The Job that Moves Me
Remote Work Culture
The kind of a job that truly moves me — is the one that doesn’t make me move.
The kind of a job that doesn’t require relocation. Simple as that. I want to choose my next project based on the project itself — not the acceptability of the hassle to change my whole life over it — just to find out that it’s not what I was hoping for it to be and have the option to either stay miserable and avoid another hassle of moving back — or go through the hassle of moving back (with all the property and family related issues which follow). Working remotely takes it all away. And in the world where, at least in IT and related industries, talent became a scarcity, there is a lot of trouble that can be taken away from a company’s plate if they decide to go remote.
To be perfectly honest, I haven’t really thought it through when I decided to quit my office job and go location independent as a freelancer, back in 2010. It was a purely self-centered decision. I just wanted to chase the wind and the sun and live all year round in amazing windsurf & kitesurf spots around the world. Just like that. And to be as honest again, I thought it’s gonna be just a phase, a prolonged kinda vacation after which I will inevitably have to go back to the traditional workplace, if I didn’t want to lose my career and financial stability. However, the life proved me wrong. The remote work possibilities proved me wrong. It turned out to be a viable, legitimate and completely sustainable career and lifestyle choice.
Sounds pretty amazing, isn’t it? But let’s get real. More than five years in, I caught myself reflecting on the benefits and challenges both for remote working professionals, and the remote running companies, as we’re all in this together, or even playing the double role sometimes (welcome to the remote freelance project management).
Freedom at last
Benefits for the remote professionals
- Location Independence
I love travelling. Even more, I love living around the world. There is a huge difference. That #worldismyhome sensation is truly amazing and an extremely formative life experience. Deciding on the next continent every few months, changing your decision based on the weather, or just simply doing as you please. The amount of new places, people, experiences, skills I fit in a year when free to relocate within days, cannot be compared with the life on one location, no matter how awesome it is.
However LI is NOT equal to nomadism! It’s way broader. And much more important. It’s the freedom to work from home even if the whole team is in the same city, because you want to spend your commute time wiser. Because you want to see your kids throughout the day. Because you want to walk your dog instead of a coffee break. Or drink your coffee while walking your dog. It’s the freedom to own your day. And it’s equally awesome as finishing your work week in Brazil, and starting the new one in Bali. And I can say that, since I tried the latter many times.
2. Flexible working hours
I am a morning person. But I don’t exactly like to work first thing in the morning. I start my day as early as 6–7 am with an outdoor sport (running, swimming…), shower and fruity breakfast. No coffee. Emails are fine. And a great input for the private daily standup while enjoying a nice walk to the coworking space. That works well right now when I started to work with a Canadian company and chose not to go to Asia this year and spare myself the night meetings. This time last year it was a company in Tel Aviv that made my stay in Bali quite comfy, since the time diff was pretty much as the one I have now while in Europe.
My point being, even without understanding the human body perfectly, it’s clear that we all have our own internal clocks that just make certain schedule work for us and certain hours of the day the time when we can expect the productivity peak. And there is no need to fly to the other part of the world after all. A well organized remote team can support flexible working hours that suit everybody’s preferences. Or obligations, in order not to be so self-centered. I am sure there are a lot of folks out there who are successfully juggling family and career and could use some flexibility within their day.
Another point, more often than not I don’t actually work full time and in my experience, in 4h, I do the 75% of the work I do in 8h. Sure, more team members means more logistic and management, but people who are not tired and have a lot of free time for their hobbies, friends and families, are so much more productive. And worth hiring a good manager to keep them in sync.
3. Choice of workplace setup
I love outdoors. In the apartment I always rent when in Brazil, I work on the balcony. There is this palm tree that I like staring at while concentrating. That same palm tree starts moving its’ leaves and making subtle noise when the wind starts picking up, promising yet another sick windsurf/kitesurf session. And tells me I should start wrapping up the highest priority tasks. That palm tree is a great productivity tool of mine. Tree lovers, I’m with you on this one :)
And again, it’s just me. People love silence or music, dedicated custom desk or quick access to food while working at the kitchen table. It’s perfectly legitimate to find peace and concentration in people watching while working from a cafe. Or, working from a different cafe every day. Or staying at home on Fridays and making them truly casual for once. Or working half day from home and another half from a coworking space after having a lunch out on the way. Splitting your work day between two locations can make it seem much less dull. The variations are endless. Instead of a company trying to figure out how to satisfy everybody’s needs, just let the people take care of it themselves. They are the ones who know themselves the best after all.
