Better Remote Work: Do It Right, And Reap the Benefits

By Jarkko Oksanen

Businesses that are effectively using remote work are getting a large jump on traditional businesses. These companies have access to the best talent and the best clients, and are producing superior results. They also have more fun doing it, and are often seen as being the most cutting-edge firms in the marketplace. Then there are those who may allow remote work but are not doing it to its full extent. They often face a lot of social issues, and productivity that should be increasing is actually decreasing. Many companies are blaming their remote workers for some of these issues, which in a few cases may be true. These companies need something and someone to push them to get back on track. This book will show you how to dodge the many pitfalls of managing remote employees and focus on building your remote team the way it is proven to work in hundreds of organizations around the world. It offers insight from experienced team managers from around the world and proven technical solutions straight from the trenches. If your business has not begun working remotely, this book will give you a good idea of what it’ll be like. You’ll find what major issues will most often come up, and the solutions other successful teams and individuals have found in similar situations. If you have not worked remotely yet, consider this: How much of your day do you already work online or through a computer screen? Managers, team leaders, developers, and everyone who works remotely will find valuable guidance in these pages. Find out what different teams around the world have done to counter the inevitable problems and thrive with effective remote work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781631928710

Book preview

Afterword

Preface

Throughout most of my career, I’ve worked either from home or from places other than an office. I grew up in a family where my mother was allowed to work remotely, and I learned the benefits for family life early on. Back then, though, I had no idea of the complex issues involved.

Over the years, I’ve been a part of three start-up companies, built an e-commerce business, and have been involved in several web development teams ranging in size from small teams of three to large teams of over twenty-five people working on the same project. I’ve learned that every remote work team has its own issues, and in all of these different places where I’ve worked, the solutions have varied. But there also have been things that have helped in every case.

I’ve discussed with the top minds in the industry their remote work solutions that they have come up with to solve various challenges. During the last three years, I’ve read over forty business related books, with five of them about remote work. I’ve gone through over twenty papers and studies about working remotely, and I’ve found the ideas that are useful and cut out the ideas and stereotypes that aren’t.

Having worked remotely both as an employee and as part of management, my perspective comes from multiple points of view. As an employee, the issues you have vary from those in a management position. Five years working in web development gave me a good perspective on how remote work feels in different teams and around the world. As a team leader, I know the hard issues that come when working with people who are in different parts of the world and communication is done only through the internet. From my business experience with three start-ups, I know the fiscal benefits that remote work can have for small businesses.

As a young entrepreneur, I felt the freedom when working on my own business and putting in the hours that I wanted. I decided then not to work for anyone ever again. I thought that working for a company meant that someone bosses you around and you work from nine to five.

How wrong I was! After a few years as a freelancer, I joined a large corporation back in Finland. There I realised that what I thought was the standard oppressive corporate work environment could be something completely different. From day one, I was given tasks with complete trust that I would finish them, and I was given no fixed hours dictating when I had to be at the office. This made me realize working for a company that did things right is not bad at all. In fact, when you’re in a flexible work position and can work remotely for a big company, the work is very, very similar to being a small business owner or an independent contractor.

Currently I’m living in Australia and working as a Drupal developer, while running an e-commerce and consulting business back in Finland.

I wrote this book because I want to share the ideas that I’ve learned on working remotely, and I saw that there is no widely published book that presents these ideas in the depth that is needed. There are many books and papers that cover the basics, but I felt that something was still missing. Like everything else these days, some of this information can researched on the internet; but I’ve combined it all in this book and added my own personal experiences and solutions to give it more depth. I believe strongly that by embracing working remotely we can change the world to be a better place. And that’s what it’s all about. I hope that more businesses around the world start experimenting with working remotely and improving their existing work by implementing the ideas presented in this book.

Introduction

For many businesses and project teams around the world, there exists the possibility for employees to do remote work. This applies to one-person companies as well as large successful corporations.

Businesses that are effectively using remote work are reaping the benefits. These companies have access to the best talent and the best clients, and are producing superior results. They also have more fun doing it, and are often seen as being the most cutting-edge firms in the marketplace.

Then there are those who may allow remote work but are not doing it to its full extent. They often face a lot of social issues, and productivity that should be increasing is actually decreasing. Many companies are blaming their remote workers for some of these issues, which in a few cases may be true. These companies need something and someone to push them to get back on track.

This book is about those issues and how to overcome them. From building a remote team to going through various ideas that can increase your team’s productivity, this book is meant as a guide for both those who already work remotely and those who are considering it. Managers, team leaders, developers, and everyone who works remotely will find valuable guidance in these pages.

Looking from the outside in, remote work might sound easy. We as remote workers know the truth. The benefits are numerous, but the issues are undeniable. In the end it’s far from easy.

This book can show you how to dodge the many pitfalls of managing remote employees and focus on building your team the way it is proven to work in hundreds of organizations around the world. It offers insight from experienced team managers from around the world and proven working ideas from the trenches.

If your business has not begun working remotely, this book will give you a good idea of what it’ll be like. You’ll find what major issues will most often come up, and the solutions other successful teams and individuals have found in similar situations. If you have not worked remotely yet, consider this: How much of your day do you already work online or through a computer screen?

The ideas in the book are meant to be convertible to many different issues and situations that teams could face. It’s designed so that you can skip to the index in the end and find your own issue, or read is as a complete guide to your business’s remote work solution. With examples and ideas from small teams of three people to larger teams of over twenty people, I’ve found the key issues and discussed with the people involved to figure out how they managed to overcome the challenge.

I’ll also provide a quick glimpse into the future and make educated predictions about what remote work will be like in the years to come. All the upcoming technologies will be very interesting to follow, and taking an early mover advantage on some of these when the time is ripe will give you a strong business advantage.

I’m not going to declare that remote work is easy and will solve all of your business and work problems. That’s not what it’s going to go. It will take time to do right and there will be challenges. But when done right, the benefits will increase your company profits, built a culture of empathy and trust, and make life better for both your employees and the company owners.

Definitions

The definition of remote work is often vague. I define working remotely as producing deliverable value from outside the office at least one full day during the week. A person just checking their email on Sunday doesn’t make them a remote worker.

With remote work I don’t mean outsourcing. Outsourcing has its place, but outsourcing companies have their own remote workers instead of you employing them. You might have a contractor or two as a part of your remote team, though.

Distributed team is a term that I use frequently in this book. With that I mean a group of workers who are distributed widely around a region or the world. A distributed team might have an office in another city and people working remotely around the world. There might not actually be any remote workers in a distributed team. Usually there are, but not always.

Synonyms and related terms create confusion. I prefer not to use words such as telecommuting or telework. These words were developed when telephones were a big part of how to do remote work, and I don’t want to use something that is that dated to describe a modern way of work. Language develops quickly, and I believe that those words, even though they are still strongly used in various contexts, will fade out after extended periods of time. Using the term remote work is a much better definition.

Flexible work is sometimes mistakenly used as a synonym for remote work. Businesses that offer flexible work plans allow employees to choose when to stop and start working, allow them to share a job between two people, or to work a full week in less time. Flexible work, which often takes place in the office, is meant to say that we don’t care (that much) about the circumstances of your work as long as you provide results.

Flexible work is therefore meant more as a whole set of modern work techniques. Remote work is a very important technique in that set. By supporting remote work, you’re automatically supporting flexible work.

The Goal

My goal for this book is to help the growth of remote work by sharing the well-tested solutions available everyone in the world. Even a marginal improvement in how remote work is implemented could have a huge global benefit for all parties involved and reduce pollution by a huge amount.

Nearly 50% of the world’s workforce could do part-time remote work, and two-thirds would want to do it. As of 2015 there are over two billion people who have remote-capable jobs and the number is growing. Imagine the change we could do by convincing more and more people to join our ranks as productive remote workers. Sharing the tools and techniques we use can be very important for everyone living on this planet.

By embracing remote work, and helping others to make it an effective solution, I strongly believe we can make the world a happier, less stressful, more productive, and a less polluted place. This will happen by sharing the ideas in this book and elsewhere, and embracing working remotely.

Chapter 1

The Growth of Remote Work

Remote work is growing in popularity and has been doing so steadily since its roots in 1970s. As of this writing there are more than 220 million people working remotely around the world. This is a rough figure based on a number of surveys around the world. In the US, 15% to 25% of the workforce already works remotely, according to the 2013 Census Bureau report. It’s even more popular in developing countries like India, which are taking the new ways of working as a competitive advantage. My colleagues in India report that working remotely now and then is a possibility for almost 50% of the capable work force.

According to the latest research, up to 25% of the global workforce are doing remote work at least one day in the week. Remote work is done in almost all different occupations to various degrees. Even construction, health care and transportation jobs are moving to be remote capable. This number goes up when we’re talking different industries. For example, in IT it’s up to 50 percent. The most popular occupations for remote work are management, services, sales, education, and computer engineering, with the last growing in a very significant rate.

Different cultures show very different percentages. Emerging markets lead western societies by far. For a quick contrast, more than 40% of the Indian workforce works from home compared to the average in the western cultures, which is around 10 percent.

Lets