An office is not required. Why are they not working at work? Jason Fried, David HenssonRemote: Office is not required

Original name: Remote: Office not Required

Publisher: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2014

This book is an ode to the home office, a manifesto for any remote worker. I loved the perfectly matched quote from William Gibson:

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."

Great, isn't it? After all, it is precisely for freedom (the choice of a place of work, residence, mode of work, etc.) that our future lies with you. Those who have already been able to switch to remote work have tasted all the delights of remote work. Those who are still hesitant or unable to work from home due to the nature of the profession, now and then curse their employers, standing idle in hourly traffic jams and sweating during rush hour in a crowded subway. Of course, any coin has two sides, but the reverse side of remote work is not so terrible: there are much more advantages than disadvantages.

Even 5 years ago, sentimental pictures of entrepreneurs sunbathing under palm trees and safely running their businesses seemed implausible: how can you earn decent money without sitting your pants in the office from morning until late at night? Now everyone already knows for sure: it’s even possible if the profession allows us to be outside the walls of the company. You will not find the super secrets of remote career success in this book if you have been looking at this format for a long time or have already taken a sip of the complexities of working from home. But, if you are just discovering the pleasure of sitting in a comfortable home chair with official employment and a stable salary, then you will have a lot to learn. The authors are the founders of 37signals, which launched Basecamp, an online project management tool. They have experienced in their own skin all the pros and cons of working in a team that meets offline only three times a year, and they believe that even this is too often.

What do workers want? Freedom, home comfort, the opportunity to spend any free minute for the benefit of yourself and your family. This works great remotely. What are employers afraid of? The fact that instead of hard work, employees will evade tasks with all their might. But wait: if you are so worried and do not trust your charges, why are they like that to you at all? You are not their babysitter. Yes, and you can also take a break from work in the office: look who frantically begins to imitate activity and minimize browser windows when you suddenly enter the office?)

The more time passes since the writing of this book, the less revelation it contains. The thoughts embodied in it have already scattered through notes and articles, many companies have listened to the experience of a successful remote business and have implemented the basic provisions of remote work. However, Remote is like expensive cognac: let everyone already know everything, let many have already tried it, but it will forever remain a classic. Manifesto of workers who do not accept stuffy offices.

The book about how employees can work effectively from anywhere in the world and, in fact, they do not need an office at all, was published about six months after Marissa Mayer announced the closure of teleworking programs at Yahoo! and urged employees to return to their offices. As everyone remembers, Mayer's actions were criticized by many, including the head and founder of the Virgin Group, Richard Branson. A book "Remote. Office is not required" - from bestselling authors"Rework. Business without prejudice"- continues to be successfully sold and of interest to businessmen, managers and ordinary employees around the world.

In the age of the Internet and high technology, remote work has become as natural and familiar as, for example, mobile communications. The authors of "Remote. Office is optional" Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have a lot of arguments that they successfully oppose to the point of view of Meyer and some other top managers (since most of the "problems" of remote work are exclusively in their heads, and they are not going to fight their prejudices yet). Fried and Hanemeyer Hansson tell how to "upgrade" the brain in this sense.

The main material for the book was the experience, in fact, of the 37signals authors, but Fried and Hanemeyer Hensson also talk about the experience of other companies - wholly or partially "remote". In particular, 82% of employees work remotely at Intel on a regular basis, 86% at Deloitte, and 57% at NASA. "A world without an office": 37signals has been operating in this format almost since its inception. This does not stop her from developing successful products for millions of users (and earning millions of dollars from them). And not only does it not interfere - on the contrary, it helps a lot. It seems that all the strengths and weaknesses of such an organization of work are obvious. But Fried and Hanemeyer Hensson go into detail about the kinds of things that can only be learned by "practicing" teleworking. In addition, the book contains a lot of useful information about new organizational opportunities and tools - there are so many of them and their "composition" is updated so often that hardly anyone knows everything about everyone.

In "Remote" the authors talk about remote interaction with clients, recruiting, motivating and retaining remote employees, maintaining a positive atmosphere in a team scattered across the country (or even the world), building a company without an office from scratch, and integrating remote workers into the corporate structure. already existing company, creating equal conditions for those who are in the office and out of it.

