3 - "Remote By Default" ======================= You should define your culture around behaving like a remote team, regardless of the actual composition/location of your team members. This may sound a little counter-intuitive (especially if your whole team is in-person), so let's go over what the definition, what this means in practice, why design things this way, & the benefits. Definition ---------- **"Remote By Default"** is actually two components. **"Remote"** means that an employee can execute 100% of their daily responsibilities from anywhere in the world. While this is relatively easier in *knowledge work* like Engineering (e.g. *"just need a laptop & an internet connection"*), it does also involve extra communication tools to make the remote employee comfortable/capable. **"By Default"** means that whenever you or anyone else in the department have a choice in means of communication, you should prefer a remote-friendly means of communication. Why Remote? ----------- During the first ~20 years of the 21st century, remoting working was a tougher sell. Email was the primary form of communication online, with few accessible group chat options (mostly 1-on-1 chat tools). Broadband distribution was very uneven, and video conferencing was expensive & relatively low-quality. And above all, it was outside of most people's normal "in-person, in-office" experiences. Then COVID-19 happened. Suddenly, during shutdowns & in the aftermath, much of the world suddenly had to get very good, very quickly at working remotely. And in the process, many of the benefits became more obviously clear to a much wider audience. However, I'm going to enumerate why I think supporting/promoting a remote-heavy environment is still a good idea, regardless of pandemics: **Reduced Office Space Needs** One of the easiest sells, from a business perspective, is the reduced cost of real estate. When you have people who work from home/coffeeshops/coworking/etc., there's a direct, measurable, & tangible savings on desk/office space. It has the added benefits of providing longer runways before having to find new/bigger office space. **Knowledge Work Lives Where The Keyboard Is** In a world of laptops, cloud-based computing, service platforms, cheap & widespread virtual private networks, and permeated by high-bandwidth-backed WiFi, your employees can be productive *anywhere* their computer is. Frequently, this has knock-on benefits for the company. If inspiration (or emergency) strikes, there's no office hours or commute in the way. Within reason (& hopefully respecting a work/life balance), everyone is just a ping away. **Great Talent Lives Everywhere** This is easily missed/overlooked, especially if you're used to just hiring locally-based employees. But great talent is everywhere. Yes, colleges and/or big cities *tend* to gather talented people to them, but this is *far* from universal. Lots of people have good reasons to live elsewhere. Maybe they need to be close to family, care for a loved one, or their spouse/partner has to live in a specific location. Maybe they don't like or can't handle big cities, maybe they can't (or don't want to) relocate, etc. Everyone wants to hire the best they can afford, so if they can work equally efficiently basically anywhere, why artificially limit that talent pool to those who just happen to live in the same place as you? **Reduced Commutes** We live in a world of climate change, where we stand on the precipice of irrevocably destroying the environment we depend on. Everything we can do to limit our environmental impact provides our species more runway. Removing a bunch of commuters from the roads could, in aggregate, have a positive effect on this situation. Beyond that & more tangibly, few people enjoy long/busy commutes. Commuting can front-load employees with frustration/anger/resentment before they even make it to the office, and further wear down exhausted employees headed home. Which leads to... **Employee Happiness** Studies have shown time & again that happy employees are productive employees, sometimes up to **10-13% more** productive. Imagine getting an entire extra hour per-employee per-day, for no cost, no effort, and zero-to-positive employee benefit. **That's** what your employee's happiness is worth. And if your employees can take it easy before work, enjoy a lazy cup of tea/coffee, skip stressful commutes, and/or work in pajama pants, **without** impacting their work hours or the business, who wouldn't be happy about that? **Focus Boosts** In-person work can often be a battle against interruptions. Coworkers tapping you on the shoulder for questions, loud hallway discussions that start/continue post-meetings, open-office hellscapes where heavy communication roles disrupt everyone around them, etc. And all of these are out of the employee's control. In contrast, remote work allows/empowers the *individual* to choose when they're focused & when they're interrupted. Obviously, this needs to be within reason (clear guidelines on reasonable responsiveness are needed), but being able to finish a train of thought, a chunk of critical code, or make notes for yourself before addressing the interruption can be huge for a knowledge worker. **Resilience/Bus Factor** It's not pleasant to think about, but there's a lot of resilience built-in by supporting a remote work environment. By having geographically-distributed staff, you automatically protect the business from local-based disruptions. Even ignoring catastrophes like floods, fires, or hurricanes, you're protecting against whole classes of major business interruptions, like public service outages (e.g. power outages), blander weather-based causes (e.g. snow/ice storms), etc. And depending on how remote your employees, you may be able spread out availability hours more easily/automatically with timezone differences. Remote Tools ------------ It's easy to go crazy on tooling, but you don't need to spend much at all to form a solid base to support remote culture. I'd recommend solving the following: * Establish an official company chat application (e.g. Slack, Discord, Teams, IRC). Prefer tools that have full/multiple chat channels, as opposed to just direct 1-to-1 messaging. * Establish official company calendars, & ask (strongly, borderline require) that they're kep up-to-date. * Establish official company email addresses. And ideally setup something that supports internal mailing lists as well. * Pick a video conferencing tool, & try to use it company-wide. * Consider setting up either a wiki(-alike), or put company docs in a version-controlled repository. Something with users & versioning, that's non-painful to edit. Of course, use what works for you & yours. There are tons of new options & interesting interfaces out there, so if something isn't working, don't be afraid to experiment. What Does This Look Like In Practice? ------------------------------------- The rule of thumb here is: *as asynchronous as possible, to the widest group of people as is reasonable*. A non-exhaustive list of examples of this: * When you want to get a timely message out to the entire team, ping in the group chat. * When you need someone's personal attention on something, rather than tap them on the shoulder, ping/direct message them in chat. * Before setting up a meeting, an agenda document should exist & usually be shared. * Meetings should almost always have video conferencing setup for them. Maybe even recordings if you're fancy. * Use email when there's long-form questions, or external parties involved. This includes times where maybe it would be otherwise embarassing, such as asking questions of a team. Unless you have good reason not to (e.g. sensitive information or topic), you should ask/talk in the widest-yet-most-appropriate place for answers. The rationale is simple: If you have a question, chances are good someone else will have the same question someday. If you've hit a problem, the solution might save others hours of time in the future, or spurn on an important conversation. The best part is that this is usually **saved & searchable** in the future, so decisions made aren't lost to small, undocumented, in-person conversations. And by being as asynchronous as possible, you're not **interrupting others** who might be in a state of flow, or about to rush to a meeting, etc. It encourages a healthy environment of respecting other's time. And being respected, even if it's just in the form of your time, is something everyone can appreciate. .. warning:: Something you'll hear a lot in the industry is the suggestion *"let's take this offline"*, or the old classic *"we work better in-person"*. While I can understand the sentiment, these are actually more harmful than they seem, and can encourage a slippery slope. Small, in-person, one-on-one conversations are great for Getting Things Done Now™, but they almost alway age horribly. Things get forgotten, or someone gets distracted & something gets dropped, or people move on & leave the company. Now that quick decision-making or explanation becomes **MYTHOS**, and those who're left behind (because they're unsure as to *"why"*) tend to maintain the pattern: orally passed down tradition, one-to-another. Save story time in front of a campfire & flickering lights on the cave wall for what they're best for: legends & ghost stories, not business. We'll discuss this more in a future section. ...And It's Cost Effective -------------------------- Something you'll notice through all of this is that, aside from some subscriptions for tools/services, supporting a Remote-By-Default environment isn't expensive. In many ways, it's cheaper than requiring that everything be in-person. Most of the things needed (email, calendars, group chat, video conferencing, etc.) are things you're probably going to want/pay for anyhow. Just by shifting everyone's mindset, you'll make better use of those tools while improving your employees lives at the same time.