Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this eARC.

The Power of Remote by Cynthia Watson and Shane Spraggs is a timely and practical guide for anyone who wants to leverage the benefits of remote work in the post-pandemic world. The authors draw from their extensive experience in managing and consulting remote teams across various industries and geographies, and share valuable insights, tips, and best practices on how to build high-performing organizations that thrive in the virtual workplace.

This book covers topics such as how to hire, train, and onboard remote workers, how to develop a remote culture and foster collaboration, how to communicate effectively and avoid misunderstandings, how to manage remote projects and measure productivity, and how to ensure the well-being and engagement of remote workers. The book also provides case studies, examples, and tools that illustrate the concepts and strategies discussed.

The Power of Remote is not just a book for managers and leaders, but also for remote workers and aspiring remote workers who want to learn how to succeed and grow in their remote careers. The book is written in a clear, concise, and engaging style, and offers actionable advice that can be applied immediately. Whether you are new to remote work or a seasoned remote worker, you will find something useful and relevant in this book.

The Power of Remote is a must-read for anyone who wants to embrace the future of work and unlock the power of working remotely.

An excellent read on one of the hottest employment topics and trends today: remote work. Its an excellent read for any leaders who have - or who are considering - a hybrid of remote work environment that touches on how to build a successful and high performing team and organization.

Remote work has been on my radar since the late 1990s and I'd been working 100% remotely with periodic office visits for ten years before the 2020 pandemic. I'm passionate about the opportunities remote work provides and that's why I was drawn to the book.

This is an insightful and practical guide for organizations navigating the virtual work environment. The authors offer valuable strategies and tips to build high-performing teams and foster productivity in remote settings. With a blend of research and real-world examples, this book equips readers with the knowledge and tools to thrive in the evolving landscape of remote work.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an ARC to read and review.

Cynthia Watson and Shane Spraggs wrote a wonderful book, full of useful information. All the tips here are practical, used in companies that understand remote work and have taken it to a new level even before 2020.

If you had to go remote, have seen some benefits to it and want to continue full remote or a hybrid version of that, this book is exactly what you need.

Though intended for people in management positions who can actually put into practice real advice from here, anyone working remotely can find useful tips to apply from the book.

“The Power of Remote” covers everything from potential challenges and how to hire the best remote collaborators to how to best navigate remote projects from start to finish.

Here are the main lessons I gathered from reading it: I hope they serve you in understanding if this book is for you.

Main Challenges of Remote Working
Whether you see going remote as an opportunity or an unfortunate thing for your company, it certainly has its challenges. Identifying them is the first step in solving them:

Top managers and executives feel, even though statistics don’t prove it, that if they don’t see staffers at their desks, they are being unproductive
Using monitoring and surveillance tools is counter-productive, but not using them requires a difficult shift in leadership styles
Even if remote work may boost productivity, it stifles friendships and collaboration that would lead to innovation
Limiting career advancement because of decreased interaction with colleagues and managers
Remote workers tend to work more than those in the office, but they also feel marginalised and expandable
Isolation and long working hours often result in burnout
Young professionals have a more difficult time with remote working than middle-aged workers – they don’t have comfortable spaces to work from home
Companies need to commit to remote work long-term in order for it to truly work.
4 Tips for Choosing The Remote Dream Team
Working remotely has unique challenges that differ slightly from in-office work, even though the actual job would be the same. People that thrive in the office may not do so great online and vice-versa. This is why it’s important to commit to a way of working and hire the best people for that.

These tips can help you identify what to search for in remote hires:

People who have hobbies they are very passionate about or simply a very strong nonworking life make for better remote workers than those who use work to give their life meaning and who thrive with workplace interactions.
“Broken CVs” tell a story. Established professionals may have had to go back to a small town or have had a sick loved one to take care of. These kinds of workers will be grateful for the opportunity of remote work. Be sure to not dismiss these CVs until you understand the reason why the gaps occur in their work history.
Introverts are usually better fitted for a remote position than extroverts. That being said, extroverts who have a robust social network beyond the office, are also able to perform very well.
Remote workers need to be autonomous problem solvers, resourceful, and unafraid to reach out to colleagues for help.
7 Ideas to Improve Your Onboarding Process for Remote Hires
Remote hires, even more than in-office ones need explicit guidance in getting to know your values, your mission and what is expected of them. If an outgoing person will manage to observe and fit into a new office fairly quick, even without much guidance, remotely, things are different.

Absolutely everything must be intentional and thought out, so the first step in all of this is recognising the need for a structured, clear onboarding process.

