table) some of which is self-evident, some of which comes from more robust studies, but all of which are worthy of consideration for companies trying to get this right.
What I have left out of this are the benefits to society. In some ways, these are just the benefits outlined in the table but at scale, but they also include the potential environmental impact of less travel and a more globalised mindset.
What is obvious from the list is the company has a few benefits, but if embraced their impact could be substantial. The employee on the other hand has the most to gain particularly if we assume that they have a lot going on outside of work - the risk (and it's a risk, not a definite drawback) is those who rely on work for their socialisation will lose out the most. Loneliness is not an experience to be ignored and without due care, by the individual, team and employer, this can increase in the remote set-up. This leads us to the final point - the team benefits are also limited. There is something we can say about getting extra flexibility (without wanting to double-count the employee benefit) so the team can outsource tasks more easily to anywhere in the world and cover each other's work more seamlessly. In other words,...
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