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I’m experimenting with something new for my new startup. I’m calling it “fractional” remote: Everybody is encouraged to work from home Wednesday through Friday. Open to better names for this too.
So far, we’re all really enjoying the balance.
- You get to connect with everybody Monday/Tuesday.
- All meetings are scheduled for those two in office days, which is more than flexible enough to enable that kind of collaboration, which is often necessary.
- You get a solid three days of productive time to do independent work.
- Remote workers aren’t considered second-class, since everybody is a “remote” worker.
- Fewer days commuting means that my hiring pool is a bit larger, as people can stomach a longer commute for two days rather than five.
- You don’t miss out on important discussions because nobody is in the office when you aren’t.
- All important communications are likely to recorded electronically, since remote communication days dominate the calendar.
BTW, if you’re in (or near!) Seattle. I’m hiring :) Contact details in profile.
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It should at least make the catchment a bit wider, though. There are some people who won’t commute to X every day, or most days, but who would do one or two days. I’ve worked with someone like that, who had a very long commute, and it was fine (though it for me it really underscored the question “so why do the rest of us have to be in here every day?”)
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Right now, we’re pretty small. As the company grows, my intention is to also grow the geographical area we hire from.
I still believe that face-to-face time is critically valuable. Having myself been a remote worker on distributed teams, I’ve seen first hand how it requires the right kind of people, culture, and experience to make it work effectively. There is a real human cost to not having regular face-to-face interactions. The baseline is remote-friendly practices, which I think we’re on track for. As the team grows, work becomes more clearly defined, and individuals become more specialized, the communication overhead of remote-work are reduced.
If were didn’t do this, we could only really hire from Seattle proper. Maybe some folks who don’t mind a long commute too. But, with this policy, all of a sudden everybody on the east side of Lake Washington may be more willing to take a chance on such a job. An hour+ commute daily across the bridge is hellish, but doing it only twice per week, and probably only commuting around 10am and 3pm or so, and suddenly it’s not that bad. Same goes for cities neighboring to the north and south.
The next step would be hiring from Portland, Oregon or Vancouver, Canada. Commute a bunch for your first few weeks, we’ll put you up in a hotel, and then reduce your commute schedule to monthly, and then eventually only commute for a week each quarter, or something like that. Once we can afford it, this option can be opened up to people who need to commute by plane too. Eventually, the “100%” remote is likely, but even then, I’d want to make sure people interact face-to-face at least several times per year.
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that kind of collaboration, which is often necessary
Can you write more about why in-person collaboration is often necessary? I’m a fan of the remote-only option, but I’d like to understand other perspectives.
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Two reasons:
- Face-to-face communication has higher information bandwidth than any other form of communication.
My new business involves the marriage of legal and engineering expertise. On more than one occasion in the short lifespan of this organization, a week-long engineering confusion was resolved by physically looking over the shoulder of the paralegal assembling a binder of paperwork. In past remote work, I’ve experienced escalation from email, to IM, to phone call, to video conference, and at least once to “fuck it, I’m getting on a plane and coming over there”. In my opinion, an escalation process like that should be more common rather than less. If you want to be competitive, you shouldn’t completely eliminate your highest-bandwidth communication channel. Besides, there’s still no better collaboration tool than shared physical writing surfaces.
- Face-to-face communication enables bonding that soothes tensions and smooths work.
I’ve worked on several split-office, but non-remote teams. The narrative at each was “everybody in $other_city is an idiot”, but at the end of a week long visit, “oh they’re not so bad”. I have lots of regular internet acquaintances. The only ones who have become “friends” are those I’ve run in to physically at conferences over and over again. I’ve contracted work remotely to people with or without having worked with them locally before. A month of working together locally builds the same trust as a year’s worth of remote work. As far as I can tell, these are not unique experiences.
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Thanks for sharing your perspective. Now, here’s more on mine.
For me, the advantages of remote-only work all come down to maximizing inclusion.
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Face-to-face communication, video conferencing, and (to a lesser extent) audio convey a lot of irrelevant information that could be a distraction and even trigger unconscious biases: the person’s appearance, clothing, accent, etc. In text, a person is just their name (or possibly a pseudonym) and their words.
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A remote-only team, particularly using primarily text, is more inclusive of people with disabilities – blind, deaf, mobility impaired, speech impediments, etc.
I’ll grant, though, that the ideal remote-only, text-only environment that I’m advocating here would probably feel very constrained for most people.
Also, I’ve only experienced the remote-only option in the context of a company where most of the staff were blind (or at least visually impaired like me). So maybe it only worked for us because we were used to doing without the high-bandwidth channel of vision in the first place. And even we relied heavily on voice communication. Sometime I want to try doing a team project from start to finish with nothing more than text.
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I ran a remote team for a couple of years and I have to agree with @brandonbloom. As much as I prefer text communication, it just didn’t work all that well. We used Slack, email and video calls. We regularly failed to resolve things via Slack and email, whether regarding requirements or development problems. It is very hard to explain things clearly without writing a wall of text, and nobody wants to write a wall of text (or has the time to do it). Video calls and screen sharing allowed us to have a much more productive dialog.
Contrariwise, I didn’t feel a particular need to escalate further and meet in person. For me, it was enough to spend a bit of time in person to get acquainted in the beginning, and after that video calls were enough both to carry the relationship forward and to resolve any issues.
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I’ve thought about giving this a try, it’s cool to know someone is already doing it! A couple of questions: does this happen only to your team or is it for the whole company? What happens when someone can’t come on a be-in-office-day?
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We’re a small startup still, so it’s the whole company.
If you can’t come in the office for whatever reason, it’s no different than other flexible schedule companies where you’d either take time off, or just WFH that day to get your big delivery, or rearrange hours to deal with a personal matter, or whatever. The key difference is that a large portion of the non-productivity reasons to WFH are schedule-able, so you can just plan to have your couch or whatever delivered on a Thursday. But “life happens”, so if something unplanned comes up, that’s perfectly OK. Since electronic communication is the norm W-F, you hopefully won’t have missed too much.
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i’ve wished i was in this situation for a while now after experiencing both “remote only” and “no remote”.
Remote is great when working alone. When hunkering down and actually coding, working remote is great. Brain not currently working? No problem, I’ll just take a break for 2 hours and work tonight. Or, wake up and “in the zone”, let me hack for 12 hours today with no interruptions.
At the same time, when I was remote, not being able to have the occasional sync up in person definitely made work more difficult.
So I think your idea is great and as long as your team is honest/responsible I think it should work out well. Would be interested in knowing how it works out.
ergodox-ez / blank keycaps / current dvorak configuration
Another ergodox with dvorak here. The ability to type without having to squeeze your wrists together greatly increases comfort imho. I like the straight (vertically-staggered) columns from a comfort perspective as well.
On the ergodox ez and very happy with it. I built one back before the ez with clear switches but I actually prefer the brown switches in my ex.