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Effective Remote Work
The office isn't as essential as it used to be. Flexible working hours and distributed teams are replacing decades of on-site, open-plan office culture. Wherever you work from nowadays, your colleagues are likely to be somewhere else. No more whiteboards. No more water coolers. And certainly no ping-pong. So how can you organize yourself, ship software, communicate, and be impactful as part of a globally distributed workforce? We'll show you how. It's time to adopt a brand new mindset. Remote working is here to stay. Come and join us.
Remote working is on the rise. Whether or not we are remote workers, it is likely we are all part of a global workforce. We need to learn to interact remotely, because we are all remote from someone in some way. Rather than simply simulating the way we'd usually work together via digital means, we have to learn new communication skills and adopt a different mindset in order to work remotely effectively, efficiently, and, most importantly, healthily.
We'll start by getting you set up with the right equipment and habits. Then, we'll learn the mindset of treating everyone as remote, and conquer both synchronous and asynchronous communication. You'll learn how to produce amazing artifacts, how to communicate clearly, and how to manage yourself and your teams. Then we'll look at the bigger from measuring the remote readiness of your workplace, to creating a handbook for your team, to exploring remote-first culture and tackling burnout and mental well-being.
Fundamentally we'll see that adopting a remote-working mindset can do wonders for our organization, our effectiveness, and our impact in our careers. It can even create a more diverse and inclusive industry for us all to work in.
So what are you waiting for? The remote future is now. Be a part of it.
What You
There are no prerequisites to listening to this book, other than having had some experience of working in the software industry and a healthy curiosity.
Remote working is on the rise. Whether or not we are remote workers, it is likely we are all part of a global workforce. We need to learn to interact remotely, because we are all remote from someone in some way. Rather than simply simulating the way we'd usually work together via digital means, we have to learn new communication skills and adopt a different mindset in order to work remotely effectively, efficiently, and, most importantly, healthily.
We'll start by getting you set up with the right equipment and habits. Then, we'll learn the mindset of treating everyone as remote, and conquer both synchronous and asynchronous communication. You'll learn how to produce amazing artifacts, how to communicate clearly, and how to manage yourself and your teams. Then we'll look at the bigger from measuring the remote readiness of your workplace, to creating a handbook for your team, to exploring remote-first culture and tackling burnout and mental well-being.
Fundamentally we'll see that adopting a remote-working mindset can do wonders for our organization, our effectiveness, and our impact in our careers. It can even create a more diverse and inclusive industry for us all to work in.
So what are you waiting for? The remote future is now. Be a part of it.
What You
There are no prerequisites to listening to this book, other than having had some experience of working in the software industry and a healthy curiosity.
Audible Audio
Published September 27, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 3, 2022
For anyone keen to learn about remote work, the book is exactly what the cover promises - a practical guide for yourself, your team and your company. What I particularly like is that the author doesn’t give in to unreal utopianism. He’s very grounded in reality and starts from personal changes, to team changes and then goes to org changes. What possibly keeps the advice grounded is that he’s an engineer, so his advice is almost directly applicable to any kind of software dev or creative team. At the same time, he's part of a large product company, so it's not as if this is advice that doesn't scale.
There’s very little fluffy, hand wavy stuff, but he also doesn’t shy away from the hard advice. For example, I totally dig the part where he asks to consider if it’s time to leave a company. You also have to admire the author's empathy for people who are very embedded in their “in-office” ways of working. That’s something I don’t have. So those kinds of people will also get something out of reading his book. And people like me get to discover another way of educating those people as well.
Unlike some other leaders in the field who dismiss these seemingly old-school workers as morons, Stanier gives them actionable advice. If they can't change their org or team, they can at least make themselves more effective in a remote work setting.
Advice for managers is spot on as well. The tip on "leaving loudly" and the part on "listening, not judging or fixing" - gold dust!
Yeah, I could go on. Pick it up. Read it. You'll thank me for it.
There’s very little fluffy, hand wavy stuff, but he also doesn’t shy away from the hard advice. For example, I totally dig the part where he asks to consider if it’s time to leave a company. You also have to admire the author's empathy for people who are very embedded in their “in-office” ways of working. That’s something I don’t have. So those kinds of people will also get something out of reading his book. And people like me get to discover another way of educating those people as well.
Unlike some other leaders in the field who dismiss these seemingly old-school workers as morons, Stanier gives them actionable advice. If they can't change their org or team, they can at least make themselves more effective in a remote work setting.