The authors of the book fully agree with Richard Branson (who, in his own words, has never worked a day in the office in the traditional sense of the word) that very soon remote work will not only become ubiquitous - it will be very difficult to imagine a world in which need a good old "traditional office".

Rated the book

... The luxury and privilege of the next twenty years will be the opportunity to leave the city.

I went to and from work... read, dreamed how cool it would be to work from home for at least three days out of five... Saving time, money and effort. Less likely to catch an infection in public transport, less unnecessary communication. Of course, it would be necessary to become more disciplined, reorganize your workflow, get used to the new regime. But the example of the company of authors and other companies mentioned in the book is inspiring! I easily imagined myself, if not in the place of an employee traveling around the world, then at least in the role of a pajama content manager. It remains to be regretted that in the native land such a practice, if it spreads, takes root, then only someday, far from now. The book is small, practical, positive, and will be of interest to both ordinary employees and heads of organizations. You can give it to your leaders, especially informal ones. With hint ;)

Rated the book

Yesterday I finished reading the book "Remote" from the creators of Basecamp and once again confirmed my decision to never return to the office.
Senseless bureaucracy, endless meetings and ineffective appearance of vigorous activity, which often consists either in "managing chairs" or in sitting pants on these very chairs - this is definitely not for me. Not to mention commuting to and from work, traffic jams and bad weather, the need to send a child to a kindergarten that he may not want to go to ... Well, talking near the cooler is not my favorite pastime.
So this book is a godsend for me. In it, the authors not only talk about the advantages of remote work and their own experience, but, which is especially valuable, they share practical tips and a list of the most effective tools for organizing the workflow.
This book will be equally useful for managers and for ordinary employees; for those who already practice remote work, and for those who have not yet made a final decision for themselves. It clearly, without unnecessary water, provides answers to all fundamental questions: how to build a convenient schedule and organize work on joint projects, how to stay motivated, how to find and hire employees, how to combine work and personal life, and much more.

The main idea that runs like a red line through the entire book is that work should bring pleasure. Psychologists have long proved that the policy of carrots and sticks is the last century. "There is only one reliable way to increase motivation - to encourage people to work on what they like, and only with those people who do not leave them indifferent." This is the main secret of "Remote".
If you like to live away from the noisy city and admire the sheep grazing on the green grass; if you like to work over a cup of coffee in a cozy cafe or have a leisurely breakfast with your family, remote work is for you.
If you want your subordinates to work conscientiously and be results-oriented, loosen control, let them work from home, changing the strict dress code to comfortable sweatpants, and they will repay you for your trust a hundredfold. Well, if work falls out of hands, maybe it's just not your job. So it's time to reconsider your life and rebuild on a new track.

Now I am on maternity leave and slowly freelancing. I like to sleep longer in the morning and work hard in the evening. I don't see myself locked up in the office anymore. But my husband and I are increasingly thinking about organizing our own small business. And, of course, first of all, we are considering the possibility of hiring remote workers (even on the scale of our city). Therefore, this book was especially useful for me: it helped to study the issue of remote work from all sides, with all its pluses and minuses, and gave me new ideas. And most importantly, it inspired me to take the first steps.

