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Remote is a management skill and an effective hiring advantage. 43% of American employees reported in 2017 working remote at least part of the time, and 31% of

Remote is a management skill and an effective hiring advantage. 43% of American employees reported in 2017 working remote at least part of the time, and 31% of those are 80-100% remote, up from 24% in 2012. The world has changed and I don't think we're going back.

bproven 9y ago
Exactly - its nothing to fear if you are good manager. If the person is screwing around you will find out quickly when projects slip over and over.
- crispinb 9y ago
  Resistance to remote work is very entrenched in my country (Australia). I suspect it's because competent management is very scarce here.
- jcims 9y ago
  It's not just ensuring they are productive, it's also ensuring that they feel included and their voice isn't drowned out by the proximity and presence of the local team. So yes, nothing to fear, but it takes a little more tending to if you have a blended local/remote team.
- matwood 9y ago
  Yep. Years ago when I was pushing us remote one of the owners asked “how will we know when people are working?”, to which I responded, “how do we know now?”
otakucode 9y ago
I have been waiting for a quite significant change in management culture for a few years now. It seems to me that a watershed moment is coming. So much thinking on the management level is drawn directly from the old manufacturing world and is such a tremendously poor fit for any form of mental work that something is going to have to give. In manufacturing, pushing for worker disposability makes sense. In mental work, it's suicide. In manufacturing, open floor plans and interruptions are fine. In mental work, it's death. In mental work, the best idea needs to win. And that's the case especially when the situation is nuanced. In-person communication generally hands every discussion to the person who is most outgoing, confident, or tallest. That generally results in the wrong idea winning and large amounts of time and resources being wasted. One of the big challenges I see is for management to avoid over-reliance on metrics. There's a famous quote whose attribution I don't recall that says "what you measure, you optimize" which is a warning. It is exceedingly easy to create perverse incentives and direct efforts toward optimizing a metric that actually hurts your progress toward the actual goal you want to accomplish. These are the places where a real leader can be instrumental. There are also many organizations that seek to reduce almost every task an employee does to a checklist or standard procedure. That made sense in the manufacturing world. But in mental work of any kind, most problems are going to be novel and, by necessity, so will be the solutions, which requires greater flexibility (and more trust extended to the worker). None of this even touches on the fact that human beings have very different fundamental capacities for mental work than they do for repetitive physical labor. If you attempt to do remote work and start by planning a system to monitor every keystroke and mouse movement to ensure that every action is productive, you'll burn out the most valuable people and those that remain will be working with a severe handicap. So many aspects of work seem ripe for change... maybe those thousands of studies done and ignored for the past few decades will come in handy.

bproven 9y ago

Exactly - its nothing to fear if you are good manager. If the person is screwing around you will find out quickly when projects slip over and over.

crispinb 9y ago
Resistance to remote work is very entrenched in my country (Australia). I suspect it's because competent management is very scarce here.
jcims 9y ago
It's not just ensuring they are productive, it's also ensuring that they feel included and their voice isn't drowned out by the proximity and presence of the local team. So yes, nothing to fear, but it takes a little more tending to if you have a blended local/remote team.
matwood 9y ago
Yep. Years ago when I was pushing us remote one of the owners asked “how will we know when people are working?”, to which I responded, “how do we know now?”

otakucode 9y ago

I have been waiting for a quite significant change in management culture for a few years now. It seems to me that a watershed moment is coming. So much thinking on the management level is drawn directly from the old manufacturing world and is such a tremendously poor fit for any form of mental work that something is going to have to give. In manufacturing, pushing for worker disposability makes sense. In mental work, it's suicide. In manufacturing, open floor plans and interruptions are fine. In mental work, it's death. In mental work, the best idea needs to win. And that's the case especially when the situation is nuanced. In-person communication generally hands every discussion to the person who is most outgoing, confident, or tallest. That generally results in the wrong idea winning and large amounts of time and resources being wasted. One of the big challenges I see is for management to avoid over-reliance on metrics. There's a famous quote whose attribution I don't recall that says "what you measure, you optimize" which is a warning. It is exceedingly easy to create perverse incentives and direct efforts toward optimizing a metric that actually hurts your progress toward the actual goal you want to accomplish. These are the places where a real leader can be instrumental. There are also many organizations that seek to reduce almost every task an employee does to a checklist or standard procedure. That made sense in the manufacturing world. But in mental work of any kind, most problems are going to be novel and, by necessity, so will be the solutions, which requires greater flexibility (and more trust extended to the worker). None of this even touches on the fact that human beings have very different fundamental capacities for mental work than they do for repetitive physical labor. If you attempt to do remote work and start by planning a system to monitor every keystroke and mouse movement to ensure that every action is productive, you'll burn out the most valuable people and those that remain will be working with a severe handicap. So many aspects of work seem ripe for change... maybe those thousands of studies done and ignored for the past few decades will come in handy.