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www.container-solutions.com
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www.container-solutions.com
Remote Working Approaches
That Worked (And Some That
Didn’t)
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Working in offices
● 1726: The Old Admiralty Office opens as the
first purpose-built office
● 1729: The East India Company uses office
space to manage an empire remotely
● ~1800: Office boredom and toxic company
culture begin to emerge
Sources: https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/old-admiralty-building
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23372401
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In 2009 “40% of some 386,000 employees
in 173 countries have no office at all”
Sources: http://www-01.ibm.com/industries/government/ieg/pdf/
working_outside_the_box.pdf
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-calls-workers-back-to-the-
office-1495108802
The 105-year-old technology
giant is quietly dismantling its
popular decades-old remote work
program to bring employees back
into offices, a move it says will
improve collaboration and
accelerate the pace of work.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-calls-workers-back-to-the-
office-1495108802
The 105-year-old technology
giant is quietly dismantling its
popular decades-old remote work
program to bring employees back
into offices, a move it says will
improve collaboration and
accelerate the pace of work.
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http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-
memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/
Speed and quality are often
sacrificed when we work from
home. We need to be one
Yahoo!, and that starts with
physically being together.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-calls-workers-back-to-the-
office-1495108802
The 105-year-old technology
giant is quietly dismantling its
popular decades-old remote work
program to bring employees back
into offices, a move it says will
improve collaboration and
accelerate the pace of work.
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https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/openai-ceo-sam-altman-remote-work-mistake-return-to-office/
I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst
mistakes in a long time was that everybody could
go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to
be together in person and, you know, there was
going to be no loss of creativity.
— OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
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Why this talk?
● Tesla made headlines after reportedly firing
people who chose to work from home during
COVID-19 lockdowns, and in 2022 remote
work was taken off the table almost entirely at
both Tesla and SpaceX
● Tim Cook is also cracking down on
employees who don’t come in 3 days a week
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/25/tesla-plant-firings/
https://www.space.com/elon-musk-spacex-tesla-no-remote-work
https://fortune.com/2023/03/24/remote-work-3-days-apple-discipline-terminates-tracks-tim-cook/
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Why this talk?
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/close-proximity-leads-better-science
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@charleshumble
● Have done most things in IT from
desktop support to CTO
● First managed a team in 1997
● Have been full-time remote since
2011
● Became InfoQ’s chief editor in 2014
and joined CS as theirs in 2020
● Write music as 1/2 of Twofish
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Remote working upsides
● If you are an introvert, or autistic, not having to
always interact with people face to face can be
liberating
● Working remotely means that you can flex your
work around your life more
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Remote working upsides
● No commute
● Amazing peace and quiet, meaning you can
really concentrate and do proper deep work
● A work environment that you can tailor to your
own personal needs
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But …
● Being able to flex your work time around your
life also means you need to be very, very
disciplined about actually doing work
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Mitigations
● Some sort of time management
system
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Omnifocus
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Pomodoro
● Helpful when you need to blast through
something (like email):
● Choose a task
● Set a timer for 25 minutes
● Work on the task until the Pomodoro
rings
● Take a short break
● Every 4 pomodoros, take a longer
break
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https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/
I’m allowed to sit at my desk, I’m allowed
to stare out at the world, I’m allowed to do
anything I like, as long as it isn’t anything.
What I love about that is I’m giving myself
permission to write or not write, but
writing is actually more interesting than
doing nothing after a while.
Neil Gaiman
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Video: 1982: Pebble Mill
at One: Roald Dahl
https://www.facebook.com/
bbcfour/videos/474640292909006/
Separate
Office
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● Amazing peace and quiet, meaning you can really
concentrate and do proper deep work
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● Amazing peace and quiet, meaning you can really
concentrate and do proper deep work
● Hmmm….
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Hmmm…
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Well defined interactions are key
to effective teams, and this is
especially true for remote work
situations.