4. Crafting your career
Although remote type of work is not necessarily associated with freelancing and many companies are opting for having long term, full time employees working remotely, those to set the trend were definitely the freelancers and I am pretty sure we still are the majority among the remote peeps. I’d also add that the line is not so strict there anymore, as I had a long term (multi year) arrangements as a freelancer.
Anyway, freelancers are free to craft their career in a more flexible (this is starting to grow into the word of the day, right? :)) manner than the traditional corporate employees. Instead of waiting to be allocated to a new project the corporation wants you at, you can choose it yourself (it’s not gonna happen that you get it every time, but you’re the active element in this game, and that sure feels nice). Or waiting for the next-on-the-ladder opening. If you feel you’re ready to level up and change your role, get a project that needs you.
5. Workload choice
Again, it’s not unheard of that some people work part time in the traditional environment, but it’s definitely more common (and yes, flexible :)) in the freelance world (which is currently the biggest portion of the remote work world). You can arrange to work 10h or 80h hours per week, depending on your current financial situation, need for a break, other obligations, interests, opportunities (all scenarios from raising the family to bootstrapping your startup). Or just to work with more than one company at the moment, to make it more interesting, widen your views, or just have a safety net at all times.
6. Global market, international environment
The world has more interesting opportunities to offer than your town. Period. Sure, that would work even better if we’d get more companies to accept remote work model. Hence my blog post :) You do your part.
International environment is my favorite, from organizing / taking part in student exchanges, to living in the expats hubs, organizing retreats for entrepreneurs and of course working in the international teams. I am sure it boosts personal and professional development, as different people bring different values to the table. People who grew up in the same place and attend same university are inevitably thinking more alike, which can often be an easy solution, but sometimes limiting the views as well.
7. Developing entrepreneurial skills
Admittedly, I am not ready yet to start my own startup. At this point I can’t say if I’ll ever be. The commitment required conflicts with my quality of life preferences. Nevertheless, I like being proactive, creative and on my own terms. I find freelancing and remote work to be the good option for me. As a freelancer, you are your own little company. Making choices like opting for a not so interesting project that pays well so that you can make a gap afterwards and invest the time & money in an (online) course & certification OVER getting a project that’ll look really good in your portfolio and get you maybe even more gigs — is nothing but a strategical decision whether to leverage the market that doesn’t completely align with your company mission in order to be able to invest in valuable assets or stick to establishing your business within the niche to bring in more customers and thus revenue. Furthermore, personal branding leverages the same mechanisms as the product branding. The funny part is that I haven’t realized this until I worked on a product and found myself in a situation when I was thinking in terms of markets, strategies, branding and such — just to realize that I’ve been doing the same with my freelance services all along.
Again, there are strategical decisions in corporate careers as well, but the crossroads don’t happen so frequently.
8. Having life outside of work
When I used to work in the classic setup, I had amazing colleagues. We’d go for lunch breaks together, after work drinks, enjoyed Friday happy hours that the company was throwing and — most importantly — stayed friends to this very day. I worked for two companies before starting freelancing, and in both cases I earned some hopefully life long friendships. Still, in the same time, it meant that I had little happening outside of that circle. With the remote work, once you sign off, it’s just you. So you’re forced to bond with other people over sports, nightlife preferences or simply geographical accessibility. Since it clearly has its’ pros and cons, that’s another excellent way to broaden your horizons, talk different stories, and generally introduce more variety in your life.
Independence can be a lonely place
Challenges when working remotely
- Lack of security
Sure, corporations go bankrupt, or just have to let some people go in difficult times. And that’s how you lose your job and your source of income. But, that doesn’t happen so often. And it rarely happens overnight. And when it does, at least in Europe, there are social mechanisms that support the people while transitioning to another job. Although, as I keep on insisting, remote work is not limited to freelance contractors, it sure is more difficult to organize this kind of a state provided support for citizens of who knows which country who are not employed in a country where the company is registered. There might be certain programs in certain countries designed to support the self employed people, but it’s not a general case. Thus we’re always aware that our source of income might just drain the next day and the way to break the news to you can vary from decent 2 weeks notice to silence treatment and not replying to your messages. What are you gonna do? Fly over there and knock on the door? Good luck with finding out where the door is in the first place.
