Working Remotely

Working remotely means working without a central office space. It means you decide where you work and you interact with your co-workers online.

Manifesto

There are many different ways to work remotely and to coordinate. The core part for sure is the location, but a connected part are office hours. Sharing of information is also pretty important.

The Remote Only Manifesto summarizes 9 core ideas of Remote Only work.

Remote Only work promotes:

1. Hiring and working from all over the world instead of from a central location.
2. Flexible working hours over set working hours.
3. Writing down and recording knowledge over oral explanations.
4. Written down processes over on-the-job training.
5. Public sharing of information over need-to-know access.
6. Opening every document to change by anyone over top down control of documents.
7. Asynchronous communication over synchronous communication.
8. The results of work over the hours put in.
9. Formal communication channels over informal communication channels.

Advantages

For You

1. Live where you want
   1. Lower cost of living: The rent for 1 bedroom in central Munich is 1165 EUR, in the center of Freiburg it is only 708 EUR.
   2. Higher quality of living: In big cities, live is hectic. It's loud.
2. No commute: You are instantly at work. This gives you way more time
3. Better Diet: You can cook at home. What you like, when you like it.
4. Work when you want: The sleep rythms of all of us differ. I'm pretty sure that having more flexibility in the working hours has the possiblity to improve health for many people.
5. Dress/style as you want: If you work at office and it's 30°C, you might still have to wear long trousers. Even if your office does not have air conditioning. And no makeup is necessary.
6. No distraction: You are in charge of your concetration. You can switch off social media and communication channels and just focus on work.
7. Diseases: People tend to go to work even when they feel slightly not well. So every year, diseases like the flue spread. If you work from home, you're save from that.

For the Company

1. Talent Pool: Candidates can join from all over the world instead of from a central location. This makes it easier to grow and might drop the salary cost a bit.
2. Worker satisfaction:
   1. Turnover: If people enjoy working for the company, they keep working for the company.
   2. Quality of Work: Being proud in your work is important. It helps to keep people being motivated to keep up with the state of the art. The fix mistakes they made in the past.
3. No office: You don't have to pay it. This might be a huge cost factor. Also all of the things connected to it, like cleaning or equipment.
4. 24/7 support is cheaper: Having 24/7 support or emergency teams who can fix stuff immediately is expensive. People don't want to be woken up at night to work. If your workers are all around the world, you can make use of the timezone differences.
5. Diseases: If the flue spreads in the office, you might suddenly loose a complete team of developers. Or maybe the site reliability team. If you let them work from home primarily, then the chance of this is way lower.

Challenges

For You

1. Distraction: You might work from home or from another place where not everything is work.
2. Work-Life Balance: It might be hard to stop working, as the boundaries get less clear. No office can mean everywhere is your office. No office hours can mean you work all the time.
3. Loneliness: You don't have co-workers.

For the Company

1. Control: Are people really working? Are they working the time you pay them for? This might be something you might be worried about. On the one hand, I'd say that is the wrong approach. You should not care about time, but about return on investment. Do you get the same / more / less for the money you pay?
2. Coordination: Who is working on what? Do people work on the same thing?

Tools

• Chat: Slack, HipChat
• Ticket System: Jira
• Documentation:
• Office: G-Suite, Office 365
• Cloud: Amazon, Google, Microsoft

Companies

There seem to be quite a couple companies which have significant remote work part:

• remoteonly.org
• workremotely.co
• yanirs: Established remote companies
• Remote Work Hub
• Top 100 Remote Companies Hiring

Some of them are pretty well known and of very different size. All of them seem to have a product which is mainly on web:

Sources