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Is remote work just possible for software and marketing companies?

Let’s resume at first the difference between partly and fully remote companies (read also that blog post: What is remote work, a digital nomad or even a remote-first company?). The partly remote company has offices with co-located workers on one hand and remote workers on the other hand. The fully remote company consists only of remote workers, also if some are co-working. The term ‘remote worker’ includes permanent employees, freelancers or contractors and is independent of their location (remote office, home, co-working or travelling).

Partly remote company

You can imagine every traditional company here, because a lot of them are enabling their workers to work from home partially. Needless to say, that this is not possible for people who are using tools or other equipment which is located at the companies property. So remote work is possible for everyone who needs only internet, laptop and phone for work. There are also positions where you need equipment only at some days. Imagine a tester, who is setting up a test jig at some days and programming test sequences and running tests with online access to its already functioning test rack on other days.

The companies are sending all their workers home these days, may it be engineers, accountants, lawyers, purchasers, managers, marketers and authors for sure. But is it even possible to have a fully remote company beyond software, marketing and journalism? My optinion is clearly yes!

Fully remote company

We said before, that everyone who just needs internet, laptop and phone can work remotely. So every company which employs more than 80% of those workers can go fully remote. Why are still so many people co-located at offices? The biggest point is, that the manager (middle and top management) are not used to it and are afraid of losing power over their staff.

But it is possible nowadays – the famous examples are showing it: Basecamp, 99 designs, Buffer, Trello and others. That are all software companies? Is the headline right in the end? No! My theory goes like this: it is much easier to build a fully remote company from scratch than transform an existing one. And with that knowledge ask yourself, which industry is fast growing and creates lots of new firms?

Thought Experiment

We will soon see fully remote companies in every industry. Lets make a thought experiment with a company which develops and produces components for construction machines.

A sales person will maintain contacts to customers remotely and personally like in the past. He or she will make an offer after consulting engineering and production people. After getting the order, a remote project manager will clarify all the open points with engineering, production and the customer and will start the developing. Mechanical engineers have a 3D-printer for fast samples or will get printed parts overnight.

Electronical engineers are soldering easy parts by their own or get SMT assembled modules in a few days (to wherever they work). Software engineers are developing inside simulations and can get hardware in a few days, as well. The industrial engineer, who manages sourcing, the kinds of manufacturing steps and the grade of automation can also work remotely. The only one who is linked to a location is the assembly guy. He is the one who manages prototype assembly and organizes everything for series assembly, may it be manually or partly or fully automated.

If you make something completely new, it will help if you arrange face-to-face integration weeks, where mechanical parts, electronical modules and software will be integrated by the developers. It also helps to work closely with the test laboratory which conducts mechanical and electrical environmental tests to avoid extra loops.

And of course it is great to meet the customer with the key people of the team. All the rest of the work – and I am pretty sure here – is possible remotely.

Please question yourself: how many of your tasks can you do from home?

For sure everything I write needs proper remote project management and very good collaboration and has trade-offs on top – but the benefits are clear (Why your company has to go remote). You have simply not the best talents for your jobs next to your office. If you are an employer, deal with that and start the transition of your company (How to start the transition to a remote company) or start your own fully remote company now. If you like to be employed, look around for remote work opportunities.

Please use the comment section for any suggestions or objections. And if you need a remote project manager for the scenario above, please let me know.

 

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The benefits of remote working for startups and small companies

There are so many general benefits of remote work, that it is hard to address them all. You can also have a look at this post: ‘Why your company has to go remote‘. This post here is about the special situation at a startup or a small company.

What characterices startups and small companies? You have a small number of permanent employees, you will have limited financial resources and a very dynamic environment relating to the market and the potentially growth of the company.

Employees

It is clear, that the best talent is spread over the entire planet. If you try to attract them as onsite employees to your small company you will fail, because they simply will not move into insecurity. That is the reason, why potential founders moved to Silicon Valley or other startup hubs before. With letting your staff work remotely, only your work and your team counts while hiring and not the location!

If you have spread your employees over different markets, you have the valuable possibility to get important information for your product management, i.e. if your product is likely to work in that market or not.

Budget

We said before, that small companies and startups have tiny budgets. How to save that liquidity – which is essential for your small company – with remote work:

We all know that the worldwide average salaries for your employees are not as high as in the few big startup hubs around the globe. Sound like ‘wage dumping’, but that is not a must. You can pay your employees according to their work and enable them a high living standard wherever they are located and be under the San Francisco wage anyway.

