A book about operating as remote organizations, why it’s good, and how to do it effectively, by Jason Fried and DHH, the founders of 37signals (the company behind Basecamp).

Summary

The book is divided into roughly five parts:

1. Why remote, and why now
2. How to collaborate and work effectively as a remote team
3. How to hire for remote teams
4. How to manage remote teams
5. How to get the best out of remote jobs as a remote team member

With the recent rapid progress in technology in the forms of better video conferencing apps, and Internet-based collaboration tools such as GitHub, remote work is taking off quickly and emerging as a solid alternative to traditional on-site office style work. There are many benefits to doing remote, including much wider access to talent, more freedom and flexibility for employees, but it is still very much a tradeoff as it does have its own disadvantages.

The authors believe that most organizations can operate as remote companies, regardless of their industries or size. This is evident in the large number of companies that already operate remotely, or at least have significant portions of their team operate remotely, companies like AT&T and Intel.

If you are convinced and want to give remote a try, beware that you shouldn’t do it casually. Remote is not something that you can tack on nonchalantly, and must be tried sincerely, with at least a whole team. Otherwise you will be setting it up for failure before it even starts. With that said, remote doesn’t have to be “all or nothing”, especially in larger organizations. Parts of the organization can operate remotely while others on-site. You should try not to split individual teams like this though.

Hiring is key in building an effective remote team. The authors have always brought in the final round of new hire candidates for in-person meetings. This allows the candidates to mingle with the team face-to-face, which is much better to screen for cultural fit.

When selecting remote candidates, here are a couple of things to consider that may be different from hiring for on-site positions:

• Writing skills are critical, due to the higher amount of text-based communication that remote work requires
• Be mindful of time zones. Overlap of working time is very important for remote teams to function effectively, and from the authors’ experience, at least 4 hours of overlap time is needed

Managing remote teams also require somewhat different techniques than traditional in-office management. Instead of looking for hours in office, remote management needs to shift to evaluate the work directly, which is what matters in the end anyway. Frequent communications and one-on-one check-ins become more critical for surfacing issues quickly, as remote employees don’t have as much opportunity to socialize. Information and access must be as open as possible, to eliminate SPoFs (single point of failures), which become huge bottlenecks to the team’s overall productivity. And finally, it is critical that remote teams cannot be treated like second class citizens. The playing field must be level, with no preferential treatment or policies for either type of team.

The book offers various advice on how to make things work well as a remote employee, including tactical tips like making sure your chair is ergonomic.

Commentary

The book was written in 2013, when remote was still in its earlier days as a concept. Reading it now in 2020, many parts, especially the first sections justifying remote as a great way to work, feel obvious and unnecessary. This is a testament to the growth and proliferation of remote work as a style and philosophy in the last 7 years, in part due to the work of this pair of authors.

I think that being remote sets a higher bar on the level and quality of employees that you need in order to function effectively. From my own experience with remote, distributed teams, hiring is absolutely key, and the book unfortunately falls short on offering good, practical guidance on how to do this right. Most candidate screening tips offered are generic and would fit the criteria for great employees regardless of their remote vs. on-site status. It seems that effective remote employees are just good, “regular” employees with additional attributes, such as being self-disciplined. Remote teams demand a strictly higher level and bigger set of attributes, not just a different combination of traits. And this may be prohibitively costly for some organizations.

I believe that remote working is a good alternative to the traditional on-site paradigm, strictly superior even, at least in the ideal case. However, I think the authors have painted too rosy of a picture for remote teams here, and don’t talk enough about the disadvantages of remote. A highly critical but difficult to quantify downside of operating remotely is the loss of casual face-to-face interactions. In an office, I find that a lot of crazy conversations and ideas are generated in these serendipitous interactions, which is almost impossible to replicate in remote teams because they are not things that can be scheduled. The book does talk about it briefly, but the benefits are greatly downplayed by the authors. Maybe it’s something that is overvalued by me.

Despite the book claiming remote “is not all or nothing”, I remain very skeptical of the mixed or hybrid approach, where parts of the organization is remote, while major hubs of on-site teams also exist. Especially if close collaboration between the different parts is required. Hubs create natural centers of decision-making power and knowledge, which often inevitably leads to remote teams becoming second class citizens. I think in terms of culture and processes, it absolutely has to be “all or nothing”. Even if geographical hubs of offices exist, for remote to really function effectively, everyone must follow the same set of rules, procedures, and ways of working, even when it seems stupid (e.g. people in the same room meeting via video conferencing).