Stories about Remote Work

“On any given day, the average employee spends nearly 65% of their time on busy work and in meetings, 20% searching for information and just 15% — or 1.2 hours a day — on the meaningful and rewarding work they were hired to do,”

While meetings have their place at work – like bringing out creativity and expanding your mind to other viewpoints through the other persons – they also consume a lot of time so that sometimes there can be a little time left for deep work.

"In turn, a remote work arrangement could afford employees more time to attend to personal matters like grocery shopping, paying bills, doing housework and spending time with family"

I really like that about remote work. The ability to live your life more freely. There is other stuff in life than work.

"Hiring remote means you are able to hire the best possible talent anywhere on the planet, and allowing those people to choose quality of life over the rat race is a serious draw for the person you are looking to hire."

It's huge! You were looking for people in small parts of cities, and now you hire the best talent from the whole world.

"Tailor each resume to the job listing"

So true! I've heard from a lot of remote companies that they receive mostly general resumes. Like hunderds and hunderds of general resumes. When you build a resume for this particular team and job you're trying to get, there's a lot more chance to stand out. They see that you're really interested in their company!

"When looking for one it is important to find a position that is a good fit for you."

Yep, and this is why RemoteHub is building a list of remote companies and remote jobs that can be searched by different factors like benefits, engineering culture, current remote team location and more.

"Search in the right places"

Great resources (although RemoteHub is missing! hah!)

Comprehensive list of remote work resources! Everything from "what is remote work" to hiring, communicating, laws, books, podcasts, newsletter, communities and more. Definitely worth bookmarking!

8 tips from HubSpot for a good work-from-home experience:

1. Determine if remote work is right for you
2. Schedule meetings and work hours in chunks
3. Over-communicate with everyone
4. Plan virtual coffee chats with colleagues
5. Create an efficient home-working space
6. Work outside of your house
7. Prepare for video calls
8. Don't forget to take breaks

What a setup! Check out this "self-made pad with crushed marble for feet massaging". Great example about one of the nicest benefits of working from home – freedom to set up your own work environment and tweaking it to the finest details.

Workout in the gym, followed by a swim in the rooftop infinity pool, followed by some beers seem like a great way to start the 29th year! Happy bday!!

I think it's very cool if you have one or more team members in your city, so you can work some days together in a coworking space or just meet IRL for an ice cream.

This is also one of the reasons I'm building these remote company maps – so when you're planning to join a team, you can check if they already have members in your home city.

Check out this fun classification of digital nomads! You learn about weekend-warriors, time-shifters, homebodies and travellers.

I really encourage you to read this article about remote work. It really sums it up nicely.

“The idea of anyone needing to work from one location every day 40 hours a week will seem even more antiquated than it already does today”

I know this can also be a source of stress, but I like how working remotely merges work and life. You don't have to sit on one place 40h per week to work with your laptop. But you need to build your own work-life balance.

“Whoever I work for next, if they tell me I can’t work remotely, I’m not working for them.”

Remote work is not a perk anymore. It's a requirement.

Remote workers are more productive than office workers and this could be mostly a byproduct of asynchronous communication. @doist is building a Slack alternative around this async logic so teams can organize their conversations into threads instead of chatting on a Slack channel.

You can always go back to a thread and read it (also helpful for new team members). You can't do that in Slack.

"70% of professionals work remotely at least one day a week, while 53% work remotely for at least half of the week"

Remote work is huge already! And of course there are these companies who are entirely remote – they event don't have an office! (I think @doist and @buffer don't have an office?)

"Nearly 70% of millennials would be more likely to choose an employer who offered remote working"

To find a great talent, you *need* to offer a remote possibility. Not in the future, but already today.

I think the benefits make remote work a no-brainer. For a start, you can hire talent from anywhere in the world instead of your local city.

But the remote culture needs to be done right in the company. One of the main problems is probably being "always on" so that you don't know when you are working and when not. Work and life boundaries are not clear anymore.

I really like how @doist is communicating their clear and organized remote work culture. They even built an app for this – https://twist.com

Buffer has a "People Team" who makes sure that their team is feeling great (what!).

Although the biggest benefit of remote work is already built into it – work from home or anywhere else in the world – there are more awesome perks that Buffer provides. How cool is that:

Tech Accessories – budgeted $9k
️ Working Smarter Stipend – budgeted $9k
Coworking spaces reimbursement – budgeted $27k
Internet reimbursement – budgeted $25k
🗑 Home Office Allowance – budgeted $10k
Free books (and Kindle) – budgeted $15k
Growth mindset fund – budgeted $40k
401k: 2% match – budgeted $80k
Accounting fees – budgeted $25k
Health Insurance – budgeted $225k
Dependents Grant – budgeted $149k
Digital therapy – budgeted $3k

If team members are used to communicate by walking to each other's table and talking, it can be hard to switch to a remote setup at first.

On the other hand I also believe that a lot of team members already chat in Slack or similar even though they may be sitting next to each other. I know I have done this. I mean, why open your mouth when you can type right – but seriously, when I type then the person can check it when can, not when I say it.

Key takeaways from the article:

Focus on communication
Share a tool-stack
Trust is key
Define acceptance criteria

Old article, but illustrates very well how it is to work remotely: "wake up, shower, have a bowl of cereal, make a cup of coffee and head over to my desk".

Good practices for working remotely such as to create boundaries between work and life, focus on your health and more.

I asked remote companies about their daily standup habits. Most teams are posting what they're working on to the daily #standup channel thread in Slack. Some do video calls.

Check out comments from GitLab, Stanwood, Latchel and Canny about their daily standup habits.

People love remote work!

91% of remote workers said working remotely is a good fit for them
96% of remote workers would recommend working remotely to a friend

You'll find some fun (embarrasing) comments in the report from remote workers, like:

"My dad coming over during my weekly 1:1 with my boss, hugging me, and asking to say hi to my 'work friend'"

"My husband has a habit of reorganizing the freezer during client meetings."

"My husband walked through the background of a video call in his underwear."

While working remotely can be a great way to work, it may not be for everyone:

Juniors may need more face-to-face guidance.
Some people really want to talk to other people in real life, so can be lonely at home.
Your home may not be the best place to work (distractions, not enough space), but you could always go to co-working spaces.
Time zones can be difficult. Check out required time zones before joining a team.
Writing is important, because when you work remotely, you need to write a lot.

Grace gives some good tips about how to work from home:

Have a routine
Get out of the house
Prepare for meals
Create a work-designated space
Have hobbies

Great article with a lot of useful insights. For example, finding the right balance between synchronous work and asynchronous work:

synchronous – chatting online, really great for being connected, bonding as a team, real-time collab, being creative with ideas

asynchronous – people answer when it suits them, little meetings, no frantic chatting, can work with their heads down

Remote workers can seemingly disappear, because they're not physically in the office. Often left out of meetings and discussions.

Very helpful for the team if you communicate your status clearly. If you're out for a coffee, mark your status as "away" on your messaging app. Also, do not work from the bed. Not a good idea.

Oh, and this "mute" button you want to press during the meetings, well... don't. I know, I've done it too – I've put together my furniture with a drill during a meeting. Not proud of this.

Companies are starting to shut down their offices and head to a beach with a laptop instead. What a good idea!

You can see from the article that marketgoo has a clear plan for their new fully remote company setting – they're planning storytelling to keep people in the loop, tougher reporting, but this also leaves more money for profit sharing and alternative remote-working efforts like co-working allowance.

Well, it does seem obvious that remote work is becoming more and more popular. Can be more difficult with old school managers, but as you can see from this report, 69% of young managers support working remotely.

When these old school managers are replaced with younger generation managers, there will be more and more remote positions to apply for.

We won't put our pants on, but we work harder!

When you're working remotely and you're not physically present in the office, your boss or coworkers can have a feeling that you're watching Netflix at home. And this could be true! But, if you can handle your work while watching Netflix, where's the problem?

There needs to be more trust in remote companies, as team is really based on trusting each other. If you're not doing your job, it should be visible, and then you just don't fit to the team.

Instead of wearing a mask in a huge city, you can move to a small place with clean air and nature around you!

It's from a couple of years ago, but still a good intro to remote work. Mart draws super cool comics at Toggl.

"And please wear some pants"

I do have my pants on! But no shirt...

"Companies are kidding themselves if they think employees are able to be productive just because they sit in a room or building with their name and logo on the door."

Yes! Walk around an office 4pm and see how many people are scrolling through their Facebook feed. Well, a lot. Maybe not Facebook anymore. But Reddit or something.

So, if you're not doing anything productive, why sit there in the office? Go home! And you'll have a lot more energy the following day, or convince your boss to skip the office.

Yep, when thinking about starting to work remotely and you like your job, it's a good idea to convince your boss to let you work from home.

Prepare your reasons and ask nicely. You can always start with one day a week and grow this to maybe 100% remote.

Doist, who is one of the leading remote companies, gives here a lot of good tips and there's even email templates that you can copy-paste.

Buffer looks back at their 10 remote team retreats – it's so nice to see your teammates in real life, but it's not so cool to replace your comfy yoga pants with jeans for a retreat week. Oh, and there's so much hugging that you probably get a flu.

I guess it costs a lot of money to fly almost 100 persons together from all over the world, but nothing replaces in-person face time and it's probably quite useful for the remote company culture. And I'm sure it's fun!

Leo knows remote work. After all, he co-founded Buffer, one of the best remote companies in the world.

While there are a lot of positive sides to working remotely, there are also negative sides (as with everything in life). Leo looks more deeply into loneliness.

People may often think that working remotely = working from home. While this is probably true for a lot of people, I think it shouldn't be like that. You shouldn't work from home most of the time, especially if you have a family and you don't have a separate "office room" at your home.

I think that coffee shops as offices are also not good. There's just too many people, so they tend to be rather noisy. Also, isn't it weird to sit 8h in the same coffee shop several days in a week? You should probably change shops and that's also a bit cumbersome.

So, for me it seems that coworking spaces are the best solution for remote work (saying this from my home, where I'm working 99% of my time, and I do have a family and no separate room for my "office")

Ryan has done a great homework on this. It's a long list of websites with remote jobs. There's a screenshot and description for each of the sites and he also splitted them into categories like general, writing, design, freelance and more.

Some of these remote jobs sites seem to be just aggregators, which I think is a popular side project to do right now.

Ryan has a lot of content on his blog, and search engines like him – this article ranks #2 on Google for "remote jobs" for me.