Remote Work Is The Way

A guide to making the most of our office-optional future

Iwo Szapar

• Publisher: Iwo Szapar
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087982922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

• My manager doesn't trust that I'm doing my best when I'm not in the office. What should I do?
• Keeping track of what my remote employees are doing is exhausting. How can I make it easier?
• I love working from home, but I feel isolated. Is there a better way to stay connected to my colleagues?

Working outside of the office is growing in popularity and is more common now than it has ever been. Millions of people have discovered they can do their jobs from home... or from halfway across the world. But while remote work comes with plenty of freedom and perks, it also comes with challenges. So how can you make the most of this new reality?

Co-founder of Remote-how, Iwo Szapar, has for years taught people how to create remote-friendly work environments. His guide to staying productive, avoiding burnout, and managing distributed teams is drawn from countless hours of collaboration with some of the top experts in the field.

Whether you work for yourself or a Fortune 500, this book is an invaluable resource for rethinking what the office-optional future means for you, your business, and the world. Inside is a guide to the practical skills and habits you'll need for communicating, collaborating, and getting the job done - as well as inspiration on how to live the kind of life you want. Remote work is the way of the future... now it's time to find out how to make it work for you.

PART ONE:

THE WORLD
OF REMOTE WORK

● ○

MORNING COFFEE: HỘI AN

I usually get up at 5 a.m. to watch as the world comes to life – regardless of whether I’m in the Vietnamese countryside, the bustling metropolis of New York or my hometown of Gdańsk, Poland. For over three years, my everyday life has included three intertwined parts: traveling around Asia, remotely managing a company in the United States, and keeping up with friends and family back in Poland. The scenery around me is constantly changing, but coffee at dawn is my ritual, no matter where I am. Sometimes it’s a latte or americano, other times it might be a strong, cold Vietnamese coffee loaded with sweet condensed milk. When my day begins in an unusual place – say, a mountain hut somewhere in Indochina – I’ll even settle for an instant Nescafe packet.

Today I drink a strong, black ca phe den here in the coastal town of Hoi An, Vietnam, as an endless hum of motorbikes and the buzz of nearby noodle shops permeates the morning heat. It is the end of March; a month from now, it will easily be over 95 degrees, even this early in the day. I am sitting at my favorite spot in town, 145 Espresso Cafe, as I check in with what the rest of the world has been up to while I’ve been asleep. I’ve got 68 new e-mails from my American and European colleagues and clients. Most of them have started working from home, as companies everywhere abandon their offices amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This trend means a major opportunity for Remote-how, the company I co-founded in 2017 that teaches organizations how to build and manage remote teams. Our services are in higher demand than ever before.

Half a year later, we are on the verge of bankruptcy. And I am at my limit.

INTRODUCTION

The idea for this book came to me in 2019. Remote work was then a niche phenomenon, and at the same time a dream of millions of people. We had been developing Remote-how for over a year and I felt more and more that I needed to explain not only how to work remotely, but also how this change would impact the whole world, far beyond the professional sphere. I passionately believed we had to ditch many of the old, prevailing ideas about how workplaces should function and rearrange the way we live our lives.

Then, in early 2020, COVID-19 happened. Overnight, the entire world faced a unique opportunity to free work from the physical constraints of offices. And it became clear that I could no longer wait. Now was the moment for this book. It was time to start writing.

The very creation of this book was a virtual effort. I wrote it from Vietnam, collaborating with people living in the United States and Europe, with whom I connected online more than once at every odd time of the day. I invited the best experts in the world, who have been blazing a path for remote work for many years, to join these pages. These are managers at some of Silicon Valley’s most innovative companies – GitLab, Prezi, Mural, and others, and leaders at pioneering remote-first companies who agreed to share their knowledge with me and with you. However, the basis of what you’re about to read is the knowledge and experience we’ve built over the years through Remote-how. Most notably drawn from our Remote-how Academy – the world’s first remote work educational program for distributed team, which has so far supported over 400 companies. As well as our Remote Future Summit, the world’s largest virtual conference devoted to the virtual work environment. Over the course of three years, more than 11,500 people from 129 countries took part in it.

IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?
DEFINITELY, IF YOU WANT TO:

1. Decide for yourself when and how you work, to better balance your private and professional life.

2. Freely choose and change your place of residence to combine work with travel.

3. Work more productively, no matter where you are.

4. Peek behind the scenes to find out what life looks like for the most experienced remote workers and teams.

5. Understand how remote work will upend social norms and the lifestyle of the future.

Disclaimer: None of the people or businesses mentioned in this book received compensation for their participation, and these pages do not include any sponsored content. The knowledge and opinions expressed here are done so freely.

CHAPTER 1:

THE REMOTE
REVOLUTION

POSITIVE CHANGE

Remote work may become the most powerful catalyst for positive change in the 21st century. Advances in technology are allowing us to redefine how we work and how we live our private lives. Being stuck in the office from 9 to 5 is no longer the standard. The work-from-anywhere lifestyle, once a luxury available to only a select few, is becoming a global phenomenon.

Working remotely is turning the world upside down.

• For some, it’s the end …

• Of wasting 30 hours a month¹ on the daily commute to the office

• Of being locked into life in a massive city (because “that’s where the jobs are.”)

• For others it’s the beginning …

• Of redefining what is most important in life (Work? Family? Hobbies?)

• Of having the freedom to choose where we live and where we travel

• Of a world where everyone gets their own corner office

But there is a problem: our remote-friendly future isn’t guaranteed. What if we don’t take this unique, historic opportunity to radically change the way we work? It’s possible that, after the pandemic fades away, we’ll reluctantly slip back into the routine of office life. We might miss our chance.

The motivations for that change, however, are huge. Even pre-pandemic, people were eager for a new and more flexible way of working. A survey conducted by Zapier in November 2019 shows that:²

Before the pandemic, remote work was appealing to many types of people, including:

• Parents who wanted to reconcile work with childcare.

• Millennials keen to combine work with travel.

• People interested in working with foreign companies but not interested in relocating to a foreign country.

• Skilled workers in developing countries looking for a way to improve their lives through access to equally skilled work.

But it has been during the pandemic that remote work’s appeal has flooded beyond these niches and into the mainstream. In 2020, many people had their first contact with working remotely – or, more accurately, working outside the office. They’re not exactly the same. Remote work is, by definition, a job that can be done from anywhere in the world; working outside the office, as many are doing now, is a forced, temporary solution during a crisis.

But even under these imperfect circumstances, people are seeing the appeal of leaving the office behind. According to the 2020 surveys by Gallup and Adecco, more than half of the employees in the USA would like to obtain permanent remote work once the pandemic is over.

Still, it’s not for everyone. The same research³ shows interest in remote work varies depending on age, nationality, and family situation. For some, the office is just a better option. Though I’ve built a career evangelizing for remote work, I won’t criticize such attitudes – my goal and Remote-how’s mission has always been to enable everyone to have a choice in how they want to work (even if that choice is a more traditional office setting.)

More than half of the employees would like to keep the workplace more flexible on a permanent basis. They should be given such an opportunity.

Our so-called “new normal” after 2020 opens companies to a reality in which, for many jobs, the physical location of work ceases to be important. Many are starting to understand the appeal! But adjusting to remote work in the long term is more complicated than the emergency measures taken during the pandemic. It’s impossible to just copy-and-paste all of our in-office practices into a virtual environment; instead, organizations are going to have to fundamentally reconsider how they’re managed and how they operate. It will be a painful process, one that requires us to overcome some of the age-old pitfalls of office culture. Pitfalls that include the lack of trust between employers and employees that leads bosses to micromanage their teams and workers to find ways to run out the clock each afternoon. For remote work to succeed as the “new normal,” we have to ditch old habits and create new ones. If we don’t, working remotely will end up a failed experiment.

THE BEGINNING OF MY REMOTE ADVENTURE

Imagine this: You dream, for years, of living a life that most people would consider impossible, until finally you seize the chance to make it happen. You start to turn that dream – of freedom, travel, financial independence, work-life balance, and global change – into a reality. You organize an international community of like-minded people and launch a company whose mission is to promote remote work, all while moving through 14 countries on three continents and turning your and your family’s lives upside down. All this so that more people can choose how they will work and where to live.

Suddenly, overnight, the world turns upside down due to a pandemic. Millions of people find out for themselves that the place where they work does not matter. And that the world of offices in crowded cities will soon be obsolete. Even I, an unabashed optimist, never imagined this worldwide questioning of the status quo and embrace of my remote work utopian vision would happen so dramatically.

How did I end up on the vanguard of a remote revolution? I still pass for a teenager – the cashiers who regularly card me are always shocked to find I’m in my 30s – and have the heart of a high school partygoer. But I also deeply value my independence and like to decide about my own life without relying on others. I’m also not afraid to take matters into my own hands or take on challenges – even when others think my ideas are crazy.

It’s been a year since my wife Ola and I landed in the charming Vietnamese town of Hội An. We planned to spend only a few months there, but fate had other ideas. Life moves slower here: whether it’s a morning stroll on the beac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• PART ONE: THE WORLD OF REMOTE WORK
• PART TWO: OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES OF REMOTE WORK
• EPILOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOOTNOTES