🕚 💆🏻 🤢 About remote work 🤩 👨🏾‍🎤 📫

Somewhere in the depths of Habr’s there was an absolutely wonderful phrase that the attitude of employers to remote work in Russia “is somewhat similar to the statements of a conservative public about people with a different sexual orientation or gender identity”. Expression: "I am quite normal about remote work - once our employee moved, but we continued to work with him remotely" - the phrase reminds me: "I am quite normal with gays, I even have several gay friends." That is, it seems to be quite decent, but at the same time it is clearly visible that in other circumstances a person would prefer not to deal with the indicated categories.

To be more categorical and sloppy in words, then in general, most managers are afraid that these representatives of an alternative working orientation will not work and give them only free rein - everything will fly to tartarara. So let it be better if someone else is engaged in killing a business through tolerance for all these fashionable little things. And we are for a traditional office.

Well, we, of course, cannot forbid anyone to remain in a quiet backwater of our own errors, but I would like to give a couple of arguments and clearly show why such a way of thinking in the 21st century - savagery, inertness, and most importantly - interferes with your business.

our history

3 years ago we founded the completely remote company Technofabrika, and since then we have been quite successfully on the market. All the predictions of the big bosses that the udalenka is a coffin, coffin, cemetery did not materialize, in two years no one died and we are going to continue this disgrace further.

Initially, this solution seemed optimal to us, as our key partner resides permanently in Argentina, and we soon realized that the remote team had a number of advantages that we had not noticed before. It turned out that udalenka convenient and beneficial to everyone: the company and employees, and there are several reasons for this.

If you are a manager ...

Then of course you want to hire the best. You are ready to spend a crazy amount of resources on finding really valuable personnel, offering them the best conditions, tasty salaries and colorful compensation packages. You lure them from other companies, look for them at industry events and use the theory of six handshakes with the intensity that your wrists are already aching in your inner circle.

Moreover, you are limited only by your city. Well, there’s still a tiny percentage of those who are ready to move (with family, children, cats and a favorite chiffonier) that will fly to you in a large amount, regardless of whether you work with a person at all or not.
Oh well. The best can not only be recruited from the outside, but also grown inside. This is an even more winning strategy, because you have a loyal qualified employee with exactly the set of skills that you need. “What happens if we train them and they leave?” And what will happen if we do not train them, and they remain? ” and that’s all.

With a competent approach and increasing loyalty to the company (not to be confused with serfdom), such personnel will remain with you for many years to come and they will not leave you for more money from competitors or for a more convenient office ... But because of the family’s relocation (to send children to school in another city, to look after sick relatives, the ecological situation has ceased to suit - but you never know what happens to living people) you instantly lose them.

When choosing between life and work, no healthy person will choose a job. And if you choose - you need to think twice whether you need a maniac for full time in the next office.
By the way, about maniacs, psychopaths, aggressive, unbalanced loonies and other wonderful people who are full of any office, and even in an industry that requires endless skill upgrades, almost constant mental stress and has a wide range of stressful factors - the number of “non-living” and “complex” people increases at times.

Good news.With remote work, they do not need to get along together. They do not share living space with each other for more than a third of their lives, do not rub against each other from a household point of view, do not conflict because of unwashed cups in a cooler, a fish and a Crazy Frog ringtone heated in a microwave. Each at home opens and closes windows, sets up a condo, if desired, eats right at the keyboard and picks his nose as much as he can.

Employees grind to each other only professionally and are not required to enter into forced marriages with each other.

Well, on the little things:

No one will portray a hectic activity upon hearing your steps of the commander behind your back. The illusion of being in the office = working quickly breaks up in the practice of remote workers, they stop "sitting around" and start working on the result.

You do not need to equip the office with xboxes, machines with smoothies and other living corners with parrots. Cutting bones with nobody really needing nonsense can really improve the lives of their employees. Extraordinary prize, for example.

You work with people capable of self-organization and management of their own time, and do not serve as a nanny in a high-security kindergarten.

If you are an employee

Then you do not need to make a choice - to die in a dusty metropolis from poisoning by exhaust gases, stress and psychopathic neighbors, or to sleep in a quiet cozy provincial city (suburb) from poverty and lack of opportunities. You can live anywhere in the country or the world - even in a village near Pskov to raise sheep, even on a Thai island to train monkeys to bring coconuts. At the same time, remaining a sought-after specialist, do not lose skills and do not fall out of the profession. Continue to do what you like for adequate money and at the same time be where you like.

Do not want to leave Moscow? But who drives. But without the need to spend an hour and a half on the road in one direction, you can suddenly free 15 hours a week or more than 60 per month. 60 fucking hours a month! Productive, vibrant, wonderful waking hours. Hours that you can spend with children in the gym or during school hours. And not in a damned traffic jam.
You still communicate with colleagues, discuss tasks, plan sprints, share responsibilities. But do not fall for a week with the flu, because one of the kuashnikov decided to heroically go to work, despite the temperature.

You plan your working day yourself and you can go to all clinics and government agencies without spending precious vacation days, you do not need a good reason to go away during the working day and no one measures your productivity through the depth of a dent in a chair.
You can adjust the working day to personal biological rhythms. If you are a corpse from 10 to 13 and super productive from 20 to 23, no one bothers you to work at night, sleep in the morning, and arrange yourself a small nap in the middle of the day. Oh, a man who tasted the happiness of a half-hour sleep in the midst of a working Tuesday has no way back ...

It is usually customary to discuss the hours of presence, the time period in which you are available for calls, questions, asaps and “see what's in the last commit”. If it so happened that the beloved dog needs to be urgently taken to the veterinarian precisely at these hours - no one bothers to warn and see all the commits on return.

In this case, do not confuse udalenka and freelance. At remote work, you are constantly employed, receive a regular salary and do not wonder what you will eat tomorrow if you do not find new orders.

Communication with management and colleagues takes place in chats, by mail and through video communication, which can be recorded. So no meetings in the smoking room and accidentally thrown by while passing super-mega-important shocks. ALL working communication is documented. Everything can be re-read, retransmitted and poked into the desired correspondence. No "well, we all then discussed verbally and everyone agreed." If discussed, there will be a log. Such a simple thing reduces the amount of sloppiness on the one hand and sigul management on the other at times.

How does it work for us?

When we first started, we recruited a team of already familiar programmers, with whom we had previously worked in the office. It seemed to us that this is a great idea, since the team has already worked together, everyone knows each other, and the transition to the remote mode of operation should happen softly and comfortably.

However, we were wrong. The ability to work remotely is also a competency, and competence is becoming more and more popular in the market every year.

The ability to self-organize and be motivated without a manager constantly looking over your shoulder at your monitor is critical for a remote employee. Etymologically, the word "stimulus" goes back to the name of the stick, which in ancient Rome was beaten by cattle on the back.

The thing is to transfer this metaphorical stick from the driver’s hands to the employee’s hands and allow him to manage his own time, motivation and resources.
This requires a high level of awareness of both employees and managers. You can’t give a cool pumped lord a box of routine boring work, which the student will cope with under the supervision, and count on the fact that he will not lose motivation and generally any desire to invest in the project. You can not give out an unfinished, blurry and slurred TK, and then torture it for months with edits. It’s impossible to motivate remote employees with chimeras like the company's mission and slides about how our work will change the world in 20 years.

We are generally against messianism, high-profile phrases that our company is called to save the planet or conquer the universe. We are more in favor of an ideological approach, which we understand as “a person should love what he does and be interested in what is happening around his work.”

The big problem with large companies is that people are often lost behind a great mission. Everyone is engaged in his own piece of duties, completely forgetting that there are other people who will somehow interact with this piece. That your code should not only work, but also be readable, that reports should not only converge, but also be representative, that QA is not an ideological adversary, but an associate, and a typesetter is also a person.

