1. The company policy: of the company has a no-remote policy this will be very difficult. If the company has a limited-remote policy, it’s already much easier, it means asking for additional remote days on top of existing policy and provides you an opportunity to show that you are productive working remote
2. Your productivity and mutual trust: on the individual level I like to believe everybody can be productive remote. On the aggregate it didn’t work that way though. Some people would use the remote time for personal matters and chalk up a day with limited output to ‘I was doing research’, others would have twice the output they had at the office. It’s difficult to know up front where someone will fall on that scale. If you can show with 1-2 days remote that you can be productive, it’s a huge help in this decision
3. Spill-over effects. If others in your team are (possibly) not productive remote it might be difficult to give you a full remote opportunity. Others will expect the same privileges and it might be easier to limit it for everybody rather than explaining individuals that I dont trust them remote yet.
4. Interactions: if the office has a weekly townhall, or if we have a quarterly long-term planning session, can you join these, or do we need to setup video and mics for that? It helps if you can be in person on these moments (even if you’re not convinced they’re always useful)
Be careful with this, because it can be a form of selection bias. I've run plenty of errands and had plenty of non-productive days from the office too. This stuff is unavoidable. If you're going to put WFH under intense scrutiny, make sure to put office work under the same level of scrutiny otherwise it might just be that you notice unproductive days more because you're looking harder.
At a previous company, the WFH policy included a question "How will your performance be measured when working from home?" to which I answered "The same as when at the office", but the question implies a level of suspicion that sets the tone for the whole thing. If you want to allow WFH but are concerned about productivity, do it in good faith and allow enough time to get a statistically significant sample size, and actually compare it with office work rather than just looking at the raw numbers in isolation.
Edit to add: You might also find that people will choose to WFH on days they were planning to run errands, but they likely would have anyway had they worked from the office, so you need to account for this too.
Find a job that already offers remote.
You can't really fake anything with a remote company. You don't get any points for showing up. At the same time, the amount of time-wasting activities created by people who are searching for 'participation rewards' is small or none.
Or, put another way, if you wanted to be treated like an adult, find a company that hires adults.
My recent experience with a company that allowed remote work but was 95% in-office was absolutely miserable. They won’t accomodate any change in communication style, tools, and they’ll regularly have important discussions in the office without you. And you’ll never change their culture. Plus as others have said, those kind of places will never give senior positions to remote workers.
Remote work is hard to do well. We're constantly iterating on it and trying to improve it. It's not always intuitive. If your company isn't focused on it, it will not work.
People routinely work from all sorts of places do so in a manner that causes problems for others it doesn't really matter. Most managers don't care so long as they know what timezone you are in and when you can be expected to be available on chat/phone/whatever.
I've found that companies that promote work-life balance as one of their strengths are the best places to ask or test the waters.
First, your quality of life isn't really a selling point from employers point of view. To raise your odds at negotiations you should focus solely on the employers problems. The same applies when selling something - you should not focus on the benefits that you as a seller get (like money), but on the problems that get solved from the employer.
Secondly, focusing on raw productivity on alone seems to be quite a common thing on these discussions. I think it is quite limited viewpoint, since a ton of other things matter as well in addition to productivity. Communication with others, spreading your knowledge, trust issues, where to focus, etc.
When you walk out the door of the office, work should be over and done with until you return. Taking work home should be impossible.
Paid overtime helps greatly. It discourages the employer from trying to get free work out of you.
Having a non-zero commute doesn't have to mean commuting for 2 hours in urban traffic. You can pick a location where a tiny commute is possible.
As someone else commented in this thread, visibility into what you're doing is very important. Especially in the beginning, don't push your manager to just trust you. Show what you're doing.
Firstly, ensure that you are always seen to be productive and delivering even when you're not being watched. The most important thing to build trust is for people to see that you can be trusted to do your work to a high standard without supervision.
Once this has been achieved, move to the next stage of your plan:
"I'm not coming in on Wednesday, I have an appointment I need to attend to a 11:45am and 4 hours of commute is unproductive so I'm going to get my work done from home."
Ensure that your deliverables are visible when you work from home - go the extra mile to ensure that your efforts are seen. Visibility is highly important here.
