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Reading notes for Remote: Office Not Required by Fried & Hansson.
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Remote - Office Not Required.md

Remote: Office Not Required

Fried, Jason and D. H. Hansson. First edition, first printing. ISBN 978-0-8041-3750-8. Crown Business, New York, 2013.

Notes by Jeremy W. Sherman.

Read 2 chapters from the middle of the book for BNR Book Club meeting on 10 Dec 2013.

The book is a very quick read. Illustrations precede each section. Sections are short. It feels like a blog.

Chapters are not numbered, just named. Focus within the chapters swaps frequently between several expected readers:

  • Someone working remotely
  • Someone not yet working remotely
  • A company considering letting its employees start working remotely

It makes heavy use of anecdotes about companies with remote workers (mainly American Family Assurance and 37signals itself) and arguments from personal experience.

Footnotes are generally (all?) to popular press articles.

How to Collaborate Remotely

Thou shalt overlap

  • Delay a problem for distributed teams.
  • "[W]e need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team."

Seeing is believing

  • Use a shared screen to collaborate (WebEx, GoToMeeting, Join.me, etc.)
  • "Much of the magic that people ascribe to sitting together in a room is really just this: being able to see and interact with the same stuff."
  • "asynchronous collaboration", "slow time": "record a screencast and narrate"

All out in the open

  • "[Y]ou need everything available to everyone at all times."
  • "If your company is too large to share one calendar, break it up by teams." (*)
  • "[A]void locking up important stuff in a single person's computer or inbox."

The virtual water cooler

  • Campfire: "its primary function is to provide social cohesion"
  • "a quality waste of time with your coworkers" (!)

Forward motion

  • "[T]o share forward motion, everyone needs to feel that they're in the loop."
  • "a weekly discussion thread with the subject 'What have you been working on?'"
    • "[W]hen that commitment [to make progress] becomes visual, it gets reinforced."
    • Peer pressure and evaluation vs. manager-managed. Public promise, or public shaming.

The work is what matters

  • "the only thing you have to evaluate is the work"
    • Helpful for ROWE: evaluate work, rather than incidentals.
    • But virtual water cooler still lets folks be jerks, or pedants, or… This claim seems weaker than the book makes it out to be. We'll always find something to judge people by, even if it's their choice of font!

Not just for people who are out of town

  • "Remote just means you're not in the office 9am-5pm, all day long."
  • "Try it for at least three months." Get over adjustment period.

Disaster ready

  • "the office […] is an organizational SPoF [Single Point of Failure]"
  • American Fidelity Assurance (AFA) shows up several times from now on.

Additionally, AFA employees who do not otherwise work remotely are asked to do so at least once or twice per month so they'll be ready if they have to during a disaster. The company also encourages everyone to stay home during the peak of flu season or during scares like H1N1.

  • "distributed workforce" - like offsite backups, but people

Easy on the M&Ms

  • "meetings and managers"
  • "Part of the problem is the perceived need to fill a whole day with management stuff, regardless of whether it's called for or not."

Beware the Dragons

Cabin fever

  • Online community "not a complete substitute for real, live human interaction."
  • Look to family etc. rather than workmates.

Check-in, check-out

  • "it's easy to don the shackles of working around the clock"
  • risk: "burnout"
  • Evaluating when to stop: "think of a 'good day's work'"
    • Not a good day? Apply Five Whys, "asking why to a problem five times in a row to find the root cause", to understand why.

Ergonomic basics

  • AFA and ergonomic professionals

Mind the gut

  • "saved time by skipping the commute […] no excuse for not finding the minutes to exercise"

The lone outpost

  • Testing remote in your office with just a single employee is bound to fail.
  • "set free at least an entire team" including their management

Working with clients

  • "let the prospective client know up front that you don't live where they live"
  • "provide references"
  • "show them work often"
  • "be very available" - return calls/emails/everything
  • "get the client involved and let them follow along"
    • Let them participate in project ownership.

Taxes, accounting, laws, oh my!

  • "whether having a remote worker out of state establishes a 'nexus' for your company"
  • foreign contractors vs. foreign office
  • contracting yourself as a foreigner - burden of fluctuating exchange rate
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