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Ask HN: Anyone gone from in-office to remote for the same company?

• davelnewton 11y ago
  Title should be prefixed with "Ask HN". Advice regarding what?
  • jsroger 11y ago
    Mainly - on how the transition went, how to go about asking for the switch to remote work.
    • davelnewton 11y ago
      "Can I work remotely?" Although when I've asked I generally start with asking for n days a week remote. If they're already familiar/comfortable with remote workers, though, that's not nearly as important. Always went fine for me, but in general the remotes I've had already had communications in place and were fully set up for remote work.
• mod 11y ago
  I did. I was working for a very small company (5, including 2 co-founders). I simply asked for a trial run of a couple days per week at home, and made it clear that I hoped if it went well, we could expand that. It did, and eventually I moved out of country for a time. I was never in-office again, actually. I was pretty close & friendly with the co-founders, and they trusted me. Might go differently at a bigger company, who knows. Also, I'm a (web) developer, so all of my work is "online" anyway. The few meetings I had at that company were just moved to google hangouts. I moved on, eventually, and my current gig has been remote from the start.
• humbleMouse 11y ago
  If I were you I would ask for a week at a time to be remote to start gaining trust. If you are gone for a week and all your deliverables still come in they will start trusting you!
• acrooks 11y ago
  For the last six months I have been working remotely from Europe for a North American company I have been at for about three years with an otherwise in-office presence. I worked at a company for just over two years based in the office and then moved to live in Europe for six months, just returning recently to Canada. The total company size was around 20 staff & execs at the time. My CEO was ok with it, as I had demonstrated over the past couple years that I was able to work independently and responsibly. The company itself did not need to make several changes as we already had remote employees, so most of the meetings already had somebody dialling in. We use Slack as well which contains a lot of information. I joined a lot more channels when leaving to try best to keep up with all of the information. My biggest struggle was feeling disconnected from the company and from my coworkers. I missed out on a lot of information that was informally discussed in the office and felt a lot of anxiety related to my performance, even though I was still producing work at a consistent rate. This started to solve itself partially after getting over some of the general growing pains being in the new environment, and I started having regular fifteen minute Skype chats with a handful of different members of the company so we could better keep in contact. Another struggle was working from home. I found it easy to get distracted and found myself adopting weird work hours. It was especially difficult having most of the meetings happening in North America and needing to make them from a European timezone. I solved this mostly with co-working spaces and other places outside of home to get work done. I got pretty good at working out of coffee shops but it's not easy. An added bonus of the co-working spaces that discovered was making friends and having some sort of social contact during the workdays. If you have any other questions feel free to email anytime at the address in my profile.
• jason_slack 11y ago
  I did about a year ago. Some adjustments I made were making sure I don't do house work, during "working hours" and also making sure I have "personal time" each day as it is easy to work a lot when working from home. For me, it is e-mail. "Let em just answer this one e-mail from my phone since I am just sitting here watching tv" which turns into me grabning my laptop and working...
• peterwwillis 11y ago
  Start by talking about the life changes you'd like to make that remote work would make easier, and how it would be more convenient for you (and potentially lead to "doing even more work from home"). Suggest that you try working one day per week from home for a trial period (1-3 months), and propose that if it looks like it works out they let you go full-on remote then. Just keep in mind that companies sometimes have "remote work agreements" separate from regular office workers, and if you don't have that agreement, they may treat you differently when it comes to expensing certain things. Can work out better, but make sure you actually get one signed if it's available.
• kspaans 11y ago
  My company, also based in London, has a mix of remote and local workers. One thing that everyone gets, though, is 1 day a week of work-from-home time. This could be a way for you to get started with remote working, without requiring a full commitment from your employer. We use Google Hangouts for video & voice during most meetings, Slack for most chats, and something close to "black-hole" email addresses for most mail. (Basically: there is only one real 'developers@company.co.uk' team list, but each project has its own virtual address so it's easy to filter your mail in order to ignore/highlight project-specific mail.) To keep people in the loop we try to have on-topic things discussed by email, even if it's between two people physically in the office.
• dalerus 11y ago
  I did at a large firm. They even had a no-remote policy at the time. I asked my boss to do a one month test, one day a week working remotely. I documented my production levels for those remote days to prove that my productivity could increase by working at home. After the month test, I proposed one-week a month and then increased to full-time remote after about three months.
• FlopV 11y ago
  If the company seems to be OK with remote employees, I'd assume you'd be fine to ask, no harm in finding out regardless. Some managers might not like it, which is why I left my first company, as I was told by my manager we can talk about being remote in a year.... No thanks :P If they won't grant it immediately, which is understandable, don't settle for "we can talk about it later", have some type of measurement and plan to get to full remote. I had this occur with 2 separate companies... The 2nd company I joined had an hour and a half commute. I would go in once or twice a week when I first started which is what part of the deal was when I joined. Most of my co-workers were in that office, but my primary partner/senior was 2 hours from the office himself, so he also went in once or twice a week. I basically started to only come in when I had an important meeting, and would go weeks without being in the office. I'd recommend having a conversation around it prior to you doing that, as I was in a very flexible position. I eventually asked to be full remote, and got the green light. At that position it didn't make much of a difference as I didn't even have a cube near my team and many of the resources I worked with were spread around different offices globally. The only downside was that I didn't seem to get any of the "unofficial" communications in the team, which made it harder to stay in the loop. The first company I worked for a couple years, left, and came back as a full remote employee from the get go. I had worked in the same department but a different role prior to my departure so I had a good reputation. It helps to know people prior to going full remote, as you know who to get a hold of for what you need done, as sometimes an IM or email to the right person can save weeks. You kind of miss that at a big company when remote, or at least develop those contacts slower. I'd start by bringing it up and working from home a couple days a week to get a feel for it and your team use to it. Personally I'm way more distracted in the office but it's more than just you, it's your co-workers as well that need to be able to handle it. One aspect I noticed is when I'm remote, I'm usually west coast. Most days for me I'm logged in by 6 or 7 AM, for others they might not like that, but I like being behind, as nothing really picks up at the office til 9 anyway, and I'm able to have more daylight to do stuff after work. That won't apply to your case, but that's another thing for others to consider.