Get your best work done, no matter where you do it. Video calls from your couch. Project reports in a coffee shop. Presentations at your kitchen table. Working remotely gives you more flexibility in how and where you do your job. But being part of a far-flung team can be challenging. How can you make remote work work for you? The HBR Guide to Remote Work provides practical tips and advice to help you stay productive, avoid distractions, and collaborate with your team, despite the distance that separates you. You'll learn to: Create a regular work-from-home routine Identify the right technology for your needs Run better virtual meetings Avoid burnout and video-call fatigue Manage remote employees Conduct difficult conversations when you can't meet in person Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.
"An excellent guide on how teams can effectively work together, regardless of location." STEPHANE KASRIEL, former CEO of Upwork IN TODAY'S MODERN GLOBAL ECONOMY, companies and organizations in all sectors are embracing the game-changing benefits of the remote workplace. Managers benefit by saving money and resources and by having access to talent outside their zip codes, while employees enjoy greater job opportunities, productivity, independence, and work-life satisfaction. But in this new digital arena, companies need a plan for supporting efficiency and fostering streamlined, engaging teamwork. In Work Together Anywhere, Lisette Sutherland, an international champion of virtual-team strategies, offers a complete blueprint for optimizing team success by supporting every member of every team, including: EMPLOYEES/small advocating for work-from-home options MANAGERS/small seeking to maximize productivity and profitability TEAMS/small collaborating over complex projects and long-term goals ORGANIZATIONS/small reliant on sharing confidential documents and data COMPANY OWNERS/small striving to save money and attract the best brainpower Packed with hands-on materials and actionable advice for cultivating agility, camaraderie, and collaboration, Work Together Anywhere is a thorough and inspiring must-have guide for getting ahead in today's remote-working world.
Learn how the best teams hire software engineers and fill technical roles. The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring is the authoritative guide to growing software engineering teams effectively, written by and for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and candidates. Hiring is rated as one of the biggest obstacles to growth by most CEOs. Hiring managers, recruiters, and interviewers all wrestle with how to source candidates, interview fairly and effectively, and ultimately motivate the right candidates to accept offers. Yet the process is costly, frustrating, and often stressful or unfair to candidates. Anyone who cares about building effective software teams will return to this book again and again. Inside, you'll find know-how from some of the most insightful and experienced leaders and practitioners—senior engineers, recruiters, entrepreneurs, and hiring managers—who’ve built teams from early-stage startups to thousand-person engineering organizations. The lead author of this guide, Ozzie Osman, previously led product engineering at Quora and teams at Google, and built (and sold) his own startup. Additional contributors include Aditya Agarwal, former CTO of Dropbox; Jennifer Kim, former head of diversity at Lever; veteran recruiters and startup founders Jose Guardado (founder of Build Talent and former Y Combinator) and Aline Lerner (CEO of Interviewing.io); and over a dozen others. Recruiting and hiring can be done well, in a way that has a positive impact on companies, employees, and every candidate. With the right foundations and practice, teams and candidates can approach a stressful and difficult process with knowledge and confidence. Ask your employer if you can expense this book—it's one of the highest-leverage investments they can make in your team.
Reinvent your organization for the hybrid age. Hybrid work is here to stay—but what will it look like at your company? If your organization is holding on to inflexible, pre-pandemic policies about where—and when—your people work, it may be risking a mass exodus of talent. Designing a hybrid workplace that furthers your business goals while staying true to your culture requires balancing experimentation with rigorous planning. Hybrid Workplace: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you adopt the best technological, cultural, and new management practices to seize the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of the hybrid age. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.
Sharon Koifman is a survivor. He survived the dot com crash. He survived working with outsourcers that mastered English like fish mastered riding bicycles. And he survived building and leading a completely remote business spanning four continents... With two toddlers in the room. The title of this book is a lie. Sharon Koifman didn't survive remote work. He thrived with remote work. Surviving Remote Work is the distillation of a decade of lessons. Inside, you'll learn the tools, strategies and tactics to survive and thrive as a leader in the remote age. Things like: How to keep your company culture alive remotely - or even build one from scratch; A world-class recipe for onboarding new remote people -one that has received praise from dozens of clients and hundreds of employees; How to manage and avoid distractions - for yourself and your team; What is the best remote communications technology that no one is using; How to protect your business' (and your clients') data in a fully-distributed operation; How to keep the extroverts in your team from wanting to kill themselves; How to keep the introverts in our team from wanting to kill themselves; And much, much more. Some awesome authors have interviewed, studied, and collected data for their business books. We love those guys. We like their books. But this is something different. This is a book by someone who experienced everything described within firsthand. Sharon made all the possible mistakes (plus a couple of impossible ones) in remote work. All so you don't have to. Buy it now and learn how to survive remote work!
The classic guide to working from home and why we should embrace a virtual office, from the bestselling authors of Rework “A paradigm-smashing, compulsively readable case for a radically remote workplace.”—Susan Cain, New York Times bestselling author of Quiet Does working from home—or anywhere else but the office—make sense? In Remote, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of Basecamp, bring new insight to the hotly debated argument. While providing a complete overview of remote work’s challenges, Jason and David persuasively argue that, often, the advantages of working “off-site” far outweigh the drawbacks. In the past decade, the “under one roof” model of conducting work has been steadily declining, owing to technology that is rapidly creating virtual workspaces. Today the new paradigm is “move work to the workers, rather than workers to the workplace.” Companies see advantages in the way remote work increases their talent pool, reduces turnover, lessens their real estate footprint, and improves their ability to conduct business across multiple time zones. But what about the workers? Jason and David point out that remote work means working at the best job (not just one that is nearby) and achieving a harmonious work-life balance while increasing productivity. And those are just some of the perks to be gained from leaving the office behind. Remote reveals a multitude of other benefits, along with in-the-trenches tips for easing your way out of the office door where you control how your workday will unfold. Whether you’re a manager fretting over how to manage workers who “want out” or a worker who wants to achieve a lifestyle upgrade while still being a top performer professionally, this book is your indispensable guide.