Tips:
- Always — ALWAYS — have the savings. They are called that way since they can really save your remote-freelancing-I-am-in-charge-of-my-life a**.
- Bill as often as you can. Upwork does it for you on weekly bases. So at least you won’t end up with a lot of pending earnings.
- Check the company beforehand. If using a platform like Upwork, make sure the client’s payment method has been verified at least. It’s also advisable to check the amount company has already spent on freelancers, and the reviews left by those freelancers. Otherwise, simply google them. Ideally, you want to work for somebody who has a well known product, great community, popular blog, an e-book or two, general online presence, participation in the conferences, recorded talks, positive mentions in forums and other people’s blogs. Realistically, make sure they have at least something from the list.
2. Lack of visibility
In the remote world you are just an email address or a Skype username. People don’t know you from the university days, or from a previous company — they don’t even know those companies and educational institutions and their reputation. People don’t get to see how you conduct yourself in a professional environment. It’s hard to just get out there and expect amazing companies to run after you.
Tips:
- Tests — Upwork offers free tests in variety of fields, publishing results is at freelancer’s discretion
- Certifications — make sure the certifications are industry recognized
- Reviews and Testimonials — we live in a world where reviews are left after each cup of coffee in a coffee place — get some on your Upwork profile (both sides of the deal leave the reviews, but cannot read each other’s before posting), or ask your clients to write a testimonial for your personal website
- Online presence and personal branding — I am a big fan of content marketing in general. It’s a win win. Potential clients get free value, and the brand / expert gets visibility. Whatever it is that you know so well, and in whichever format you feel most comfortable with — just give it away. From forum posts, blogs and e-books, over podcasts and YouTube channels to giving talks and joining meetups.
- Networking events and coworking spaces — and now back to the material world for a change — amazing partnerships and cooperation have been born in places with high concentration of ambitious, knowledgeable, creative people. Check Eventbrite, Meetup.com and local coworking spaces.
3. You are your own little company
And that’s both good and bad in the same time. While you are developing your entrepreneurial skills, you also have to realize one thing: unlike corporate case, here you have work — and then getting the work. And it all takes time and effort. This blog post is no exception. It took me significant time in the period when I was both working on a project and preparing for a certification. But since I was coming across a lot of questions, I thought it’s a good decision to invest some effort and put the answers I have in one place, for whomever can benefit from it. Myself included. Long live the community :)
Tips:
- Your work is not just work — include time for all the mentioned activities in your planning as well.
4. Organization and productivity
In the long run, freedom only works for the well organized ones. If the proximity of your couch means temptation for yet another nap, you’re better off in a company where somebody is making sure you spend your time at least awake. It’s difficult to wake up on time and sit at the desk when seemingly you don’t have to. Let alone the situations when working on the road, or with inconvenient time zone diff.
Tips:
- Plan your day the previous night.
- Have schedules and routines. Workouts, work, meals, socials, and last but never the least — 8h of good night sleep.
- Block at least 2h without interruption.
- Have something planned for after work — nobody is productive in an empty day, we need to know what’s coming next in order to accomplish what we’re doing at the moment. After jogging, there is breakfast, after work there is a walk with a friend. That way we’re getting the things done. I always use the example from Brazil, where I am in a place that has super reliable 30knots wind starting 11am every single day. That’s my major productivity boost to block 7am — 11am for very efficient work — since I know that the nature won’t shift its’ schedule around to accommodate my procrastination.
5. Burnout
There is a fine line between being free and being lost. People need structure. When its’ not provided by the environment, we need to build it ourselves. Without 9–5 and 2 weeks vacation in August, the freedom can often mean 7–11 and no vacation. It took me almost 5 years to realize that I can experience a burnout even while working from a tropical paradise. No matter what the current workload is, having your work as something that is not left in the office, but rather constantly with us on a smart phone, means that you are never really disconnected.
Tips:
- Even unpaid vacations pay off. In addition, many remote companies are offering paid vacation to their contractors as well. I had it only once myself. Used those 2 weeks in Cuba (where otherwise I wouldn’t be able to travel due to the lack of internet access).
