The reinforcing lesson I take away from the post is that you should know your company's weaknesses. Don't support remote workers if you don't have the culture or structure to support remote workers. Otherwise, you'll end up as a company that allows remote workers but doesn't truly support them, which is worse than not having remote workers at all.
Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
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Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#12Replace remote worker with new starts and you could have written a very similar article.
I've been remote working for about 5-6 years and I use that same argument to get jobs. Hiring, supporting and listening to your remote workers is a great way to validate you have sufficient processes in place that all new staff who come in can get up and running with minimal fuss.
I've never looked at figures, but I'm willing to bet this'll reflect on churn rates too.
Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#13I would have thought "Have access to the entire world of smart talented people" would have cropped up but it didn't. I see why, that's not quite the direction the article was going in, but it's another benefit. In my company we had a pretty talented front ender who had to go back to germany but since we support remote workers we've been able to keep him which is cool.
I've noticed an interesting paradox at companies where I've worked. They are very flexible about remote workers when they are far away (e.g. office is in Los Angeles, and one programmer is in Oregon and one customer service rep is in Colorado), but they are more resistant when someone local wants to work remotely (e.g. to avoid a 1.5 hour commute each way in Los Angeles traffic).
I've had a similar experience. Most of remote my work has been between 4-10 hours drive away (I'm in the UK, so thats pretty far) and anyone within an hour wants me to commute.
I generally don't take them up on the offer as driving for 2 hours (and much longer on bad traffic days) on a regular basis feels like a waste of time when I don't need to do it.
It's funny because I'd much rather work for the companies in drivable distances if given the straight choice. I love to be able to get on site for meetings of if I need something physical done with hardware but alas its not to be. :)
Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#14It almost sounds like sexual selection in the way that the natural logic is turned on its head. A male bird with such a cumbersome and visible plumage could only survive if its genes were awesome in all other respects, so it gets more favor from the female birds.
A company that had many remote workers would crash and burn if it didn't have many other qualities (good management, processes and developers) to support the remote workers.
Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#15Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#16Have been working remotely for over 6 years and all of our team are remote. I think there is a massive change coming as businesses start to adapt to the idea of working remotely. It's just the beginning of the trend.
Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#17I wonder if 20 years from now, programmers will see working in an office as a luxury, rather than working from home.
Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#18Actually, I think the "chromosomal difference" that will pull some companies ahead and leave some in the dust is open allocation. See: http://www.quora.com/Software-Development-Methodologies/What... . This is related to telework because project allocation is one of the first things to fail in a badly-designed distributed company (the main hub takes all the interesting work for itself).
Remote work I have mixed views of, because it's obviously a good thing in the abstract, but I also think there are major benefits to having people eat lunch together and discuss ideas through informal channels. Also, having a culture where some people cannot participate in those benefits, but others do, is, I think, problematic. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that completely distributed companies do better than semi-distributed ones. I'm glad to see it becoming more common, though.
Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of support infrastructure are you talking about? I work remotely a couple days a week and we have several full-time remote workers on my team. We setup a Webex meetings for every meeting and we all have webcams. Besides that, we will informally use Google Hangouts to chat with each other. I'm just curious what we could do beyond that to support the remote people.
Have a ticketing system. Use it religiously. Have online chat options (gmail is good). Use it religiously. Include remotes in conference calls. Do it religiously. Have key discussions in email, or at least summarized there, instead of just in person. Do it religiously. In short, make sure that everything is accessible for people who weren't there. And keep the habit going always.
Wrote this up but it didn't seem to post before...
Treat the remote workers as if they are local deaf workers. How would you accommodate a deaf co-worker? You'd write down a hell of a lot more stuff in emails, documents, wikis, blogs, etc. There's huge value in written documentation - and keeping it up to date - that goes well beyond the immediate "get stuff done ASAP!" needs. Every time a new person comes in to the team, they have a record of documentation, mailing list archives to sort through, revisions of docs to learn from, etc.
Somehow all the same tools and techniques that make collaborative development possible and popular in the open source world tend to get shunned in corporate cubes.
Re: Companies that support remote workers win against those that don’t
#20I wonder if 20 years from now, programmers will see working in an office as a luxury, rather than working from home.
Depends on what kind of office. Is it the luxury office of separate private offices or the budget office of being crammed together in an open space with a lot of noise.