The other cost impact is the saving of offices, furniture, IT infrastructure, energy, janitor service and cleaning personnel. To rent conference rooms for your bi-annual project meetings is definetly the cheaper alternative. It comes with the great idea to change location with every meeting to ‘visit’ your employees at their locations with the entire team.

Efficiency

With a small number of people, you will experience that their level of efficiency will be directly visible at the companies results. You will boost the efficiency by letting your employees work remote, because ‘work doesn’t happen at work’ like lots of authors are explaining (i.e. Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson). The key points are less useless meetings, less distraction of crowded offices and collegues who work like ‘ask a collegue is better than think for myself’. Probably you know what I am talking of.

You should let your workforce not only work where they want, but also when they want, because only they know where and when they are most productive. For sure there is some overlap time needed for video calls, but the rest of the time should remain flexible.

Time Zones

Having workers in different time zones is first of all an obstacle. But imagine around the clock coding-testing-coding or overnight bug fixing for happy clients or even a 24/7 help desk with just a handful employees. That is a really big boost for the customer service.

If you work remotely just from the beginning, you are avoiding problems with turning your existing company to a remote one. That includes normally discussions about processes, tools, collaboration with and behaviour of single remote workers. See more in the post ‘How to start the transition to a remote company’.

Remote work has lots of advantages, especially for startups and small companies. What are your experiences? Let us know in the comment section.

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What a good remote project manager needs to know

What is a remote project manager? That’s easy, its a project manager of a remote team. So what is different between managing an onsite or a remote team?

Most articles about this topic are not highlighting, that most methods and approaches are the same. Time, resource and budget planning, controlling or stakeholder management are nearly the same with onsite and remote projects. But if you take the PMI methodology for example, it says that you have to adjust all methods to the specific circumstances of the project anyway. The location and composition of the team is, of course, an important characteristic.

What are the major different topics, the remote project manager has to deal with? They are:

  • Communications
  • Tools
  • Team Management
Communications

The known principle is ‘everyone has to know everything what is important to his / her work at any given time’ – not more and not less.

The diffuculties with remote teams are, that you don’t have talks from desk to desk and you don’t have the informal meetings at the water cooler or coffee maschine. According to the famous book Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, are the employers of Basecamp encouraged to use their chat software Campfire as a ‘virtual water cooler’.

Instead of that you have to assure that all inforamtion will be exchanged in written (i.e. design specifications) or via chat, phone or video conference. The advantage here is, that agreements are more binding, but on the other hand, it is hard to get the mood of the participants and the reading between the lines.

Use the communication tools according to the urgency of the information:

  • urgent: make a call (but think about the time zone)
  • less urgent: reach them via messenger
  • not urgent at all: use email

Be very cautious if there is a little misunderstanding or you sense a bad mood at any form of communication. Normally that is only the tip of the iceberg. Get over this with temporarly even more communication, be it written, via phone or video or even face-to-face if needed.

Tools

We can’t do remote work without a number of tools. Remember that only the tools enabled us to work with distributed teams around the world.

The variety of tools in unbelievable. Its very hard to get a good overview or to make suggestions. Its also continuously envoling as we know the matter with software. Let’s focus on the tasks we have to address with the tools:

  • project management (schedule, resources, timetracking)
  • communication (VoIP, video, chat)
  • document management
  • source code management with version control, if you create software

Commonly you will use the tools which are in place at your company or at the client. If you have the choice, check out tool comparisons and have a close look on what will help the team while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.

Team management

Together with communications, managing the team is the most important topic for the remote project manager.

The great advantage of remote work, that you can hire the best talents (for the best price) worldwide, comes with the challenge that you will maybe not work in the same time zone. And even if – you should maintain a plan with the actual (remember travelling digital nomads) time zones and preferred working hours of all team members.

Get a very good overview about everyones experiences, skills, characteristics, position in the company, etc. At best you make longer one-on-ones at the beginning of the project. It is very good, if you have a face-to-face kickoff or get-togethers once or twice a year.

To enhance the collaboration, allow some time for personal conversation. So start every phone conference with some small talk and encourage the team members to exchange some information about hobbies, family situation or about the home or current city or country at other situations.

The project manager is the critical role in a distributed team. He enables all the remote work benefits, if he / she makes a good job and can destroy the project and the reputation of remote work if he / she skews it up.

Contact me if you need a remote project manager or even a coach for your project manager!

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Remote Work opposes Nationalism!

The actual development in Europe and for sure extremly in the US politics throws questions in every community and every industry.

So, what is the remote work industry thinking about? The remote work ideology, if we like to name it that way, is the complete opposite of all nationalistic thinking. Most remote workers symbolize globalization, multiculturalism, equality and freedom (of thought, speech, action, religion, trade, loacation and much more).

There are just a few remote workers in the world, who are working from home or in a co-working space for a company or customers, without any connection to foreign nations. All the others have regular communication, collaboration, partnerships and trade (of goods and knowledge) with different countries. And we love that and we know the benefits.

Globalization is not 100% positive for everyone, we are not denying the drawbacks. But nationalism is definitive the wrong answer! To name one example: the jobless production workforce of the North of the USA will be not saved by import taxes or anti-immigration actions. They will only be saved by appropriate educational actions (education has already changed to a lifelong task) and complete opening to the global remote work industry.

To the political leaders everywhere: Think of easier taxes for digital nomads, e-residencies, universal basic income, free travel, working visas for every taxpaying worker and free internet with net neutrality instead of closing your borders!

So in these days, remote workes are Canadians instead of US citizens. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, twittered at 28th of January 2017 ‘To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada’.

Anyway, most remote workers are decribing themselves as ‘global citizens’. Surveys of millennials are showing a rising numbers of people identifying themselves with the global community rather than with a nation.

Sorry, Mr. Trump, there is no place for your ideology in our future communities!

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How remote work supports the health of our planet

There are different aspects of reducing our footprint on our planet with remote work. I will go through them and will also highlight, that there are two points where remote work stresses the environment.

Commuting

We all know that commuting is a bad thing. Not only for commuters and the productivity, it’s at first bad for the environment. For sure it’s better to take bus, train or ferry (i.e. in Vancouver or Sydney) then your car, but in any case you have a significant amount of air pollution and climate gases forcing climate change. If you power your electric car by photovoltaics, you are the extreme rare exception.

Lot’s of cities are now looking closely at their pollution data, maybe a little more since VWs scandal. Some are calculating how many death per year are caused by traffic pollution and some are even banning cities temporarily for diesel cars (“Oslo temporarily bans diesel cars to combat pollution” by TheGuardian).

Now it’s very clear what a big impact working from home has for the health of the environment and the health of the people. And we are not starting to discuss the saving on gas, car loans, parking or train tickets or the danger of accidents in this article.

Less commuting results in less demand for new or wider freeways, streets and railroads. That is a direct impact to longer untouched nature or the possibility for more parkland.

De-Urbanisation

Today, urbanisation is still a mega trend in developped and developping countries. This study (2014 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects) of the United Nations shows it well and is also projecting this till 2030.

But the rise of remote work will slow this process down and I’m pretty sure, it will reverse that trend someday in the midterm future. The reason is clear, without the need to life in a city for work, lot’s of people will seek a place with more nature und less leases (however many will stay in the city, which is ok because actual infrastructure is more than enough for them).

The de-urbanisation, caused by the fact that you are able to live in a quieter, cheaper and cleaner environment, will have a big impact on the environment. Huge areas in metropol regions can be converted into parks or can be completely recultivated. That’s adding large potential space for plants and animals and will increase the air quality to name only one big benefit.

This decentralisation of living will fit perfectly with the new general way of power generation through solar and wind. The power will be generated and consumed decentralised, without the need of increasing the number of huge power plants to feed the demand of the cities or to build new power lines.

Downside

But there is, like always, a downside with remote work and the environment. If you are a digital nomad, you like to travel much, including flying a lot with planes and use all the other transporting possibilities. It depends on the commute, that you would do at your home town and it depends heavily on the frequency and lenght of your travelling, if you want to calculate what of both is worse.

But in any case you should consider to reduce your carbon footprint as digital nomad. There are lots of possibilities, donating for forestation projects or volunteering (for sure online) for nonprofits are only two of them.

The other downside will come from the wish to life and work at beautiful places (i.e. in the near of nice beaches). That will bring a pressure on that communities to enlarge their size into untouched nature. Hopefully we can cope that with a modern approach of coexistance of people and nature with as less impact as needed.

What are your thoughts on remote work and our environment? Please let us know in the comment section!