Originally posted on blog.kevinlamping.com
In the past five years, four times I have made the transition from working in an office to working from home.
All transitions were initiated by me. Three times I was in the minority among my co-workers; many were co-located in the company office. Only one time did the majority of my teammates work remotely or from home.
While it took a lot of work, the reason I made the transition was due to the realization that open-floor plan offices were not just a detriment to my work habits, but also a cause of very real anxiety.
Introversion vs. Extroversion
"Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk."
A Manifesto for Introverts
If you haven't watched it yet, take the 20 minutes to watch Susan Cain's Ted Talk on The Power of Introverts. It explains very intelligently why "The Extrovert Ideal" is harmful to so many people, both introverts and extroverts. It also is the foundation for why I'm passionate about working remotely.
In her talk (and in her wonderful book), Susan explains that whether your an introvert or an extrovert depends on how your body responds to stimuli. Extroverts are most comfortable in an environment with lots of stimulus (i.e. background activity). Put them in a quiet room and they'll go stir-crazy.
Introverts, in general, are the opposite. Too noisy of an environment and they become overwhelmed with everything going on.
One study measured the this difference, noting that "On average, the extroverts chose a noise level of 72 decibels, while introverts selected only 55 decibels".
They also found that both introverts and extroverts performs poorly when placed in environments that didn't match their temperament.
As an introvert with years of experience working in noisy offices, I can attest to how difficult it is to try and be productive in that environment.
Every movement of every co-worker is noticed by my brain and my attempts to ignore the situation only amplify the distraction. I'm no longer thinking about how to complete my work, but on the fact that I can't focus for more than five seconds because there are all these people moving around me.
"Yeah, but you can just wear headphones"
Even with the very expensive and high quality pair of noise-cancelling headphones I own, I can't block out the sound of a conversation five feet from my desk. The only hope to deafen chatter is to crank up the music. But this just takes a choatic noisy environment and replaces it with a melodic noisy environment. The noise is still there.
I love listening to music while working, but not to drown out the sound of people talking.
Many programmers love listening to chill/lo-fi beats, which have low parts where the outside noise sneaks right in.
Headphones don't cancel out the effects of a noisy office. They merely add a little beat to it all.
Private offices could solve this
Some companies get it; they provide their employees with private offices to get their work done and open spaces to come out and play as a community. But in my experience, those companies are rare.
Part of the problem lies in the people in charge of the office layout. While they have good intentions, they aren't the ones using that layout. They're goals are to create an open, collaborative space that won't cost a fortune. Developer individuality just isn't brought up.
I've had several conversations with multiple different managers throughout the years about this. While they agree with the need for quiet space, they simply don't have the power to change things.
The decision on office layout is based mostly on perception and cost-savings. Private offices for developers can seem like a waste of money. Office space isn't cheap, so from a budget perspective, it doesn't look like it makes sense. This ignores the benefits of private office space: employee happiness and improved productivity, both of which improve the ROI for private offices.
The other reason given against private offices is the fact that they can encourange employees to *gasp* work independently. Collaboration is a hot buzzword and any attempt to resist being more "collaborative" can come off as not being a team player.
It's an even tougher conversation if customers visit the office. They want to see people working together, sharing ideas that will earn their company money. An office full of closed doors isn't what they want.
But the truth is, the majority of productive work comes as an independent activity. Meetings can be useful for planning, but products aren't built in meetings. Products are built by individuals getting down to business and working on them. The idea that we should discourage independent work simply because it's independent flies in the face of the reality of how things get done.
Finding the Right Fit
If someone told you they wouldn't like working from home every day, you wouldn't force them into it. It's okay that working in solitude isn't for everyone. We're all different. But some people don't like working in shared offices and that should be accepted as well.
I fear I give the impression that I think everyone should work alone. To me, that would be just as bad. Rather, employees should be given the choice of their work environment and be trusted to collaborate in their own way (more on that in the 'communication' section). But until people's needs are prioritized over appearances and cost savings, remote working is the only alternative.
Works with my communication style
One part of being an introvert is thinking with your mind instead of with your mouth. I like to think slowly, plan things out for some time and then finally act once I've considered my options. I can't do this in a face-to-face conversation easily.
Develops strong habits
"The single biggest problem with working remotely is that you have to be excellent"
The Most Important Optimization: Happiness
When the majority of your conversation is online, it's always getting recorded. This allows you to easily search and recall the exact words spoken.
This is insanely useful when trying to remember that debugging tip your co-worker mentioned to you right before you left for a three-day weekend.
It can also prevent information from being siloed to just those around the water cooler. Open discussion in a group chat room is available for everyone to read and respond to, even if they weren't there in that moment.
Companies fret that remote working will lead to a lack of collaboration, but with the right culture, it can actually improve it tremendously. It can bring together groups of people from around the company who would never have a chance to talk if they were located on opposite sides of the office.
A Focus on Results
When you work remotely, measurements like "Morgan is a hard worker because I see Morgan working hard all the time" go out the door. Instead of being able to focus on misleading physical cues of someone's efforts, managers and companies have to focus on actual results.
Well, they don't have to, but it's a lot hard to fallback to measuring productivity by seeing butts in chairs.
Remote work encourages managers to measure success by output, not by input.
This means that, when paired up with the right environment, I can work my work in as part of my day. If I need to step in to my backyard for 30 minutes to debug a program in my head while I weed my garden, I don't have to worry about how that appears to others.
All I need to focus on is continuing to output quality work. People will see that, instead of trivial measures like staring at a computer screen for 8 hours straight.
Drawbacks
Isolation
One of the toughest parts of working remotely is the missed conversations with co-workers. While tools like Slack are wonderful for keeping up conversation, inevitably many interactions are lost when you have co-located co-workers.
This is why I believe having a successful remote worker on your team is half based on the remote workers abilities, and half based on the teams effort to include the remote employee.
It's incredibly easy for communication gaps to occur between employees in the office and the one or two remote workers. So easy that many remote worker experiments fail because of it. And sadly the remote worker gets blamed for the companies unwillingness to adjust work behavior.
But even with a fully-distributed company, isolation will still occur.
There are far too many companies that are entirely remote but fail to bring the team physically together on at least a semi-annual basis.
No matter how individual you are, you need to spend face-to-face time with co-workers to form the very important emotional connections that will get you through tough project times.
Guilt
I often have to shake off the guilty feeling I have when, after meeting my co-workers for lunch, they have to drive back to the office while I head home (especially when they make it known that's what's happening).
It's part of the reason why I'm writing all of this down. To help me explain my side of things. I don't work from home because I'm too lazy to drive in or because I'm anti-social. But it's very easy to feel guilty about it.
Even if you feel confident in your decision to work from your home office, there's still a nagging guilt about it all.
It eats at the back of your mind knowing that your co-workers choose not to work from home (or want to but are unable/unwilling to convince their manager).
The best thing to do is:
- Make sure your manager and co-workers really are comfortable with you working from home
- If so, take a deep breath, re-assure yourself on this, and let the feeling of guilt go
- Kick ass and be productive to where you really feel no guilt at all because you're able to get so much done.
A Final Plea to the Open-Office World
I suspect that some people working remotely as a special privilege. Some sort of bonus or benefit of being a good employee.
I agree, it's a privilege, but not in a "look at this special treatment I get" way.
It's a privilege in the same way that having a good laptop is a privilege.
It's the privilege of working for a company that values their worker's individual needs.
If you talked with a developer whose company made them use a year 2000 laptop running Windows ME, you wouldn't feel 'privileged' for being the one with a Retina MacBook Pro.
You would question the decisions of their management for providing such a lackluster tool for development.
I feel the same way about companies that are dead-set on requiring developers to work in big, open-air office layouts.
Yes, open-office floor plans work great for some people.
But everyone is different.
What works for one group of individuals won't work for another. It's okay for someone to need isolation to get a part of their job done.
It's okay for someone to not be as "social" as someone else. It's okay to not have everyone working under the same roof.
If you're on the side of the fence that work just gets done better in an office (and that may be true for you), please take a step back and consider that for some, work gets done better alone at home.
Edit - I just posted a follow up based on comments from this post: How to find (or make) a remote job
Latest comments (20)
I currently wanna transition to remote work at my current employment. Doing remote is absolutely possible and I can't think of any delimiting factors that stops from happening.
My only concern now is how to present that option to my employer in a convincing way.
How did your convince your employer to transition to remote?
Thanks
That's a great question and worthy of an entirely separate post (just managing bringing up the subject and the transition).
But in short, I would start with ensuring they're okay with any sort of remote working. That means that they're okay with the occasional "work from home" say when your cable needs repair or that plumber is coming by to fix the sink.
If they're not okay with that, I highly doubt they'll be open to any sort of remote work arrangement.
But chances are they are okay, and that's when you take the step of asking. I'd start the conversation explaining the advantages of remote work for the employer (better productivity for you mainly). Explain how it's much easier for you to get work done from home, due to the lack of distractions.
Then, reassure them on all the ways they'll be able to contact you if needed. I think that's the two main concerns for an employer. Will this affect project work and how will I get in contact/know this person is being productive.
Also, start out at 1 day per week working from home. Do that for a month or so, then start the transition to 2-3 days, then 3-4, then finally if it all works, jump to full-time remote.
Best of luck!
Keep it healthy Kevin! I share your point of view one hundred %!
Silos are so easy to appear when you work in the office. There is no collaboration happening in the office. Usually it is whispering that is happening, and no digital traces left how decisions were maid, and sometimes even the fact that decisions were maid is also kept secret.
Everything changes when company is remote-first with all communication logged, at worst in slack, at best in gitlab issues and special documents/files.
But even in remote companies there are people who prefer to make decisions in audio/video chats and nothing documebted again.
I see fully remote companies not only better for developers, but they improve whole business processes by forcing people to write down all things.
It is too easy to talk and then take your words back. Happened to many times with my bosses and collegues that I am fed up by that already.
I've witnessed this happening too, and indeed is total annoying.
No digital traces to confirm what I did is based on the same person's decision, who's now verbally also wants something contrary to what he or she said.
What I try to do is, after communication verbally, I put that in writing and send to this person to confirm in chat, so that at least I have that on record
And that side must send u a written confirm, this is important
Of course. Readily looking forward to their written response.
Yep, the fact that a company is fully-remote doesn't mean that silos won't appear or decision making will be transparent. It does encourage it though :)
So how do I go about finding these unicorn remote working jobs?
If you already have an 'in-office' job, you can start by asking to work from home once or twice a week. Do that a few months until people are comfortable with it, then try 2-3 days a week. Again, go for a few months then see if you can do just one day a week in the office.
Heads up though that this is typically where people start raising a fuss about it all. They can handle 2-3 days, but when you're usually not there, they start getting annoyed with it (Through no fault of your own). I could write up an entire post about my experiences in this arena; unfortunately most of it wasn't fun for me.
The other thing to note is that remote work is highly competitive, since the candidate pool is so much larger. You've got to apply to a lot more jobs and deal with a lot more rejection if you want to find a remote job.
In my previous gig this "slow move to remote" was more possible. In my current it's not. So I'm asking less about transitioning to remote from my day job and more about where to find these genuinely remote job listings for a completely new role. Ideas?
try remoteok.io, weworkremotely.com and you can also search the stack overflow job board for remote-only positions.
I am considering working half of my week from home or something similar. I do identify with the persona description. It's scary to take the leap. I've not made the jump yet.
I worry about all that extra communication I need to perform just for things to work remotely.
IMHO, starting off part-time working from home is a great idea. It takes time to adjust to the differences, especially in the communication arena (both on your side and your teams side).
I'd start with 2 days at home per week for a month or two and see how it goes!
Thanks, that make sense. I'll keep it in mind.
As a remote worker myself, totally pumped to see more people able to take advantage of an arrangement I know to be more productive and beneficial to all parties. Great article!
One thing I've noticed though re: introvert/extrovert, it's often not as simple as "introverts are better at remote work".
I totally agree on the processing of external stimuli. I've known many introverts who describe dealing with/processing that at any length as "exhausting".
But when it comes to remote work, I feel like you need to be a communication "extrovert" to some degree. You have to over-communicate, and be extremely comfortable projecting yourself, and being highly visible/available. Some introverts may struggle even with that.
Great post Kevin ! You tackle an oft-overlooked issue which is being inclusive of introverts. You also call out some important things to consider. I recently started working from home more frequently. I have had an office for many years but find myself double-up currently. I get more done by far when at home but confess to having a great setup that allows me to do that.
Very nice and thorough article.
IMO, office as we see them today need to be refined a lot. Laptops should be used a lot more often. Rooms, or any space, should have policies on noise/light/temperature/etc. Productivity should not be view as tied to time spend on place.
I use to visit my parent's workplace ~20y ago and not much change from back then.
Yep, I feel that I'd be much more willing to go in to an office if it allowed me the adaptability needed to focus on my work (versus focusing on everything else going on).
Awesome write up! Thanks