Do this periodically for a few months and eventually tell them that you will be working from home on Wednesdays from this point forward. This is much easier to do when you've got a reputation for delivering the goods. Continue to ensure that the work you deliver from home is visible.
After a little while of this, up it to two days a week and perhaps this will be okay. I find that 2-3 days a week from home is plenty for my sanity. I need to be in the office for the social aspect and to feel like I'm part of the team.
Completely cutting myself off from the camaraderie of the office doesn't do anything for my sense of wellbeing. So I usually try to be in the office a couple of days a week, just for my own sanity.
I worked over the summer for a company based out of Vancouver and never got to meet the team because it was work from home for 5 days a week. This was hard. I actually went so far as to get farm hands for my farm, as much so that I didn't feel alone as for farm labour. At the end of the summer, I negotiated a part time contract with them for another 6 months so I could take on a local client so I'd have a social outlet.
It's a game, and a game that often in large corps involves deception, but I don't think has to. (Or perhaps I'm just making myself feel better by calling it "Crafting perceptions.")
There was a post a while back about a topic, "status fungibility." In a perfect world, you'd be in a team where everyone knows how hard that task is and you wouldn't have to say a thing. I've been on teams like that. They're fantastic. But in most worlds, you have a team where, if you're lucky, a handful of the people know _deeply_ what you're doing and the rest have a general idea. They probably aren't _trying_ too look down on you for being silent, but next to the guy who gives status updates translating what might be a simple task into something they perceive as a journey and time consuming, the human mind tends to use flawed heuristics that benefit certain types of overcommunication.
I've wrapped this in a lot of flowery and clinical language to try and not get incendiary about of it, but the crux is that you sometimes have to help your team see the value you bring, (The positive side) while recognizing (the negative side) that this enables an ecosystem where this opaqueness can allow others to use this intangibility to try and boost their standing vs. yours, so there's a degree of "protect yourself."
Sorry if this is a ramble. It's a topic I took a while to build mental models for (similarly introverted) and something that I've had frustrations with which is why I now try to look at it very impassively. I hope these thoughts offer at least a useful point of view.
Working for HP in Atlanta, I'd already proved myself during the '96 Olympics, when even the 12 miles to work was impossible. In 2000, our rent went out of sight; we owned 7 rural acres -- about 800 miles away -- so we just decided to move. I figured my boss would let me telecommute, but I didn't ask for it: I just told him, very honestly, that I was moving, and why. He said, "That's fair. I support you in this move, if you understand that you won't have the same advancement opportunities as someone who's in the office." I agreed, and that was that. I worked another 15 years that way, until HP fell apart and I wanted to change jobs.
I'm with a different company now. The original company didn't actually handle full remote well. Poor communication made everything difficult. The new job has a pretty strong remote culture. MKe sure you out in the effort of no one else does or you'll be unhappy.
they said 'would you like to try working remote for a few months, see if it works out for both of us ?'. I agreed and few months became 4 years. I'd visit the office once a month for department-wide meetings, so they wouldn't forget my ugly mug.
of course, database stuff is very well suited for remote work, so I might have lucked out there.. then again, when it came time for a promotion after 5 years, they gave me a decent raise, but on the condition 'you have to come in once a week'. i took the raise but left soon after.
My company moved from Chicago suburbs to Tampa FL and I didn't want to relocate to Tampa.
I was already working 2 days per week from home, so I simply told them I wasn't relocating with the company and I would work remotely. It hardly matters at all since my manager and 2/3 of my direct reports are located in Germany so I would have effectively been remote anyway.
(29 years ago. I guess Em Software is a "lifestyle" company (just 4 of us working out of our homes, so you can discount the anecdata...).)
I started Em with the idea of a futuristic wysiwyg document editor, with the help of my brother's friend who wrote us a check for $50K to get started, "and cut me in appropriately" (which we later paid back since we never had a traditional start-up)). But after 6 months of writing a business plan (yeah, I know..) and talking to friends in the software business, it was clear we weren't going to get VC funding. (I think 1990 was the nadir of software VC investments.)
So in my deep-dive into the document production market (QuarkXPress, FrameMaker, etc) I came across the small idea of building data publishing plug-ins for XPress (Xdata, copying an idea I saw for Aldus PageMaker), and started there (then Xtags, Xcatalog).
We later (2000-ish) branched out into plug-ins for Adobe InDesign, initially the same XPress plug-ins just ported (underwritten by Adobe), and then later expanded into workflow plugins (WordsFlow, DocsFlow) which are our mainstay right now.
Funny how we're doing more or less the same stuff as 30 years ago (well, plus additional products) in a supposedly fast-moving market. I suppose print publishing hasn't changed a lot in the past 20 years.
I was on a software team for 2 months before finding out I needed to move. I told my boss I had to move in 4 months, but I really wanted to keep my position and wanted to switch to working remotely. More than half of the engineering team at the time was offshore; however, they were all in an office with close communication with the higher-ups there. My boss basically said to me that he'd been working with remote folks for his entire career and if the other engineers had no problem with it, he didn't see an issue either.
4 years later I'm still remote and I couldn't be happier. Not at that same company, but at a new remote position.
The offshore team, previous bias to remote employees, and potentially the need to keep me onboard to get shit done for cheap helped me here. There were other employees who inquired about going remote, but they were turned down - one even needed to move for their SO (same as my case), so they ended up leaving the company when they moved.
It's really hit or miss unless you find a remote position where the company expects you to be remote right off the bat or you just get lucky and your boss trusts you to switch. Just remember that trust goes both ways - if your company doesn't trust you, maybe don't trust that you'll retire there. Going remote is a great way to test both sides of trust.
There were even times in the past where my boss talked to me about wanting me to be physically in the office more. These days I often only go in twice a week for less than half a day for meetings. Recently our boss worked remotely for a month from the other side of the globe. Our head of sales is considering moving 1000 miles away while staying on remotely.
We're tight knit and small enough that it hasn't been difficult to accommodate more remote work.
Do you know why they were turned down?
Long answer: I married a medical student, and due the matching process, had very little control over where I would end up moving to. I told my boss, boss's boss, head of the company, ect, that there was a chance that I'd have to move in about a year. Throughout the year, I periodically reminded everyone that I might move.
Once matching happened, I declared where I was moving. Our parent company happened to be local, and we worked closely with a team that was a 60 minute commute to where I was going. We arranged for me to have an office with the team that we worked with; but we all knew that I would primarily telecommute.
Except for a 1-month period of very bad weather, I commuted to my new office 1-2 times a week. It worked very well until our parent company announced they were closing my new office and moving everyone to what would be a 90 minute commute, in rush hour, for me.
I then asked to be a full-time telecommuter, and the answer was, "you work very well remote." A day or two after I packed my office up, our parent company sold us. I never went to the new office, although I honestly thought I was going to go there 1-2 times a month. It was a very nice location, and I was really looking forward to spending the day there when I needed to interact with our team there.
1) Either the whole team communicates in a remote manner, e.g. holding meetings via videoconferencing only and writing down follow-ups, meticulously logging progress via special tools, putting a lot of effort into documenting everything, so any member of the team can quickly find literally any piece of information and manage most of the tasks without asking peers for help.
2) Or you should ask for a position as mechanical and routine and async and redundant as possible, like I don't know, fully scripted first line of customer support, or data markup, or monkey testing, or something like that.
This is because most of the teamwork is actually about information flow, and the bigger the team - the larger the stream. In case of partial remote working, when some team members are indulged with home office days or even full remote, other members, and especially leads and managers, are just paying these outstanding info bills, just to keep remoters in the loop with the team and company as a whole.
So in my opinion the only way to work remote in a close-quarters team is to either be extremely special and indispensable just to strong-arm your privilege, or be largerly underpaid to justify communication tax you will lay on your teammates and direct supervisor.
1) most mechanical and routine jobs will be automated first. So in XXI it is not a wise choice.
2) Any team manager's duty is to reduce bus factor [1], so strong-arming remote job from competent supervisor should entail dissolving or breaking apart a unique employee's position.
I don't recommend going that route, but I _really_ wanted to work from home and was ready to quit if I didn't get it. I had requested a trial period of working from home two days a week and didn't even get one day. I brought it up every few months, but no progress was made, so I stopped caring about their stupid rules and did what I had to in order to focus on my work (I even moved my computer to an abandoned room at the opposite side of the room to prove I was more productive away from distractions).
