MBA1523 Must Read: Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show Business Building goodness every day with our daily ten minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a must Read Episode. On our Must Read Episodes, I share with you the insights of a book that I've read that has influenced me, that has helped me throughout my entrepreneurial journey. I share with you its takeaways, some of the favorite things I learned from it and why you should read it too. Today's must read is Remote by Jason Fried and David Hanemeier Hansen. Jason Fried and DHH are the founders of Basecamp, but they also write really popular books. The their New York Times bestselling book Rework is very popular and their latest book as well, it doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work. Remote is a book that came out a few years ago that's not as commercially successful but I think is really insightful, especially in today's day and age where everybody's working from home. This book is all about how to have a great successful business with a remote team, teammates around the world working from pretty much anywhere, whether it's their home office, a cafe, a Co working space. That's how they run their business over at Basecamp. It's how we run our business. But in the book they share some really good insights on how to make that transition. They talk about what the trade offs are, where work really happens, how to make sure production is actually happening, how to hold people accountable, how to collaborate remotely, and what are some of the most important things to look out for when running a remote team. I get into my favorite insights in this book. I share it with you. Can't wait to get into this. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start by saying that Jason Fried and David Hanemeier Hansen, when they write a book, it's quite controversial. They're very opinionated and they have a particular view on work. So a lot of people read their books and say, yes, this sounds amazing. And others say, this isn't for me. So my advice is, whenever you read their books, is to go into it with an open mind. Consider maybe some of these things, like on the surface might seem strange, but they might work in your business. The book opens up in a chapter called Work Doesn't Happen at Work. And it really explores the concept of what really happens in the office when everybody's together. It really begs the question, when does the best work people do happen? And Jason and dhh, they argue that the best work happens for employees when they're alone, when they have concentrated time, focused time, distraction, free time, often after everybody's gone home and they just put in extra hours in the office so they can just get some work done. Many of us have experienced this where you're in the office, you're constantly being interrupted because either you have a meeting or somebody's asking you a question, or somebody's just chatting you up or something that's holding you back from working. So they make the point that, hey, if you want to get more work done, you might think it's counterintuitive, but get people to work from home, get people to work on their own time, in their own space. They believe more work does get done in that manner. So they kind of bust the first myth that a lot of people have when it comes to remote work. Like, hey, if I can't see them, they're not going to be doing work. So it's very interesting that they start with this chapter. I can tell you from experience running a remote team for eight years that this is definitely true. More work can get done when people have concentrated time, when they have distraction free Time where they're not being interrupted. It doesn't mean that we're not communicating with each other as a team team, but it just means that the communication is asynchronous. I can see those messages when I'm taking a break, when I'm out of the zone, when I'm done solving this particular problem I'm working on and not being interrupted while I'm in a flow state. For me personally, this is the best benefit of working remotely. I can get a lot of significant work done if I'm just left without distractions, without interruptions. You have to have some sort of interruptions, right, for meetings, for collaboration. But scheduled interruptions are the way to go, and you could do that with remote work. Also, early on in the book, they discuss a lot of interesting perks of working remotely, having a remote team. One of them is you save a ton of time on commuting. Everybody on our team pretty much works from home. We have a few teammates that prefer to work in a co working space that's close to them. But for the most part, everybody on our team's commute is seconds, right. Getting to that office in their house. I remember when I had to commute to work 50 minutes each way. I used to spend almost two hours a day. Often two hours a day with traffic in the car. Just absolute waste of time. That time adds up. Two hours a day, five days a week, that's 10 hours a week, that's 520 hours a year. That's like 20 days. That's a lot of time. And this alone can be a perk, a differentiator to recruit a hire, recruit a talented new person saying, do I deal with a commute or no commute? No commute will win. The other thing they explore is the idea of talent. Like I just mentioned, when you're hiring for the best talent in your company, you want the best of the best. If you are going to be limited by a geographical location like your local office, you are really limiting your business from really getting the best people in the world. Most people are not going to get up and leave and move to work for you by having a remote team. You can hire from anywhere in the world. And there's some really amazing people across the world that you can get for just as much or maybe even less than what you would have to pay if you're paying somebody locally. Even if we're talking about within your own