Rated the book

The 21st century is the century of new technologies and breakthrough ideas. And now you think that people live in a completely, completely different way: after all, we have super iPads, Macbooks, the Internet (!), cool cars and everything our heart desires. However, if you drop into the very essence of life, nothing has changed. People are born, then kindergarten, school, university, work, and finally - retirement. And after all, people spend most of their time, that is, their lives, on work. And how many people can boast of their incredible love for work? I'm afraid the answer is obvious.
The vast majority of jobs require you to get up in the morning, sit in the office from and to. Every employee's day starts with their favorite alarm clock, the way to work, waiting for the end of the work day, the way home, and a pillow. You begin to notice how your time for family and friends is shrinking. Sometimes you remember how much you wanted to travel, learn languages, draw, play some instrument, dance, or eventually find time for a book that you always looked at with a “not now” sigh.
It's time to change the most important part of our lives. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hensson's Remote. An office is not required” reveals to us the first steps in this. Namely:
1. Ability to work outside the office. And this is beneficial not only for employees, but also for the employer himself - to save on renting premises.
2. Follows from the first. Save time and travel costs. You no longer need to stand in traffic jams, make transfers, be on the bus during rush hours (!).
3. Have a flexible work schedule. How many hours, let's say from 10 to 6, do you really work? Wouldn't it be better to catch the very time when you feel that the work will be productive?
4. Evaluation of the work itself. You will no longer be judged by what time you deigned to come to work today, how many cups of tea / coffee you drank, how long you talked with employees at the cooler, and what time you ran away from work.
5. Organization of remote work. The authors recommend programs that have helped them create and improve remote work.
6. Tips for managing remote workers and creating a corporate culture.
The work is read in one breath. The reason may be that I am very impressed with the very idea of ​​​​not having an office and working remotely. After all, this is a unique opportunity to work from anywhere in the world. Today you need to try very hard to find a place where there is no Internet. Many professions today can safely switch to remote work and enjoy life... As the authors note, "A world without an office is not the future, it is the present." Join.

(formerly 37signals) is a cult organization in a wide range of developers and young entrepreneurs. They always seem to do great things. Ruby on Rails, one of the most popular web application frameworks, is their brainchild, but most of this American company is known for Basecamp, an online project management service, during the development of which Ruby on Rails was created.

The company of Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hensson has been trying to share their experience with the whole world from the very beginning. Their blog Signal vs. Noise has been around for almost 15 years. From the depths of Basecamp, two best-selling books appeared, and at the end of last year a third came out. It all started in 2006 with Getting Real. In it, the founders of a successful company talk about how they managed to create an effective team that releases software with a million customers, while not using corporate norms and established practices. Many of the ideas voiced in Getting Real seemed (and still seem to many) too harsh to be true, too bold to be taken literally. Do less, don't raise outside funding, find an enemy, ignore details at first, say no more often, don't have meetings... Exhausted by ten layers of management, bureaucracy and corporate events, programmers from all over the world read the book like gospel. “Am I not the only one?” they thought and dreamed of a company like 37signals.

In his hymn to remote work, Sir Richard Branson wrote: “To work successfully with other people, you must trust each other. In many ways, this means trusting your employees to do their job, wherever they are, without supervision.”

It was interesting for me to read Getting Real not because it contains some completely new and innovative ideas. No, most of the book is obvious thoughts and rational reasoning. First of all, I was attracted not by the thoughts themselves, but by the fact of their presence, the fact of their adequate discussion and generation of logical conclusions. Yes, I suspected that a two-hour meeting in the middle of a workflow did not provide me or the company with anything really useful. Yes, I have never thought that having planned a thousand features in a new project, we will not make a great product. Yes, my colleagues and I regularly complained about the quality of the code that results from this approach to business. And yes, I often felt like I was in a ridiculous fairy tale, and not in rational reality. After reading Getting Real, I only made sure that my thoughts are not meaningless, that the usual and established principles can be erroneous, and the mass of people simply do not notice the change in conditions because they live and work by inertia. “Stop and realize what you already know” is how I would describe the experience of reading this wonderful book.

The next book came out in 2010, it was called Rework. Partially repeating the theses of the previous book, the authors of Rework question the usual mechanism of the workflow. Urgent tasks and time pressure are poison, the authors say. Planning is guesswork, they continue to the silent smiles of hundreds of thousands of programmers. And again this feeling of “yes, I know it! Will everyone around now also understand this?!”

And so, last year, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hensson finally released their third book - "Remote: Office is not required." She talks about the obvious advantages of remote work, and like previous books, in a prophetic, almost biblical style, she talks about the imminent transition to a remote work model for an increasing number of companies.

The typical train of thought of the early capitalists was: "Let's gather a lot of people in one place, where they will have to live in cramped houses on top of each other, and then we will have enough human material to work in our factories." Just fine, Mr. Moneybags.