Matthew Skelton and Manuel
Pais
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Mitigations
● You probably need
a company-wide
communication
policy
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Mitigations
● You probably need
a company-wide
communication
policy
● “Do not disturb” is
your friend
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Deep work
● Bill Gates famously conducted
“think weeks” twice a year
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Deep work
● Bill Gates famously conducted
“think weeks” twice a year
● It was during a 1995 think week that
Gates wrote his famous “Internet
Tidal Wave” memo that turned
Microsoft’s attention to Netscape
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● If you are interested in
exploring this topic more, I
recommend reading Deep
Work by Cal Newport
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But …
● No commute means less time for reading/
listening to podcasts/whatever it is you do on
your commute
● Less exercise: you won’t be walking to the bus/
train/office
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Mitigations
● Schedule time for
yourself to, for example,
go for a walk/run every
day
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Mitigations
● Schedule time for
yourself to, for example,
go for a walk/run every
day
● Get a fitness tracker
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A big win for remote work
● A work environment that you can tailor to your
own personal needs
● I have worked in some truly terrible offices
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Sign me up
● Look into how much it might cost:
○ Is your computer up to the task? Do you have a
decent monitor? Keyboard?
○ Do you have/can you get high speed internet?
○ How much is a good office chair?
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Mental health
• Burnout is a real, serious issue
• Loneliness can be a real problem
• Make your social life (and your
family) a priority
• Pets can help
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Mitigations
● There is a growing body
of evidence that getting
out in nature really helps
● Intentional organisational
design can make a
difference here as well
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Make remote work work
● Upsides for a remote company:
○ Your overheads are low
○ If you get your hiring right your employees are
happier and more productive
○ You can hire the best people because location is
largely irrelevant
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››
https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html
A remote team may be less
productive than that same team
if it were co-located, but may still
be more productive than the best
co-located team you can form.
Martin Fowler
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Hiring
● Location isn’t entirely irrelevant:
○ Some countries have very complex tax regimes
you need to understand
○ Not all locations have decent internet (even in
the UK!)
○ Timezones can be a problem at scale
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Hiring
● Interviewing remotely is particularly hard:
○ Have a probation period of, say, 3 months
○ For key hires fly them somewhere and meet in
person
○ Have a really robust onboarding process
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Trust
● A remote environment has to be a high trust
environment
● I’m also reasonably certain that you need strong
psychology safety to make remote working work
well
● Trust at an organisational level means sharing
data such as forecasts and finances, and being
open if the company may be in trouble
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Communication: meetings
At CS and C4 we’ve found the following meetings useful:
○ In-person meetings both at a company and departmental
level
○ Monthly all-hands
○ Sprint demo/retro
○ Stand-ups / daily huddle
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Meeting rituals
● Check in
● Meetings should be
conducted on video if at all
possible
● The core protocols are
helpful here
https://www.infoq.com/minibooks/high-performance-teams
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One on one meetings
● One on one meetings are
sacrosanct
● A one on one is not a status
meeting
● Try to keep notes in a
shared document
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Tools
● Slack for IM
● Google Meet for video conferencing
● Google Docs for remote collaboration
● I also like private retrospectives
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Scaling up
As you scale a remote
organisation a problem
is: “How do you keep
everyone aligned and
working towards the
same company goals?”
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Scaling up
● Remote work requires a strong written culture,
particularly with teams spread across time zones
● This becomes more important as the company
grows
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Over-communicate
● Text-based communication makes it hard to detect
nuances in tone or urgency
● Problems can also arise from cultural differences
in phrases
● Don’t make it hard for people to find meaning in
messages: make messages self-contained
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Ultimately, in a remote-work world
it is essential to be very clear all
the time about what you are
working on, why you’re working on
it, how your work is being
completed, and when it should be
completed by.
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
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Wrapping up
● For both employee and employer, remote work
requires intentional design to work well
● Separate home from work: through physical
separation, for example
● Prioritise mental health: social life, exercise, taking
breaks
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Wrapping up
● Both the company, and its managers, need to
exhibit transparency and be prepared to be
vulnerable
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Books that influenced me
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Thanks for listening
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleshumble/
Masterdon: https://mastodon.social/@charleshumble
Email: [email protected]
Writing: https://muckrack.com/charles-humble
Podcast: https://blog.container-solutions.com/tag/hacking-the-org
Music: http://www.twofish-music.com/
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