country, let's say, for example, you're in the US and you're based in New York, you have a whole large geographical area within the US we're talking about within three time zones that you can hire from. They even mentioned some cities that are talent hotspots like Evanston, Illinois or Tulsa, Oklahoma. They also mentioned some cities outside the U.S. cities in New Zealand and Germany that are worth looking into in the book. They also offer some hybrid solutions to remote work. You don't have to have all or nothing. But some of the companies out there, what they do is they have a local office that it's optional. You can come into the office, there's an office space if you want to have a meeting, you can come in once or twice a week if you like, but you can work from home every day if you like. Now what's great about this is that you do have like a home base and you can also have a physical space if you all want to meet together, like maybe for an all hands meeting. But also the space doesn't have to have individual offices for everybody. It could just be an open plan place where people have hot desks and you can rearrange your room for meetings. That way you're not wasting on all this office space that's not needed because most of the time people are working from home. The argument against a large, expensive office is that when you pay a lot of money for an office, and they make this point very clearly in the book, you tend to want people to be in the office because you want to get the money's worth, the money's worth of paying that rent and paying for all the things that you had to buy to make this office livable. So you're kind of just hoping that the people stay in that office as long as possible instead of having a work life balance, instead of actually getting the work done so they can go home. 40 solid productive hours is more than enough to get things done. And because of interruptions in the office, that doesn't actually happen. So people have to stay longer, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And they're very much against this culture. They're very much against Google's culture of having these Googleplexes where people have all three meals of their life. At Google, they exercise, they do the gym, they get massages, they live basically at work. And they don't think that's a healthy way to live. They don't want that for their employees. They want their employees to have a sense of balance and a sense of recharge to get back to work every day. In the book, they actually give you a clear game plan if you want to go remote, Even if you're a new company or an established company, what are the steps you have to take if you want to transition or establish yourself as a remote company? They also give some really good pieces of advice about differentiating work life and home life, even if you're working from home. How how to have that line drawn in your mind and in your life. So not everything is blended together and you're not overworking yourself or of course, overworking your team.

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Today's must read Remote is quite insightful when it comes to building a remote team. I want to leave you with one of my favorite chapters, one of my favorite insights, and it's about how to make sure your teammates don't feel like they're being ignored. A lot of people worry about this. If I have a remote team, I don't see them. They might feel like they're being ignored and feel like they're being neglected. So they put the onus on them. They say there's two ways to make sure you're not ignored. And they say these are the two ways. The first way is you make some noise. Okay? And when they say make some noise, they basically mean you're communicating, you're collaborating, you're talking to people, whether they're on video chats or whether they're on chat, whether on Slack, whatever you're using to communicate with your team remotely. You're constantly in communication with people. The second way is you make progress. And that means you're doing significant work, noteworthy work that people can't ignore it. They're like, wow, this person is really producing results. These are two ways to make sure you're not ignored. And what I love about this is that they basically give the formula to their teammates and they say, this is how we want you to make sure you're not ignored. This is how you do it. This is how you win. And they put the onus on the team and not on the managers. The managers are not supposed to be babysitting them. They're all professionals. They're all adults. This is how you're not ignored these two ways. I really like that. I really like this book and I highly recommend you pick up Remote by Jason Freed and David hanemeier Hanson that wraps up today's must read episode. If you love what you hear, leave us an iTunes rating and review. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Also, if you have not yet, hit that subscribe button on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe. This ensures that when the next episode is available it's right on your device. You don't miss a beat. So whether you like to listen to podcasts on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher Radio or Spotify or Himalaya or whatever it is, hit that subscribe button right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A lot of us were forced into remote work because of COVID 19. Some of us are going back to the office soon. Some of us are not yet. It's still early days. Some of us are evaluating. Hey, maybe this work from home thing is a good idea for me and my team. Let's continue. One of the best ways to ensure success is to look at people and to learn from people that have already done it successfully. And that's what this book's all about. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can just look and follow by example. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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