Advice for managers is spot on as well. The tip on "leaving loudly" and the part on "listening, not judging or fixing" - gold dust!
Yeah, I could go on. Pick it up. Read it. You'll thank me for it.
July 1, 2022
Great introduction to effectively working in a remote environment. It's a mix of things you can do to immediately improve your life and practices you gradually influence your team to adopt so that everyone has a first class experience working, whether it's an office or a home office.
May 8, 2022
Easy to read, full of great tips and ideas for individuals and teams alike. I liked the comedy in the chapter openers, and it never felt boring.
May 8, 2022
Remote working is something many of us had not given much thought to prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was often a temporary inconvenient to be endured, rather than something that required conscious thought on how to perform as an effective team whilst not located in the same building.
Fortunately, many of us and our organisations have been forced to completely reconsider our approach to remote work. This doesn’t mean that the solutions are obvious. Understanding how to communicate, collaborate and manage a team remotely requires careful consideration. A lot of this adjustment happened through necessity, with little guidance as to what the best practices were.
Effective Remote Work is the guide many of us wished we had back in March 2020. It covers how to become effective remotely yourself, progressing onto how to run remote teams and organisations. The sections addressing hybrid environments are especially useful given this is now the reality for a majority of former office workers. I’d highly recommend the book to anyone interested in improving their effectiveness as a remote worker, anyone that interacts with remote colleagues, or anyone leading remote or hybrid teams.
Fortunately, many of us and our organisations have been forced to completely reconsider our approach to remote work. This doesn’t mean that the solutions are obvious. Understanding how to communicate, collaborate and manage a team remotely requires careful consideration. A lot of this adjustment happened through necessity, with little guidance as to what the best practices were.
Effective Remote Work is the guide many of us wished we had back in March 2020. It covers how to become effective remotely yourself, progressing onto how to run remote teams and organisations. The sections addressing hybrid environments are especially useful given this is now the reality for a majority of former office workers. I’d highly recommend the book to anyone interested in improving their effectiveness as a remote worker, anyone that interacts with remote colleagues, or anyone leading remote or hybrid teams.
May 17, 2022
Remote work won’t go away. Better get it right now. This book is a great starting point for that!
Everybody does some form of remote work. Some companies want full remote, some have a more hybrid approach. “Effective Remote Work” is a highly condensed but easily digestible book on all the things that matter on remote work. I particularly liked the chapter about artifacts as I think those are, or better should be, the center of every remote work we do - thanks for that!
I am a huge fan of synchronous work methods like remote pair/mob/ensemble programming. In this book, they are only mentioned very briefly and the reader is directed to further studies on their own. I would have liked that James shared more on these, but maybe that’s just me. :-)
Overall, I strongly recommend reading it. It’s time well spent, and with James’ writing style, it might just be the perfect companion with your red wine on your balcony this summer.
Everybody does some form of remote work. Some companies want full remote, some have a more hybrid approach. “Effective Remote Work” is a highly condensed but easily digestible book on all the things that matter on remote work. I particularly liked the chapter about artifacts as I think those are, or better should be, the center of every remote work we do - thanks for that!
I am a huge fan of synchronous work methods like remote pair/mob/ensemble programming. In this book, they are only mentioned very briefly and the reader is directed to further studies on their own. I would have liked that James shared more on these, but maybe that’s just me. :-)
Overall, I strongly recommend reading it. It’s time well spent, and with James’ writing style, it might just be the perfect companion with your red wine on your balcony this summer.
May 5, 2022
I transitioned to remote working during the pandemic and my company continued with remote work afterwards.
This book is a great resource to help teams realign their expectations and norms around being remote, and like other books from PragProg, it is focussed on practical examples and exercises that you can discuss and use with your team immediately.
The chapters on treating everyone as remote and the spectrum of synchronous had a real impact on how my own team work and communicate with each other.
Highly recommended!
This book is a great resource to help teams realign their expectations and norms around being remote, and like other books from PragProg, it is focussed on practical examples and exercises that you can discuss and use with your team immediately.
The chapters on treating everyone as remote and the spectrum of synchronous had a real impact on how my own team work and communicate with each other.
Highly recommended!
May 26, 2022
Highly recommend this book. The author provides a very good and comprehensive landscape of all the factors involved in making remote work, work. Including async work. I particularly liked the framework that he provided around a trade-off triangle between "number of people", "consensus", and "speed" when making decisions in a distributed system of work. You can only pick two.
April 10, 2022
I've found James' previous writing to contain many uncredited ideas from other sources. It is unpleasant to read and incongruent with the ideas presented about working well with others.
