There's an interesting debate about remote working going on here on 37signals 's (a software developer)website. The debate is interesting because the developer's own firm has remote workers and the tools they develop are helpful to remote working.
The usual issues come up: trust, office politics, lack of motivation away from the social team, body language and eye contact as a form of communication, use of technology (the firm has developed internet whiteboards and chat tools for brainstorming), time zone problems, cost of living and quality of living benefits, problems of measuring productivity, face to face theory in offices versus face to computer reality, social life shouldn't depend on work. I'll stop there because it's only still only half way through the comments.
I'm interested in how software development teams work, because I have always worked with project teams, first in construction, then in research, then IT and now international consulting as an independent consultant. Nowhere are the conditions more demanding than the last, at least the sort I do, with a new country, a new team and (what really makes it interesting) a new problem each time.
Take my last project. We had a team of 3: me a Brit (a generalist by now), a young Polish/French lawyer without much experience of consulting in the field, and a retired Dane technical specialist, pressed into service again. We had never met. The Dane had not worked for the firm before. I had not worked with the lawyer before either.
We had 3 months (part time) to catch up on time lost while the team had been changed, an extremely demanding client under political pressure, a government beneficiary (for whom the work was being done) undergoing political changes, and the summer when nobody wanted to work.
So we started work in a new country for one of us, without an office, and with a horrid hotel. Two of us moved to an apartment where we could work and have at least a dial up internet connection. Gradually we got to know each other over the trials of tribulations of daily life. No space for prima donnas over living accommodation, food, bad service, and the vagaries of hotels, money exchanges and cash points. We had a lot of laughs over dinner and plenty of wine.
During the day we met our local clients and co-workers (working largely through interpreters) and agreed a work plan. We answered their questions as best we understood them. We mapped out what each of the team should do and got on with it in our "office" (the living room of the apartment) using the internet in one of the bedrooms (because the phone socket was there. The Dane worked in the kitchen as he preferred "privacy".
Since then we have worked from our respective homes/offices/countries by email and Skype, plus an attempt at Basecamp, the project management software written by 37signals. It's project management software based on the need for communications, not on vast sequences of tasks and resource allocations, like Microsoft Project etc.
On this project however, it seemed a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and was useless when we were on site because of the lack of internet, but maybe not for another project with a better internet connection. The sequence to produce our "product", a single report, is relatively easy and can be done on Word, with shared contributions and commenting.
As the project continued, the client moved the goalposts, eaking out the funding to get more and more done, to meet what seemed to be important political requirements. So we ended up doing more reports, with no meetings on site. Somehow the unofficial team building which occurred during our "camping" on site was sufficient to help us through the remote working afterwards.
Most of us doing this work are in the 50-70 age group, the age group regularly labelled as less flexible, less adaptable and therefore candidates for early retirement. Some of our reports actually condemn older workers just like us to redundancy, which has a certain irony. In reality some of us have already been through that stage, and found a new interest working abroad (using our "outdated" ideas and knowledge) so we are not unaware of the irony.
Some people find it difficult to cope without the facilities of (and also respect indicated by) an office and a secretary. They don't last long. Probably they aren't very self-reliant or selfdisciplined either. There's nothing like a full diary of meetings to stop you doing work which requires thinking, if you want to avoid thinking about solutions to problems you have never met before.
So what can we add to the debate about remote working? Certainly we can do it in our type of consulting. But the personal characteristics (age, maturity, expertise, confidence) of people who do the consulting are likely to support it too, and need less personal or office support to get work done. Our work is usually well defined before we start, or at least we need to redefine it, if it isn't. We are generally "expert" in what we are doing (that's why we are hired in the first place), so there isn't a lot of ego or competition involved. We do have to work remotely as a team but we generally fly in for regular meetings with a client. We tend to be on the same side in those meetings (at least if we want to get paid). Interviews for jobs are often not necessary if standard cv format is used and there is a continuous record of work in this particular field. We tend to work for the same firms, though these can be spread all over Europe. With a time zone difference of only 2-3 hours, this is not a problem within Europe, but instead we have lots of language and cultural differences, even if our working language is English.
None of us have to work in these conditions if we don't want to. So perhaps the common factor is that we like the uncertainty and the freedom, plus the travel. And it is only for short periods. More normally we have proper offices in the country with the usual working arrangements.
So probably the only conclusion we can draw is that remote working suits some people and not others, and not for ever.
