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Getting Remote Work Right
It’s a social imperative. And when done correctly, a source of tremendous added value.
What is Remote Work?
Remote or distributed work is any situation in which one or more employees aren’t sitting in physical proximity to other members of their team. This can take a lot of forms: organizations with Work From Home (WFH) policies, teams working on different floors or in distributed offices, and teams with members who work full-time from a cafe, co-working space, home office, or somewhere else. Even a team member who leaves the office to do field research is temporarily remote.
If your organization fits any of these descriptions, then congratulations, you’ve got distributed workers. And if you want to get the most out of them, there are some facets of remote work that your organization needs to operationalize.
Remote First
It’s helpful to start by looking at organizations that use remote teams successfully over the long term. Whether they have an identifiable headquarters or not (or even a fixed office), the most effective distributed organizations are those that decided to support remote working from the outset. Distributed working, like any operational process, requires a well thought-out set of principles that work in a variety of situations, and these rarely emerge overnight.
In the tech sector, some of the best known remote-first organizations are:
- Automattic
- GitHub
- DigitalOcean
- Zapier
- Invision
Most of us can’t start from scratch, though. So if you want to get serious about remote work, there’s a lot of thought and effort that needs to go towards cultural issues, tools, and policies, in order to maintain a positive, equitable dynamic between remote and non-remote workers.
So Why is Remote Important?
Let’s start with the most obvious reason: productivity. There are plenty of reports out there on the topic, and while they don’t segment by type of work or distinguish between collaborative and solo tasks, the overall conclusion is that remote workers get…