On this new topic of remote work, James would likely have started working remotely full time in March 2020. Funny enough, that’s about the same moment that, well, just about everyone else in the audience for a book like this did too. Did he form a complete, innovative, book-length body of knowledge in those two years? Where did this expertise come from?
It is quite possible that this book is not simply an opportunistic cash in of filler material between others' work. It could be something more than a round-up of whatever James was getting from Hacker News, Twitter threads and Clubhouse calls to help him through the lockdowns. You’d have to be extraordinarily inert, undead even, to have lived through Covid and have formed no original ideas of your own about remote work. But given James’ history and enthusiasm for appropriation I would not rush to exclude that possibility.
I find it hard to imagine there's enough of James' original thought here to merit a book, or that James has somehow chosen to credit others contributions appropriately this time.
The only area where I would expect novel material to be found here is in the table of contents.
On this new topic of remote work, James would likely have started working remotely full time in March 2020. Funny enough, that’s about the same moment that, well, just about everyone else in the audience for a book like this did too. Did he form a complete, innovative, book-length body of knowledge in those two years? Where did this expertise come from?
It is quite possible that this book is not simply an opportunistic cash in of filler material between others' work. It could be something more than a round-up of whatever James was getting from Hacker News, Twitter threads and Clubhouse calls to help him through the lockdowns. You’d have to be extraordinarily inert, undead even, to have lived through Covid and have formed no original ideas of your own about remote work. But given James’ history and enthusiasm for appropriation I would not rush to exclude that possibility.
I find it hard to imagine there's enough of James' original thought here to merit a book, or that James has somehow chosen to credit others contributions appropriately this time.
The only area where I would expect novel material to be found here is in the table of contents.
June 1, 2022
A good primer on how to do remote work.
I wonder how much of it is old hat now that so many people have been working remotely for two years, but it is also a good refresher for people already in remote work (individual contributors or leaders) to see i they could improve the environments at their own companies.
A whole bunch of topics are covered, from the practicalities of setting up a personal workspace, to how to start convincing a team or a company to try out remote policies, to how to craft a better communication hygeine, to how managers should lead by example. It also talks about the drawbacks of remote work, and how to mitigate them. The book pulls from several other sources that are worth following up on, and there is a nice bibliography that could be constructed from the footnotes.
My only complaint about it is that, despite its own advice to keep language as inclusive as possible (i.e. no in-jokes or irrelevant inside talk) the writer occasonally gets too nerdy, with talk about the Zelda and Dark Souls videogames as analogies. I get the intent (and I happen to love those two game franchises) but not everyone who needs to read this book is a gamer and those analogies I feel are a bit tacky and get the message of their respective paragraphs lost a bit.
I wonder how much of it is old hat now that so many people have been working remotely for two years, but it is also a good refresher for people already in remote work (individual contributors or leaders) to see i they could improve the environments at their own companies.
A whole bunch of topics are covered, from the practicalities of setting up a personal workspace, to how to start convincing a team or a company to try out remote policies, to how to craft a better communication hygeine, to how managers should lead by example. It also talks about the drawbacks of remote work, and how to mitigate them. The book pulls from several other sources that are worth following up on, and there is a nice bibliography that could be constructed from the footnotes.
My only complaint about it is that, despite its own advice to keep language as inclusive as possible (i.e. no in-jokes or irrelevant inside talk) the writer occasonally gets too nerdy, with talk about the Zelda and Dark Souls videogames as analogies. I get the intent (and I happen to love those two game franchises) but not everyone who needs to read this book is a gamer and those analogies I feel are a bit tacky and get the message of their respective paragraphs lost a bit.
July 24, 2022
Es un libro muy bueno, aunque tiene muchas "historias" inventadas para darle una idea mas al lector acerca de lo que se esta hablando. Te muestra como es que las empresas poco a poco han empleado el esquema de trabajo remoto, que se debe de hacer tanto como empleado como empleador y mejor aun, te explica a fondo cada una de las posibles actividades a realizar en remoto, lo que esperan los demas. Que mobiliario necesitas, etc.
Me agrada que hace mencion de dos libros muy buenos de empresas que desde hace años ya han estado realizando esta operacion de trabajo remoto, los libros son The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work and Remote: Office Not Required
Es una lectura comoda, paginas amigables y te permite leerlo de corrido o solo la seccion en la que te gustaria mejorar.