The world is now your office! You can work from home, from a coffee shop, or even from the gym—but how do you keep on task and stay motivated when you’re alone. In Working Remotely, authors Mike, Holly, and Teresa discuss how to ward off toxic levels of loneliness, how to get what you need from colleagues spread across the world, and how to network and grow in your career when you are sitting in an office of one, plus many other topics that will help you survive and thrive as a remote worker. Mike, Holly, and Teresa use their different paths through Kaplan to help the remote worker figure out how to set up the right headspace for them. “Working Remotely paints a very real picture of what it's like to be a remote worker in an organisation... In contrast to most books on remote work which have been written with managers, business owners or freelancers in mind, Secrets of the Remote Workforce speaks directly to employees, guiding them through their day to day.” -Pilar Orti Director of Virtual not Distant “Working Remotely is a terrific map for helping employees who work remotely take charge of their own career. The authors have all survived and thrived as remote employees... While other resources focus on how to manage remote employees, this book highlights the power that employees have to drive success for themselves.” -Susan Cates, Strategic Advisor
The Remote Work Handbook: The Definitive Guide for Operationalizing Remote Work as a Competitive Business Strategy is for readers seeking to leverage the business benefits of a flexible, remote workforce. It is a practical guide for building and implementing remote work at any size organization. C-suite executives, operation leaders, business owners, or entrepreneurs who recognize the workplace is changing can use it to re-tool their operations for a strategic business advantage. Mari Anne Snow, the author, is a recognized remote work expert with over 20 years of experience leading remote teams and has re-written the rules of leadership to unlock the potential in remote and distributed teams. In this book, she shares all her secrets. The book explores the untapped potential of remote teams and lays out the business case for adopting a new, flexible workplace model to build organizational resilience and a competitive edge. It takes the reader through the step-by-step process of constructing a remote work operating model, staging an implementation, then institutionalizing and sustaining the change. It includes down-to-earth professional and personal stories that alert the reader to the top priorities and operational realities they will face as they craft their own implementation plan for operationalizing remote work at their company.
This revised second edition presents 15 years of data on Virtual Distance metrics and their predictive impact on organizational success factors shedding new light on how to correct for communication challenges that often show up as a foggy set of digital disconnects where the vitality of the virtual workforce often gets lost in transmission. This still-evolving Digital Age conundrum continues to present new complications. The rise of remote work which rests on an increasing reliance on electronic communication and the overall growth of virtual interactions has led to the escalation of a phenomenon called Virtual Distance. Virtual Distance, which influences our behavior through three components Physical Distance, Operational Distance, and Affinity Distance affects not only how we relate to others thousands of miles away but even to co-workers sitting right next to each other! Perhaps even more problematic, Virtual Distance causes measureable malfunctions in teamwork, innovation, leader effectiveness and overall performance. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Power of Virtual Distance offers specific, proven and predictable solutions that can reverse these trends and turn Virtual Distance into a unification strategy to capture untapped competitive advantage. Surprised? The Power of Virtual Distance, 2nd Edition is a must-read for leadership who want to understand the true and quantifiable costs of the virtual workplace. For the first time ever, readers can take the guesswork out of managing the virtual workforce by applying a mathematical approach derived from the extensive Virtual Distance data set: The Virtual Distance Ratio. The Virtual Distance Ratio can precisely pinpoint the particular impacts of Virtual Distance on the organization’s critical success factors. Beyond business metrics, Virtual Distance solutions also detail ways to restore meaningfulness and well-being into people’s experience of work, enhancing life lived in the Digital Age. The Power of Virtual Distance reveals an updated set of data, including the first award-winning analysis, collected from an extended range of executives to individual contributors, that represent situations and solutions in more than 36 industries in 55 countries across the globe. Readers will get a “first look” at the data and its revelations on how to be less isolated and more integrated. Helping managers globally, this book: Offers new, real-world case studies and a chance for readers to participate in thought experiments to help with personal performance, group synergy and by extension, relationship dynamics of all kinds Demonstrates (with statistically significant trend analyses) that Virtual Distance is growing at exponential rates in every corner of communities worldwide Offers expert advice on how to manage the “unintended human consequences” of today’s digital technologies Companies that successfully harness the power of Virtual Distance demonstrate better performance. The second edition of The Power of Virtual Distance is a valuable, one-of-a-kind resource for everyone – from the C-suite to human resource professionals; from divisional leaders to project managers. Everyone in the organization can benefit by discovering how to improve financials, innovation, trust, employee engagement, satisfaction, organizational citizenship and other key performance indicators. And perhaps best of all, by following the prescriptions on how to reduce Virtual Distance, the entire workforce will have the tools they need to bring about a revival of meaning, purpose and an enlivened sense of “humanhood” back into everyday work and everyday life.
The ultimate guide to leading remote employees and teams, tackling the key challenges that managers face-from hiring and onboarding new members to building culture remotely, tracking productivity, communicating speedily, and retaining star employees