My boss has a weird phobia of people working remote despite everyone who does work remote getting more done than those who work in the office. It's weird, and your boss is probably not as bad as mine in this regard.
Honestly, I recommend asking your boss to give you a trial of working from home for 2 days/week and prove that you're able to get more done. Once that's done, push for more days until you're only coming in for meetings, and then start pushing for whatever other pieces you'll need to go fully remote (virtual meetings, move conversations to a digital format, etc). Even if they say no, they'll recognize your initiative if you keep the dialogue about you giving more value to the company.
Our boss is great, and does support remote work, it just seemed like there was this mental hurdle - inertia from social norms - that took a while to get past. He said he was ok with working remotely, but would still be bothered by simply not seeing a person for days at a time. There wasn't an issue staying in communication, and no issue with work getting done, so eventually he had to reconcile his position.
Someone proposed something like that to me recently, arguing that if the cost of living in my home city is less than in the office city then I shouldn't be paid as much. I'm thinking pay should be based on productivity and value to the company instead of value to me.
Value produced is the upper cap of the pay, the lower cap is dictated by how much competition there is on the market. The employer can look at it like buying any other kind of service. If you work remotely, you compete with all the freelancers/contractors around the world. If the company values local employees, and you can work locally at the office, there is much less competition for that kind of position.
(edit: moving for reasons unrelated to employment with the San Francisco company)
Why should you get paid less for doing the same amount of work? What does it matter to the employer?
The question is, how much will it cost your employer to replace you? Presumably, they will be hiring your replacement locally so your salary should be compared to local wages.
The trick, is to make yourself indispensable (or at least very, very expensive to do so). Focus on being the sole owner of crucial products and knowledge (we are after all, knowledge workers). If you find yourself in a position where redundancy is being put in place (i.e hiring someone to shadow you, etc. then it's time to move up the knowledge chain or to a different product).
So is most companies' unwillingness to allow full-time remote work. If it is possible to alter the mindset about the latter, it should certainly be so about the former.
No, but you need to realize that you're being paid based on your value to the company.
The company doesn’t care about you. And the company culture certainly doesn’t care about where you are. Success in being remote depends solely on your managers preference for keeping watch – and wether or not the majority of your teams talents and productivity takes place remote as well.
If your manager doesn’t like work happening outside of arms reach, you won’t be successful. If 60-70% of progress happens within reach of your managers arms, you won’t be successful.
The only other major impediment is top level company policy. Read: Yahoo and IBM.
There were/are so drawbacks that I should mention.
-I didn't get a raise that year because he wanted to make sure this remote thing was going to work.
-Everyone in the office gets free lunch every Friday but me since I am remote.
-I miss out on every company team building event
-I miss out on the company big Christmas party
I could go to the company events, but I would have to pay for my own flight and hotel. So I don't see myself going.
-I often feel disconnected with the company and only know a handful of remaining employees that still work there when I was in the office
So there are downsides to bring the only remote employee. But I have an amazing schedule and don't have to travel. This works out perfectly with dealing with 2 kids and daycare.
Btw, the raises come almost every year now and are decent. I am very content in my current situation.
So my advice is to keep your head down, come to work early, stay late and get some good experience at your current job. My boss is a big time micro manager that said yes.
I bought my plane tickets to Asia for a 6 week trip and I told my boss 2 weeks before my trip that I wasn't happy living in the bay area. I loved my job, but I wanted to live anywhere else.
Rather than fire me / have me quit, he let me start working remotely keeping California time.
I was in a small place, we both liked each other, and I simply explained my situation. Been remote every since
(Of course, someone will cite "The graveyards are full of indispensable men"..)
I started as an employee of a contracting firm whose offices are all in different parts of the country from my now-employer. As a contractor, companies can be much more willing to not have you on site, especially if you aren't independent. Demonstrate enough value, and you may get a full-time offer, in which case it's a lot easier to leverage the fact that you've already proved your ability to work remote effectively.
The biggest benefit in this case was that I was able to negotiate salary as if I lived where the company is headquartered, resulting in an almost 2x increase over what I could negotiate where I am physically located.