The first and main idea: “obvious does not mean bad”. This is a perfectly adequate statement, but, unfortunately, many people believe in its obligatory falsity. Simple and obvious to such people are signs of something wrong. I think you have met with such an opinion, they say, the right one is necessarily difficult and not obvious.

Armed with the idea “obvious doesn’t mean bad”, the authors consider the obvious advantages of remote work: high efficiency, saving time and money, more opportunities to search for personnel (instead of searching for people in a certain city, you can search for them all over the world). The authors then describe the status quo and are surprised by the fact that a large number of companies (and maybe even your company) have been using remote work for a long time. Moreover, many government and public organizations do this. The tipping point has already arrived, remote work has already won, we just don't always notice it.

Since 1995, IBM has reduced its used office space by 7 million square meters through the introduction of the practice of remote work. m. Of these, about 5 million square meters. m were sold, which brought in $1.9 billion.

The authors devote part of the book to the classic excuses that company leaders come up with in order not to switch to remote work. Probably, all of you have heard them: “how will I keep track of the employees?”, “But how will I get them if there is an urgent matter?”, “Why did we buy this new luxurious office?”... For each excuse, the authors offer , again, the obvious and rational explanation.

In the end, the authors admit that you understood everything and now you are wondering: “how can all this be organized?”. Remote work, despite its flexibility, requires significant changes in the mechanics of the team and in the mental model of its members. Several chapters are devoted to solving the main problems associated with partial and full transition to remote mode.

Despite the fact that Remote is a book about work, a lot of attention is paid to rest and life in general. Working from home is very easy to go into a 24 hour work regime and it is a real danger not only to get frustrated with the idea of ​​remote work, but also to ruin your health, relationships and career. Therefore, in "Remote" described techniques for separating professional and personal life.

Remote is as easy to read as Getting Real and Rework, it looks like a logical continuation of them. But if the first book was written for web developers and team leaders, and the second one for entrepreneurs, then Remote is designed for the widest readership.

To be honest, for a long time I could not understand who she really was for. Programmers and computer scientists? We already know and love (most often) remote work. In our environment, this idea has gained popularity. Entrepreneurs? Perhaps, but young entrepreneurs already prefer the remote mode as much as possible: this approach saves time and money. And entrepreneurs of the old school (and especially a separate popular class - soviet managers), in my opinion, will not change their minds thanks to one book. It seems that Remote is written to convince people, but it is read first of all by those who are already convinced. In English there is such an expression - "preaching to the choir" - "to preach to the church choir." That is, to convince those people who already believe.

But in the end, I realized: yes, this book is read by the church choir. But it is given to us as a tool, or as a guide to action. One book is not enough to convince people who believe in 9 to 5 work, employee tracking, dress code and timekeeping. It is our job, armed with the reasoning and conclusions of Remote and other books, articles, blogs and speeches, to convince people that 1920 factory style work is bad in most cases. You need to understand that this will benefit primarily the leaders and owners of companies. And we can help them.

David Heinemeier Hansson

OFFICE NOT REQUIRED

Copyright ©2013 by 37signals, LLC

© Translation into Russian, edition in Russian, design. LLC "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber", 2014

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and corporate networks, for private and public use, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by the law firm "Vegas-Lex"

* * *

Jamie and Colt Heinemeier Hansson: Remote work allows the whole family to spend more time together in more places on the planet. Thank you for the love and inspiration.

David Heinemeier Hansson

For those who are on the road.

Jason Fried

From the authors

By 2013, when we began writing this book, the popularity of remote work—or remote work as it is sometimes called—had been slowly but surely growing for many years. From 2005 to 2011, the number of remote workers in the US increased by 73 percent, to 3 million people. 1
URL: http://www.globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics.

However, in February 2013, this goodness was suddenly broken by a loud statement from Yahoo! about curtailing the remote work program. We were just finishing the book. The topic immediately emerged from the academic shadow and became the subject of close international attention. Hundreds, if not thousands, of articles appeared, the authors of which defended opposing points of view.

Of course, we would be grateful to the CEO 2
Chief Executive Officer - General Director. Note. ed.

Yahoo! Marissa Mayer, wait six months for her book to come out. Those

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