If in office culture this is somehow solved by the fact that one way or another you see all these people every day and the danger of grabbing a patch in the jaw of the cooler behind a curve (a real story in one software company) somehow disciplines and does not allow absolutely to gesture, then in a remote place respect for someone else's work needs to be cultivated separately.
To do this, it is imperative that the remote team knows each other and everyone understands what the other is doing.

To do this, it is important to maintain communication, both business and personal. We have several chat rooms, separately for projects and separate floods, where you can complain about the weather, tell about children or send a memo. We believe that the relationship between colleagues should rather resemble a clan in an online toy where everyone is good friends to each other, even though many have not seen each other lively, than dystopia, where a lonely person in front of the monitor receives tasks from an impersonal Big Brother.

We have a practice from time to time to call up and find out how things are. We even have a special person responsible for the “weather at home”, our HR Julia. She knows all the birthdays of those who have a cold and who are again tormented to change their shoes for the winter.

How we recruit employees and what happens next

We value motivation and the ability to independently evaluate the time spent on tasks. Therefore, we always give the applicants a test task and ask them to evaluate the deadlines.

If a person after this disappears for an indefinite time or surrenders the task later than the deadline set by himself, we are most likely not on the way.

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We have several principles. First of all, we never work with juniors and even try not to hire middle. All of our programmers are senior men who do not need to be taught how to work.

Secondly, we never transfer new employees to large and responsible projects. First, they earn a reputation as responsible and organized people on some of our internal tasks, or where we can afford to double-check everything for them several times. And only after that they begin to work on those projects that they themselves will choose, including in key ones for the company.

Thirdly, we do not use total tracking systems for programmers. We do not force to install software that reads keystrokes, eye movements or detectors pressed to the chair of the fifth point. It is unnerving, distracting from work and evokes the spirit of Orwell. With a great desire to filonit, you can get around any repressive measure, but for an experienced manager it is always obvious without all these pribludy when someone stops working. For example, if you have mobile development on both Android and iOS at the same time, and they differ in terms of time a couple of times, then there is clearly something wrong.

It is important for us that our employees are truly passionate about what they are doing, so everyone has the opportunity to choose a project and do what he thinks is the most interesting and promising.

And the fourth - we have offline meetings with customers. It is important for many people to see the face of the person to whom they give money. Online transactions, contracts signed by people who have never seen each other and are located on different ends of the globe, international transfers of large sums of money in a few clicks and negotiations across the continents via Skype only enter into the everyday reality of Russian business, and, of course, there is enough the percentage of people cautiously looking at "all these your fashionable little things." If a customer needs a live person in a suit to come to his office in order to feel comfortable, we are happy to be virtualized.

If you need to go to a good restaurant, where you can rush to discuss all the details of the transaction - for God's sake, we are always ready to negotiate in a format that is understandable and familiar to the customer.

In conclusion

If you believe the statistics, that in the world, in Russia, the share of remote work is growing every year, and perhaps very soon the number of remote workers will exceed the number of office workers, at least in the IT field.

This is a normal process launched by the development of technology. Video conferencing is simpler, cheaper, and often more effective than personal meetings, Trello is more visible than a lined board on the wall, and if you only need a laptop connected to the Internet to complete the tasks, then what's the difference where this laptop is.

According to recruiting agencies, the demand for remote work among applicants is much higher than the current market supply. This means that the business is still wary of remote employees and, on the contrary, is ready to invest in the reorganization of offices, the creation of game rooms, daily fruits and other bonuses and compensations, if only to leave employees in the offices.

But judging by the trends (and in 2020, which has already begun, we were already predicted by as much as 20% of remote jobs in Russia), all these attempts to force staff into offices are doomed to failure, like any other intention to return to old good times.
The future is remote work and this future has already come. Now the ability to work remotely is a competency for which you can hire, and the ability to provide a remote workplace is a competitive advantage for which employees choose your company.

The conditions on the labor market change regardless of our desires and preferences, the only important thing is whether we are ready for them or will continue to invest resources in a deliberately failed attempt to return the clock back.