A few thoughts on remote workers

A couple of days ago, I celebrated my 10 year anniversary of working from home. Same basement, 6 different jobs, WILDLY different experiences. I was lucky that my first work-from-home job was at Canonical. Had it been anywhere else, I would have run away and never looked back. Probably.

Canonical had an office in London for finance, executives, HR and a few other functions. Everyone else worked from home. Our primary means of communication were e-mail, IRC, a couple of wikis, and a bug tracker.

The fact that people aren’t in the same space isn’t a big deal. You could address that with an always-on Google Hangout or whatever. The real problem is that people aren’t in the same time zone.

Would you like to attend a meeting at 3am? How about a recurring one at 7pm? Yeah, me neither.

If I wanted to discuss something with someone, there was always a good chance they were sleeping. I’d spend the time writing down my thoughts and send an e-mail to the team. If they didn’t care about the subject, they could just ignore it. If they cared, they could weigh in. And they could do it when it was convenient for them.

Writing all those e-mails took a lot of time, but it was time extremely well spent:

• Half the time, just explaining the problem revealed the solution.
• Writing a response gives you time to consider all the options. This is much better than a meeting with no time to think things through.

In many corporate settings, people’s calendars are packed with meetings. The first time slot where all required participants are available could be weeks in the future. Rescheduling is also common, so reaching a decision takes a long, long time.

Even though writing e-mails takes time, it rarely takes more than a couple of days to reach a high quality decision. Best of all, you’re not wasting anyone’s time by inviting them to a meeting that they have no interest in.

All of this was business as usual at Canonical. It’s just how things were done. It wasn’t until later I realized how awful working from home could be.

I worked for a couple of companies where everyone was in the same office except for me. I was also in a very distant time zone. It’s hard to describe how disconnected that makes you feel. There was no overlap in working hours. Rather, there was a several hour gap between my working hours and theirs. Most discussions happened face-to-face. Sometimes in the hallway. Sometimes in a meeting at midnight (my time). There would be daily standups that would be recorded for my “convenience”. Occasionally, there would be an e-mail thread, because my input was required, but even then, half the follow-up was face-to-face.

It was awful. I had always been very driven, motivated, and productive, but working this way destroyed that entirely. It took a long time to build it back up again.

The lesson is that adding a distributed member to your team means that you have to reconsider how you communicate. If you keep doing things how you’ve always done them, the distributed member will be left out and will eventually leave. It’s really that simple.

If you need to discuss something, do it in a way that will include the distributed team member. It’ll feel awkward writing an e-mail to the guy sitting in the next cubicle, but that’s what you’re signing up for when you add a remote worker. Always use means of communication that allows the remote workers to participate. E-mail is excellent for this. Also use something like Slack, Flowdock, IRC, or whatever, so that you can have more rapid conversations and still allow the whole team to be included no matter where they are in time and space.