Being Close from Afar: Maximizing Value and Minimizing Risk with Remote Workers For me, being able to work remotely is one of the greatest gifts of the Information Age. It allowed me to help raise my daughters in the 80's and 90's, then to live almost 4 hours from a major airport, and now to visit my granddaughters in Chicago at the drop of a hat, all while scarcely missing a beat at work. I could not have done this had I been born just a few years earlier. I am, to put it mildly, a big believer in working remotely. But while remote working succeeds more often than not, there are, nonetheless, many ways it can partly or wholly fail. After witnessing many such failures while working from home successfully for fully 100,000 years (ok, 32 in decimal), I have a few thoughts about ensuring that working from home is a net benefit for both the company and the employee. Remote Work It's important to start by understanding the range of possible work-at-home arrangements. Today, nearly every company will at least allow some employees to work from home for a few days due to natural disasters, illness, or other exceptional condition. On the other extreme, most companies have not yet experienced the joy of an employee working from the wilderness. That's obviously more likely to cause problems, and warrants much more consideration. In between those two extremes is plenty of middle ground that companies can use as perks to attract good people. Some companies allow everyone to work from home on Wednesday. Others allow people in certain job functions to work from home two or three days per week. I've even seen two people sharing two jobs, each at home half time and at the office manning a desk half time. Sometimes it works out wonderfully. Other times, not so much. I believe that thoughtful management can ensure that the latter are rare enough to be overwhelmed by the benefits of the success stories. Proximate Problems When you ask people about the hardest part of managing remote employees, you'll usually hear terms such as "communication," "team cohesion," and "bonding." These are all important concerns, but I think they are secondary problems to the deepest one: trust. A manager has to trust an employee to do his job reasonably well. An employee has to trust his manager to treat him fairly and ethically. Two employees need to trust each other to collaborate, to help each other get their jobs done. Two managers need to trust each other to spend more time woring than jockeying for a promotion. Without such trust, team cohesion is dead in the cradle, and communication becomes an exercise in subtle codes and analysis. I cannot give a recipe for establishing trust between two people. However, I have observed that it is much more likely if the two people spend some time -- preferably very early in their relationship -- working together closely, ideally in the same room. For some reason -- and the person who figures it out should make a fortune -- people trust each other and communicate better if they have been physically proximate at some time. Such occasions don't need to be terribly extended; as little as a day can be an enormous help, though I recommend 2 or 3. I guarantee you, your videoconferences will be more productive if the people involved have spent a day or two in each other's presence. (And yes, videoconferences are themselves much better at facilitating trust relationships than audio-only calls.) Of course, cracking the nut of trust doesn't automatically solve the other problems. Communication, in particular, requires constant attention lest the remote employee drift "out of the loop." But a modicum of trust is a prerequisite to solving any of the other problems, and the creation of such trust, more than most work tasks, seems to require physical presence. All Jobs are Not Created Equal Obviously there are some jobs (doctors, cashiers, ...) that require physical presence and can't be done remotely. Less obvious is the fact that, within a typical office/enterprise environment, the roles and employees span a wide range of suitability for remote work. I believe the most important factor, once roles with physical duties in the workplace have been eliminated, is age -- or, more accurately, career seniority. The rationale for this is not complicated. If you hire a new employee fresh out of college, you're unlikely to be starting with a great deal of trust -- you're not confident of his competence, and he's starting with a dearth of knowledge. Keeping him in the office is pretty much a necessity, while you figure out whether he's working out in the role. The further along an employee is in his career -- at your company or elsewhere -- the more flexibility he should have earned. Perhaps the new hire fresh out of college spends a year or two and produces a stellar deliverable. Along with a raise, you might reward him with a day per week working from home, if he wants it. From there, it's natural to reward several years of productive work in this manner with another day of work from home, and so on. But beware: when the employee starts spending four days per week at home, new needs will kick in. With only a single day at work each week, it's hard to "catch" all the people you need to talk to. You need to develop good scheduling and planning skills, if you don't already have them. Finally, some employees -- surprisingly few, but I'm one of them -- will want to cut the cord entirely. I've known quite a few programmers who told their long-term employers something like, "if you let me move to Montana and work from there, I'll forego a raise for three years." This is actually a great thing for your company, potentially, because he'll quickly get used to a lifestyle that some of your competitors might prohibit. But even with an employee already successfully working 4 days per week from home, there's a pitfall awaiting with the move to full time: if the employee doesn't come back to the main office every few months, his productivity will slowly decay over time. This might be as seldom as twice per year, but some regular connection is essential. When those scarce visits occur, they should err on the side of length -- a week is usually good -- and the remote worker should make an affirmative effort and plan to meet physically with all of the people he works with. Mature people hired from outside the company should not necessarily have to start at the bottom like fresh young hires. If they've been working from home 3 days/week elsewhere, let them start the same way with you or work up to it fairly quickly, and prove themselves to you at that level. It's Worth the Effort I know that I've made work-from-home employees sound like a hassle. They are. If everything else were equal, I'd probably not recommend a home worker over an in-office worker for the same job. But all things are never equal, and information workers tend to be unique individuals. By making your company friendly to home workers, you gain a recruiting advantage. In the end, you get better quality of work, and the employee gets better quality of life. It's a win-win, but that doesn't mean it's effortless. Working at home actually opens up some more radical options as well. Some day, I expect to see some forward-looking company set up a major R&D center in a surprising, inexpensive location, such as the affordable and rebounding city of Detroit, and to couple that bold move with an aggressive embrace of working from home. Junior people would be brought into Detroit to earn their stripes, with the motivation that their job might eventually let them move into the north woods like me. Senior people could be recruited even if they turned up their noses at Detroit, because of the flexibility the company could offer about location. Working from home is still, in the larger picture, a very new thing. We've only scratched the surface of how remote working will change our world.