So the steps for me were. 1) Establish myself as a valuable asset over several years at the company 2) Move closer to family and ask if I could work remotely 3) Work really hard to establish communication lines and insert myself into the same conversations that I would have been included in at the office.
No convincing needed.
I am moving to Spain in April and will be working remotely for the company I started contracting with back in August 2018. I did a ton of research and prepared a pitch deck and presented to my manager, who then advocated for me and moved it up the line to get approval from the department.
Some key points:
1. The company already allows a very flexible work from home schedule.
2. Although primarily focused around my region, there are a couple team members spread across the world. So it's not unprecedented.
3. The person whose role I took over (contract as well) moved to another country but then quit when they had trouble adapting to the culture (there was an eight hour time difference). So I had some possible baggage to work around.
4. I tested my ability to work off-hours and remotely with a two-week long trip to another city living with a friend and performed swimmingly.
5. You must convince them that, other than your physical presence, they will not notice any difference in quality of work, availability, or communication. Being that Spain has long working days anyway, the transition from my time (-7 GMT) to Spain (+1 GMT) will actually work out quite well from a working hours perspective.
Best of luck!
Also I find partial days remote works if your commute isn't so large. Work mornings from home and then afternoons in the office. Justify the work at home by early morning calls/meetings.
Have clear project plans with deliverables. Provide a weekly written update to your boss and other stake holders with the weekly progress.
To me, it comes down to a couple of things.
- Have you proven you are a good remote communicator (eg: if you're always doing private messages in Slack or don't communicate much at all, so everything that you do is only in your head, you might not be a good fit)
- Do you have plans to have a proper work area once you're remote. If you're going to be working from the middle of the living room with your significant other interrupting you to do the dishes or the kids screaming during video conference....NOPE. You need a plan.
- Your reasons for going remote won't interfere with productivity. It's totally ok if you're doing it for work life balance and take better care of your family. However if you're going to do strictly 9-5 (which is ok!) and be out half of the day on top of it (no longer ok) to take care of the kids and be constantly cancelling meetings and other obligation, then you just won't be meeting expectations anymore.
If you meet those criterias, it's a no brainer for me. I personally much prefer face to face interaction, but Ill fully support anyone who's serious about working remotely in my team. But they have to be serious about it.
Our company is located in NYC a few blocks away from PENN Station, where Long Island commuters arrive in Manhattan. Several top peeps in the company live on LI, and commute to work. Sometimes the commute is terrible, and they work remotely. And, there are peeps in the company who have family obligations which necessitate a flexible schedule. The schedule gaps in their office attendance is filled by remote work.
It all just works. I believe my colleagues recognize this situation is not common, and therefore the flexibility engenders loyalty to the company.
Also, senior colleagues are not micro-managers, and my fellow colleagues don't need constant supervision and instruction.
Finally, there's one argument which comes up in this cultue that might be helpful. Some senior colleagues say they can't get a lot done at work with interruptions from junior colleagues and phone calls. If you're in this position, then remote work could increase your productivity and help you meet deadlines.
Good luck.
Having a remote job when moving to a new town is ideal as it allows you to quickly secure housing with your latest paycheck. In my experience neither landlords nor mortgage companies care that your office/employer is out of state.
I would advise against this approach if you are more on the junior side as you might not learn as much as you would in the office (of course you might not learn anything from coworkers regardless in some cases). I would also advise against trying to work remote from the same city as your employer without a really good reason. This usually just makes you look like a jerk.
As for productivity, this can be a major challenge. When I first moved I lived in a very small apartment and was distracted by a good many things. I usually felt like I had to work into the night to make up for distracted time during the day.
Going to libraries and coworking spaces a couple days a week helps me. It helps with the cabin fever and it helps staying on task. Communication with your team and manager will likely also be a huge challenge and all I can say is be nice to everyone, be willing to help out in anyway you can, and initiate conversation with your manager often. I check in with my manager several times a week outside of standup to make sure critical items aren't getting missed. Our team will also screen share with each other often which can be uncomfortable at first but is vital. Our team is a mix of remote and in-office, but as more people became remote things improved. Reminding your manager and team dispassionately about any remote work challenges your are facing can help.
Best of luck.
Since then, I've done more freelance and employed work, but I've only accepted remote roles.
