Remote Working – 3 Year Retrospective

Also jealousy issues... Realize that most people can't stand those things and it tends to turn into a test of personality, who will kiss up no matter how awful the experience, or who has the guts to admit the emperor has no clothes... In my wife's work at home experience there was some jealousy that she got to avoid teambuilding by default, while the office people were punished by having to attend. How come I have to go to the Christmas party on my day off and (VLM's wife) doesn't have to?

Oh and another jealousy issue... in this day and age not so many people smoke, but the smokers did not like that my wife could theoretically smoke at her desk but they can not (thankfully she doesn't smoke)

And discipline issues... "(VLM's wife) gets to pick up a sick kid at school without being formally written up for leaving work early because nobody notices, so why am I being written up?" and so forth. A lot of workplace BS exists so bosses can manufacture the reason to fire folks they can't just fire for no cause, and its going to collide with the obvious work at home differences.

At medium size corporations you can also run into Dilbertian requirement problems. Small corporations ignore "corporatism" and big corporations already have remote training, but it can be a mystery how to check the checkbox for annual diversity training, or annual PCI/DSS compliance training, or however else HR tortures the employees. She usually combined this kind of stuff with the rare facility visit, so we'll all go to diversity class as a team in the morning and then hang out and talk about work (aka goof off) in the afternoon.

Was the rest of the team local to each other? That can be difficult because the team may be accustom to conducting all communication verbally, where you need it to be electronic. I was a new-comer to the team when I became the remote lead, and one of the things I did was focus on getting folks to communicate electronically. Luckily for me, they were in individual offices spread around the building and two were in other buildings, so they were already using IM, chat, and email. I just needed to reinforce it.

Also from the beginning, I've focused on team cohesion and team communication. The team was in a bad state when I joined, so again lucky for me, it was something I knew needed extra attention. As a team lead, it's an important factor that you need to pay attention to, but perhaps don't have to spend a lot of time on when everyone is local. As a remote team lead, you need to spend a non-trivial amount of time on it.

And face time is still important. I travel twice a month for a day or two and try to meet with everyone during that time. I also conduct a daily standup where the rest of the team is in the room and I'm on the phone. It can be difficult to follow the conversations in the room from the phone, but really the goal is to make sure the team is talking to each other, and isn't about my control of the conversation or of the team.

Where in FL are you?

Nope.

I've been a full-time remote worker for 6.5 years, and 1/2 time (2 days a week) for 4 years before that. During that time I've managed and hired remote workers.

The reality is remote work is not for everyone, and I think that is even more so for new grads. There is a lot of mentoring that happens early in someone's career, and that is difficult to pick up in a remote environment. I think over time the need for having that on-site mentoring decreases, but it's critical in the first 12 to 24 months.

I want to work remote too, but I'm from Germany and don't know anything about the financial implications.