- Make gaps between the projects. That reset effect can do miracles.
- Educate your team that, unless mission critical, you’re off the grid during the weekend.
6. Crazy work hours
It’s not always possible to plan the time zone diffs ahead. Even if it all seems idyllic when joining the team, it takes one new team member from one of the Americas to make it impossible for a win win win to happen for a team spread across Europe and Asia. In my case, since I am the one changing the continents all the time, it felt a bit selfish to ask the team to adjust to my new time zone every time I take a plane. So once I ended up having daily standups at 3am for 3 months. I was still happy since I really loved my time in the islands of Venezuela, but you can imagine that it was an exhausting scenario.
Tips:
- Discuss the time zone situation within the team prior to accepting a new project.
- Be independent in your work as much as possible, so that you don’t need to overlap with the other team members’ work hours for long intervals.
- Be flexible. If you want the flexibility in your work environment — show some first. Every team needs some time to get in sync, and then the moment will come when it won’t be necessary to work the crazy hours so much.
The world of talent is yours
Benefits for remote companies
- Not limited to local talent
I am hearing all the time how many IT companies have 365 days a year open positions and simply can’t find talent to join them. At the moment, I am recruiting developers for a new project I am working on — and it’s true, it’s not easy at all. I can only imagine how difficult it gets when you narrow your search down by applying the physically present filter. The best people are just not at the same place at the same time.
2. Attracting professionals who wouldn’t accept the offer otherwise
If you are competing with another company over a great expert, she might pick you for allowing her to live and work whereever she wants. That’s one more for your team. And that matters.
3. Attracting certain type — you want that type
Remote workers, if successful, are proven to be proactive, self starters, independent, well organized, productive, responsive and possess entrepreneurial mindset. Doesn’t mean that the others are not, but a few years of sustainable remotely handled career is quite a test. Plus happy people are more motivated and productive.
4. No office costs
I believe this one is self-explanatory.
5. People bring new trends
Don’t lock yourself within the tech scene of your city, sourced by the local university. Unless your city is San Francisco, Berlin or alike, it’s probably a fairly closed community. And while there are many advantages of working with people with similar educational, cultural and professional background — the easy way is not always the best way, and the comfort zone is never the most fun to be in. Keep it fresh with people from the outside, acting as the missionaries of the trends and practices new to your company.
6. Geoarbitrage
Although I wouldn’t like the geoarbitrage to be the main point that drives remote work, outsourcing to countries with lower living costs (and quality of life expectations) definitely works. It’s math, can’t fight it. Still, it’s a win win in most of the situations, as your company might be bringing job opportunities to underdeveloped labor markets , or supporting a doing well westerner taking it easy in South East Asia and accepting lower pays as long as you let him live on that beach. I’ve been there, and it’s a completely legitimate deal, at least for a while. And you still get a person from your own culture if that was the main obstacle when thinking about geoarbitrage.
7. Shifts
The shop never closes :) The QA working while the dev team is sleeping makes for a nice set of reported bugs to be fixed first thing in the morning.
8. Everything is logged
The lack of possibility to talk in person, makes us use the tools for communication. And those tools have this nice little habit of logging everything for us. So when you decide to finally start working on something you talked with your team members about, you can just go over the logged chats — ad hoc meeting minutes :) In the same manner, you can just include somebody who missed the conversation, and after catching up with the log, they’ll be able to hit the ground running. Online communication goes beyond the present moment: you can go back to a past conversation, or talk to a future team member you haven’t even hired yet. In addition, the transparency is encouraged and behind-someone’s-back habits are diminished.
9. Online communication is not as unnatural as it seems
Back in the days when I worked in a co-located setup, I remember that we had a chat room that we used constantly, in spite of sitting in the same office. It was not premeditated, it felt natural, and we kept doing it for various reasons: we wanted to have our headphones with our own choice of music on, we wanted to have the log, we wanted to be able to re-join the conversations we missed while out-of-the office or busy, we wanted to be able to send links and attachments (so many things these days can’t be conveyed properly without throwing the URLs around). I must admit that I found it creepy when a colleague sitting next to me would invite me for a lunch break via chat, but later on, as more and more of us were changing offices, companies and even countries, I realized that our so called “office chat” was the way to go, since it survived for long time after its’ primary purpose was deprecated. It was our natural choice of communication.