I've used https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job to find a new job
But I'm not alone in doing this, I might be relatively unique in doing it every single day though.
* travel to each event separately (my least preferred)
* have a couple of months off without pay
* work remotely for the couple of months while I was away
I'd earned a good rep at my company by smashing out the previous project on time/budget, so the working remotely was approved and all went well.
I liked it so much (escaping the northern hemisphere Winter), that I started my own consultancy and did the annual migration for the next 8 years. Most of that work was remote, so as long as I managed timezones, all was good.
I did have several things going for me:
1) We had a wfh day once a week
2) We had a few other employees (but not other devs) already working remotely
3) I already had a lot of freedom that came from tackling not fun (to some) issues, like build tolling, infrastructure interactions, etc. So I was already trusted to be proactive in what I was doing
4) I'd say perhaps the biggest thing that lead to it was having split management - a people top level manager over development and a tech top level manager of development. Both are great and work well together.
It helps that my company, SAP, has a strong home-office culture: A lot of employees are consultants, who spend most of Friday doing time-recording and other administrative activities, so Friday is traditionally home-office day (for those who want it). Last year, a new company policy was adopted that requires managers to provide an objective reason for why mobile work (such as home office) should not be allowed for their team members.
I was impressed at just how well they treat their employees. Kinda reminded me of the Simpson's episode where the Germans take over the power plant.
That said, it helps that IT is a white-collar industry. I have a few friends in blue-collar jobs, and working conditions sound worse over there, esp. for temp jobs where workers are considered fungible.
I worked remotely for them for two years before they laid off the entire engineering team, me included. My next and current job was remote from the beginning. It was easy to get because by then I had proven that I could be effective remotely.
A private office with a door you can shut is also up there. I actually lease a small office about 1.5 miles from my home. Normally a spare bedroom is sufficient, but we ran out of those in my home.
Keep a normal schedule. It doesn't have to be 9-5, but it needs to have a good amount of overlap with your team.
Have a backup computer and internet connection. (Cellphone tethering qualifies here.)
All that said, there's really no substitute for occasional face time. My company has a lot of remote staff, so we do quarterly gatherings where everyone comes to the same city to work together for a week.
I believe that the key to make it work is to have a remote-first culture, at least in the team you're on.
Being one of a company's only remote workers can be a terrible experience. What you gain in focus may easily be lost in terms of missed communications, being left out of spontaneous meetings, etc.
Also, depending on how far you live, missing out on company events. That can negatively impact your level of engagement with the company, which could also hurt your productivity.
1) Report frequently
2) Ask for paring if boss likes or whenever you need non-trivial discussion (it's better than chat obviously)
3) Tell boss what you will do today, your expectation on results
4) When problems occurs, let him know immediately or within 4 hours
I did all of these just for less than a year. After that he doesn't give a shit what I do anymore. It's kind of lonely now lol
For I couple of years I did all the actual coding from home, and then I spent a few weeks in the office, relaxing, being social and drinking free coffee :)
I don’t think you will have much of a chance of convincing them with arguments about productivity. Otherwise we wouldn’t have loud open offices everywhere.
In short, build up "career capital" by making yourself valuable to the company, which you can later use as leverage. Or as others have said, just get a different job that's already remote.
+ Sure, picking up someone?
- No, flying.
+ Ah! Where are you going?
- Home.
+ Home? Where are you?
- I've been in $REMOTE_COUNTRY for the last 3 months, I told you...
+ Right, I thought you stayed for a week or two only
(laughs on both sides of the call)
It helps when your boss is 10000KM from you :)
Finally, like a year later, my boss asked about it (in our first 1:1 meeting ever lol)... Apparently, a bunch of other devs did the same thing after me and now the office was becoming a ghost town. Leadership was super confused about it and tried forcing people back into the office.
Eventually, a re-org had the office "flourishing" again, with a new exciting "bro" culture and lots of mandatory after-work events (in the office...) - I left soon after and have been fully remote ever since.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and it becomes apparent pretty quickly if you aren't cut out for it... we're all professionals here and should be allowed to choose our optimal environment for getting things done.
TLDR; Be ready to walk, there are a ton of remote companies out there. Employment is a 2-way street, make it work for you!
