Why We Work From Home (and Why You Should Consider It)
What if you could:
- Wake up every morning at a reasonable hour and have breakfast with your family.
- Bring your kids to school then be at your office, ready for work, only a couple of minutes later (no commuting, no traffic jams.)
- Start working without having to small talk about the weather.
- Have hours of undisturbed, focused work time to work on your projects. No one interrupting with a “Quick question, will take only 5 minutes“.
- Have the flexibility to fill in your breaks as you like: walking, running, reading, sleeping, watching the news, or meeting a friend for lunch.
- Be there to get your kids after school and have dinner with your family.
- Have your evening to spend with your friends and family. You won’t need to continue working because you already got a ton of work done during your uninterrupted and commute-less working day
This is what a typical day looks like for the team at ArchiSnapper—we all work from home.
For young innovative companies, it’s probably cooler to have a trendy office with a ping pong table, a meditation zone, and gluten-free lunches.
And to be honest, until recently, sometimes I would feel a bit embarrassed when I told clients that we’re a remote company.
I was afraid the client would think that it’s not professional to work from home, or that we do it because we can’t afford to rent an office.
So every time the question “Where are you guys based?” came up, I would simply answer with the city where I live, and say that we have another office where my co-founder lives :)
But I’m past that now, and I’m confident to say that we all work from home, even if the client asking is a very “traditional” business with hundreds or thousands of employees. I’m happy that we are a little bit contrarian and that we always resisted to renting an office.
It’s not because these hip startups have trendy offices that we have to follow the trend. I prefer having a quality life to appearing trendy just for the sake of it.
I know it’s not easy for every business to work remotely, but if it’s possible for yours you should consider it.
Here’s why:
- you and your colleagues will be far more productive by eliminating all the small talk and massively unproductive “do you have 5 minutes” interruptions
- you will save lots of time on commuting and traffic jams: say you’re driving 30 minutes to your work and 30 minutes back. That’s one hour a day, 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month and more or less 200 hours per year. That’s 25 full working days (OMG!!!), just saying …
Per employee… just saying :-) - you increase your recruiting pool enormously. At ArchiSnapper we’re working with developers in Belgium but also in Spain for example.
“How do you control people when they work from home?”
We don’t. We don’t ask them for time logs, we don’t do screen captures. We trust them and we give them freedom. And it works great. Treat people like adults, and they’ll behave like adults.
“How do you organize meetings?”
We don’t or only do when needed. Meetings are costly and toxic. We only align via Skype call when needed.
“How do you create connections and maintain team spirit?”
I have to admit that this is a bit less obvious when working from home. But there are many ways:
- we organize weekly status calls: what has been done, what’s the focus for next week, who is doing what.
- we try to meet one or twice a year, with the whole team. Last week we met in Malaga (Ole!), which was nice.
So if you’re running, say, a small architecture studio then it’s of course great to have an office where you can work together when it’s useful. But why not combine it with allowing everyone to work from home when that works best?
Say you have a site meeting at 1 PM. Why bother to commute to the office, do the small talk and bare the interruptions if you could just as well stay home, get in the focus right away and get a good amount of work done?
Not convinced? Check out these Work From Home Statistics.
Take care!