10. Remote workers are results oriented
Since we are not scoring any points for showing up and looking nice’n’busy sitting in front of our computers, we have the urge to send some results. Show me the code! :)
11. Managers are more inclined to create loosely coupled tasks
That’s a good practice in general, but sometimes neglected. If you know that your team members are separated by oceans and out of sync due to the time zones, you always remember to give them the tasks they can work on more or less independently.
Where are my people at?!
Challenges when running a remote business
- Attracting talent
If you are a successful company offering great prospects and pleasant working environment, you’ll earn your reputation pretty soon. In your own local community that is. To attract the right professionals to apply for positions you offer, you need the online reputation as well.
Tips:
- Have a great blog, publish e-books, sponsor events and conferences. It already happened to me that, while enjoying a blog post, I noticed a “work with us” link and applied, simply because I found the content to be great and thought it would be cool to work with people who think this way.
2. Trust issues
Placing the future of your business in hands of a person you never met sure sounds outrageous. It’s difficult to form an opinion based on an online profile and a brief Skype call. And to be sure that this person won’t just stop replying to your emails when you really need them. It’s so easy to fall off the face of the Earth if you’re just a Skype username.
Tips:
- Check reviews, testimonials, forum posts, blog posts, personal websites, and all other sorts of channels for conveying who we are and what it is that we do. If hiring via Upwork, it’s fairly straightforward to look at the reviews left by previous clients, who in addition can be checked as well for the reviews they have. And the other people who worked for them just to get the big picture. You can go as many levels deep as you wish.
- Opt for a call instead of messaging, at least in the beginning — it’s closer to the offline communication and will help you get to know the person faster — we naturally look at the facial expressions, body language and the way of talking to form an opinion and a relation.
- Build the trust. It’s a project like any other. And you should start lean. Don’t leave a new contractor with a 3 months worth of a workload with the agreement to get back to you once finished. Start with the smaller portions of work, check the results as early as possible and slowly cut down on the interval between the two check ins. On the first day you might wanna message a person every few hours, to make sure they are able to set up the local environment and are clear on the project itself. And that they are still there :) That kind of micromanaging won’t work in the long run, but it’s necessary in the kick off stage.
- Opt for personality. The technologies can be learned.
3. Communication issues
Admittedly, it’s more natural to communicate with a fellow human being in person. And even that can be a challenge more often than not. It requires effort in order to improve. That effort is often neglected in case of co-located teams. Just because we’re sharing the physical space, doesn’t mean we truly connect. But it sure feels a bit better than wanting a clear answer, responsible commitment or a quality explanation from a voice in your headphones.
Tips:
- Don’t just sit back and wait for your team members to bond magically. Provide the framework for the desired communication to happen. I like using Geekbot to facilitate asynchronous daily standups. I guess those 3 months of waking up at 3am to join my team while I was in the very odd time zone made me realize that it’s not always worth it. Another experience which made me realize that traditional daily is a bad idea was a period when I worked on more than one project. Not only that I had to show up at an odd hour, but I had to do it more than once per day. I guess I don’t need to tell you how that was a major productivity killer. Especially when not having full time team members, having them spend big chunk of their time on the meetings looks like an overhead to me. For reviews and demos (internal or for the clients), there is GoToMeeting or Hangouts, the invitations by Google Calendar are usually welcome, one-on-ones are ok on Skype, and the absolute day saver Slack with channels, auto-reminder etc.
- A smiley can go a long way. Written communication lacks the means of conveying the tone of the message, thus even a “np” can be interpreted as “ok, fine, I’ll do it if you really find it absolutely necessary and nobody else will do it” or “sure, it’s no trouble at all, I’m excited to start working on it”. A “np :)” makes a world of difference. Also, it can be used to just acknowledge a message, if there is no further comment needed. I can’t see you nodding your head, so send that smiley my way :)
- Never forget that the text you’re seeing in your IM of choice comes from a human. A little bit of a chit chat is time well invested. I had team members I never met in person with whom I stayed in touch years after we finished the project. The important part is that while working on the project, we felt as we belong to the same team and are ready to support each other.