Me agrada que hace mencion de dos libros muy buenos de empresas que desde hace años ya han estado realizando esta operacion de trabajo remoto, los libros son The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work and Remote: Office Not Required
Es una lectura comoda, paginas amigables y te permite leerlo de corrido o solo la seccion en la que te gustaria mejorar.
May 5, 2022
Like for many over the last three years navigating a global pandemic has proved challenging, eye opening and at times deeply testing. The best we could do was in fact the best we could do.
Now as my company, and my team make the long term transition to being a fully remote company I needed a reference and a guide to help me look back at the decisions we made, look forward at those yet to come and this book has proved to be exactly that.
James, like many of us, switched from full time office to full time remote as the pandemic hit and this book show cases the the most effective policies and processes he, and companies he worked for put in place to allow teams to adapt and thrive at a time we were all working to re-writing the rules.
Almost 3 years on from the breaking of the Pandemic - the world of work has changed and this book serves as a robust compendium of advice, written in the easy to digest tone I've come to recognise from reading James' last book "Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager". I highly recommend it to anyone be it managers of remote or hybrid teams - or if you have anyone offsite for that matter - this book will help you make the most of your people regardless of where they're located.
Now as my company, and my team make the long term transition to being a fully remote company I needed a reference and a guide to help me look back at the decisions we made, look forward at those yet to come and this book has proved to be exactly that.
James, like many of us, switched from full time office to full time remote as the pandemic hit and this book show cases the the most effective policies and processes he, and companies he worked for put in place to allow teams to adapt and thrive at a time we were all working to re-writing the rules.
Almost 3 years on from the breaking of the Pandemic - the world of work has changed and this book serves as a robust compendium of advice, written in the easy to digest tone I've come to recognise from reading James' last book "Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager". I highly recommend it to anyone be it managers of remote or hybrid teams - or if you have anyone offsite for that matter - this book will help you make the most of your people regardless of where they're located.
July 5, 2022
Last month I read Effective Remote Work by James Stanier. I highly recommend this book to anyone currently working in tech who is experiencing Remote work for the first time because of the pandemic or who is trying to figure out what hybrid work is all about.
Professor Stanier does an excellent job explaining the spectrum of synchronousness and uses it as a guide to help understand effective communication patterns and to help the reader select good tools for their remote work.
The book is full of guidance for ICs, managers, and executives on how to get the most benefit out of remote work. The key lesson that resonated with me was about treating everyone as remote.
"Treating everyone as remote declares that the headquarters of the company is the Internet and everyone works there." James Stanier
Professor Stanier does an excellent job explaining the spectrum of synchronousness and uses it as a guide to help understand effective communication patterns and to help the reader select good tools for their remote work.
The book is full of guidance for ICs, managers, and executives on how to get the most benefit out of remote work. The key lesson that resonated with me was about treating everyone as remote.
"Treating everyone as remote declares that the headquarters of the company is the Internet and everyone works there." James Stanier
August 26, 2022
Some practical tips for better remote work and some big picture ideas to implement if you have the power to do so.
March 26, 2024
Lots of repetition but lots of good info as well. A good comprehensive workbook for working and managing remotely.
January 29, 2025
This is the most comprehensive and helpful book on remote work that I've read so far.
There were an absolute ton of cheap, badly written, money-making literature and other material around the time of the pandemic when the world was suddenly thrust into a work paradigm which was very new for a lot of people.
Now that the dust has settled and evil businesses are keen to 'claw' their happy remote workers back into the office, there is certainly less emphasis on WFH these days, but there are also more organisations offering WFH than before the pandemic.
Actually, many organisations, particularly in technology, have been setup for remote working for decades. I myself worked from home for 5 years before the pandemic.
This book is fairly typical of the Pragmatic Bookshelf series in being an intelligent and almost definitive take on a (often quite niche) subject that is highly useful to tech professionals, although I would argue that ANY person working from home would benefit from reading this book.
There were an absolute ton of cheap, badly written, money-making literature and other material around the time of the pandemic when the world was suddenly thrust into a work paradigm which was very new for a lot of people.
Now that the dust has settled and evil businesses are keen to 'claw' their happy remote workers back into the office, there is certainly less emphasis on WFH these days, but there are also more organisations offering WFH than before the pandemic.
Actually, many organisations, particularly in technology, have been setup for remote working for decades. I myself worked from home for 5 years before the pandemic.
This book is fairly typical of the Pragmatic Bookshelf series in being an intelligent and almost definitive take on a (often quite niche) subject that is highly useful to tech professionals, although I would argue that ANY person working from home would benefit from reading this book.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews