The three Rs of remote work

I started working remotely in 2012. Since then I’ve worked for big companies and small, companies with outstanding remote working cultures, and others that probably would have difficultly spelling the word without predictive text. I broadly classify my experiences into three tiers;

Little r remote

The first kind of remote work I call little r remote.

Your company has an office, but it’s not convenient or you don’t want to work from there. It could be the commute is too long, or its in the next town over, or perhaps a short plane flight away. Sometimes you might go into the office for a day or two a week, and should something serious arise you could join your co-workers onsite for an extended period of time.

If you often hear people say they are going to work from home to get some work done, that’s little r remote.

Big R remote

The next category I call Big R remote. Big R remote differs mainly from little r remote by the tyranny of distance. It’s not impossible to visit your co-workers in person, but it is inconvenient. Face to face meetings involve a day’s flying. Passports and boarder crossings are frequently involved. The expense and distance required results in week long sprints and commensurate periods of jetlag recuperation.

Because of timezone differences meetings must be prearranged and periods of overlap closely guarded. Communication becomes less spontaneous and care must be taken to avoid committing to unsustainable working hours.

Gothic ℜ remote

The final category is basically Big R remote working on hard mode. Everything that was hard about Big R remote, timezone, travel schedules, public holidays, daylight savings, video call latency, cultural and language barriers is multiplied for each remote worker.

In person meetings are so rare that without a focus on written asynchronous communication progress can repeatedly stall for days, if not weeks, as miscommunication leads to disillusionment and loss of trust.

In my experience, for knowledge workers, little r remote work offers many benefits over the open office hell scape du jour. Big R remote takes a serious commitment by all parties and if you are the first employee in that category you will bare most of the cost to making Big R remote work for you.

Gothic ℜ remote working should probably be avoided unless all those involved have many years of working in that style and the employer is committed to restructuring the company as a remote first organisation. It is not possible to succeed in a Gothic ℜ remote without a culture of written communication and asynchronous decision making mandated, and consistently enforced, by the leaders of the company.