- Avoid hard drive and emails. I don’t keep anything on the hard drive any more, and not only because I worry about my computer crashing or getting stolen. If everything is online, it’s ready for sharing and collaboration. I use Google Docs, Google Drive and Dropbox. Even tools I use only for myself, like Evernote, have the sharing functionality if at any point I decide to share a note with somebody (obviously, you can send a doc from your hard drive, but sending the attachments back and forth after each revision is a very clumsy way to collaborate). In addition, I am also avoiding emails. In most of the cases, it’s more appropriate to add a comment to a Jira / GitHub issue, add a Trello card, bring up an impediment in standup by Geekbot for Slack etc. etc. That way the message is placed in the context where it belongs and where it’s gonna be accessible for search and overview, even by people who join us later down the road.
4. Lack of overview
For a manager or a business owner, I guess seeing the team at work, with the focused expressions on their faces, can have a calming effect. The results are still not guaranteed, but it sure is way less frustrating than not knowing what and if at all is happening.
Tips:
- Set up the processes carefully. Every action should be recorded and followed by a notification. Luckily there are tools to the rescue again. Jira lets me create a custom workflow that matches the workflow we want to have at this stage. Every state transition is followed by a notification. And it’s possible to filter the issues and get the overview. Use comments as much as possible. You can get alerts from Jira, GitHub, Cloud66 etc. right to your Slack team. The things you do are never obvious to the other people as they are to you. Even a clone of yours wouldn’t have the same perspective as you if he doesn’t have the same information, let alone another person with a different mind (freely adopted from the Elon Musk book).
5. Cultural differences
Differences are fun, but challenging. Words are never 100% precise.
Tips:
- Ask the questions whenever in doubt. Lowering the risks of misunderstanding is worth the effort. And every day you learn something new and the team becomes more coherent.
6. Background differences
I felt it’s an issue when the new team members were lacking freelancing / remote work experience, in spite of their expert level. The same goes for all other previous experiences or the lack of them.
Tips:
- The profiling is not finished after the recruitment process. Keep those facts in mind when working with those team members. If that’s their first remote work experience, give them the tips they might need. I put some of it in the KickOff document as well. Can’t hurt. And it’s likely to help.
7. Time zone differences
Bad time zone management can lead to losing a one day cycle over a simple thing. If you need to handle something that involves a few people (maybe you need to clarify some requirement with the product owner, realize that the implementation will need an action by the system administrator — to grant access for instance, and then explain it to the developer), it will end up as a disaster if those people are signing off in exactly the opposite order.
Tips:
- At all times, bare in mind the time zone differences. They can work for or against your.
8. Building the company culture and keeping the spirit up
Once the happy hour beers are off the table (it’s kinda sad to drink alone in front of your computer even when on Skype:)), you need to find another way to build the company culture, and keep the team motivated.
Tips:
- Value the informal communication, it’s not the waste of time. A few fun Slack channels are a nice thing to do. We’ve built so many things online, we can build a virtual water cooler :)
- Play the community manager role from time to time, share an interesting post, or bring up non-project related (it can still be industry related) topic. A few times per year, the whole company can gather for an online meeting where CEO would talk about the plans, ask the team to give the input, raise issues etc. And be fun to be online around :)
- Personal touch. Your team members are not the black boxes spitting out the code or other work products. Follow up on whatever is happening, like you would do in “real” life when you run into somebody in the corridor when going to the conference room. Gone are the times when the work was outsourced to cheap remote workers who remained the second class citizens within the company. Nowadays the co-founders are shaping the future while living their lives on the opposite sides of the planet. Nobody is less important just because they are not physically present.
- Flat organization. While it’s difficult to do it 100%, it’s still so much nicer if you as a manager realize that you are a team member with a specific role, and not a ruler of it all.
- Company retreats. I can imagine they are expensive, but not paying for the office and equipment, and leveraging the geoarbitrage possibilities, does save some money. I’ve had this opportunity only once, and haven’t joined for private reasons, but would definitely like to try it out myself sometimes. A friend of mine who runs a remote company of 20 people while he’s traveling the world, tends to stay in a cool place (last time it was South Africa) for a few months and invites his team to join if available. And they are hiring: mobilejazz.com :)
I help startups set up their software product development, check it out at: www.tijanamomirov.com