These 7 ideas will help you improve onboarding for remote hires:

Greet your new hire with a welcome message from the CEO, laying out the company’s purpose, vision and values.
Make the onboarding process fixed in length – 90 days is optimal.
Set specific expectations, inform about how those expectations will be measured and schedule with the new hire periodical reviews to discuss their progress within those 90 days.
Create a detailed timetable, a list with everything a new hire needs to learn and do in the beginning, from getting banking information to getting introduced to her relevant pears and the tech platforms your company uses. This should include all the practical policies on vacation, sick days, diversity and respect, expectations on after-hours communications (hint: there should be no reply expected), guidelines on social media use if they include company’s name in any way, and, of course, security protocols.
Finally and do not skip this, give your new employee a clear career development plan within your organisation.
Accelerate your new hire induction by giving them a buddy with a similar or related role. This buddy should be trained to know the answer to the most frequently asked questions, as well as be enthusiastic and friendly as a personality type.
Review your onboarding process with every new hire – get her feedback once it’s done and improve it for the next one. Learn from every new hire!
The Unexpected Way of Bonding with Remote Workers
Office workers get easily immersed in a company’s culture. They are there, having in-person experiences and understanding everything hands-on. Remote workers may struggle with this at first, but, if their onboarding process is done correctly, their bonding with the company can be accelerated.

Meeting remote workers, you are actually invited into their homes. You can, even accidentally, learn about pets or family members. This makes getting to know your new hires a lot more personal and a lot faster: it’s the completely unexpected benefit of hiring remote workers.

The One Secret to Improve Communications with Remote Workers
It’s difficult to be ignored in a face-to-face conversation. It’s very easy, however, to be ignored in remote communication.

The secret to being sure your message isn’t ignored is to practice the concept of WIIFM (What’s in It for Me). Whenever you want attention to your message, engage the recipient by focusing on their concerns, interests and objectives: “why is your message relevant to them?”.

Of course, all your messages should also definitely be short – short attention spans become even shorter if your remote workers are distracted by family or pets. A good rule for this is “the billboard messaging approach”: get to the point in the amount of time that it takes to drive past a billboard (~3 seconds).

Furthermore, definitely always assume messages will be shared with the world. Maintain care and attention to detail in all written communication. (P.S. This is available for virtual meetings as well. Meetings can be recorded and end up as evidence in court in a few years.)

The Secrets to Successful Virtual Meetings
The most inspiring productivity tip I found in this book was to keep a day free of meetings: organisation-wide no meetings at all on certain days. This is genius.

However, meetings are necessary as well. Some things just need to be discussed this way rather than on a chat. For that, here are just some of the tips presented in this book to successfully navigate a virtual meeting:

Make sure the meeting is actually required and has a defined, clear purpose: Zoom fatigue is not a myth! It should go without saying, but make sure you only invite to the meeting the persons necessary and no one else.
Limit chit-chat at the beginning of meetings to 3 minutes. This may take longer for in-person meetings, but it is advisable to keep it very short for remote ones.
Testing audio before every meeting should be a standard policy: sound quality is crucial in virtual meetings. If someone is unfamiliar with the company’s conference tools, practice sessions should be a must.
A good meeting should involve great notes – the meeting minutes: key points, commitments, deadlines and next steps. These meeting minutes have a powerful effect in creating accountability. If there is an official place where everyone is being held accountable for deadlines and commitments, they all take things more seriously.
3 Best Practices for Remote Leadership You Can Implement Today
Being a great leader in the virtual workspace isn’t that different from achieving this in-office. However, as with everything else, your actions need to be better thought out and planned. Nothing can be left to chance:

Work with your team members to establish their career progression path and set milestones for them to achieve.
Shift focus on results rather than tasks. Managers are not available 24/7, whenever a team member needs a new task assigned. If everyone on the team is aware of short-term, mid-term and long-term objectives on your projects, they should manage to take the actions necessary to hit them. The focus are results.
Regularly collect feedback through anonymous surveys with open questions. Of course, be sure to always address the feedback and incorporate it into the business whenever it’s appropriate. Use your feedback as guidance for improvements.
Discuss purpose with your employees: how your company impacts the community or what it plans to build for the future. Merely discussing purpose increases engagement and pride in the work of employees by more than 40%.
Reinforce the company’s core values regularly. A pro tip for that is to actually ask your employees in a weekly meeting to share examples of living these core values – how they implemented them and impressed a client with their attitude. This kind of behaviour is inspiring and deserves recognition.
7 Practices That Build Trust with Remote Employees
Trust is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight and it requires intent and effort. To build it, these are the best practices to put in place:

Transparency – honest and open communication. This includes admitting not knowing the solution to a problem, acknowledging mistakes and explaining the reasonings behind decisions.
Following through on commitments – be sure to be able to fulfil employees’ expectations before creating them.
Consistency – don’t share contradictory information/objectives with different employees/departments. This will only make everyone question the truth of what you say.
Accessibility – keep a public calendar, welcome opinions, and be open to calls whenever possible.
Collaborative decision-making – include team members in all decisions when it’s appropriate. The more decisions everyone gets to influence, the more voices are heard, the better.
Regular feedback – as with decision making, the more ways an employee has to make his opinion known and taken into consideration, the more she will feel heard and represented in the company.
Recognition for team members, especially remote ones, for their achievements. Noticing progress and appreciating effort go a long way in winning employees’ trust.
Do Not Confuse Ambitious with Passionate Employees
Both passionate and ambitious employees work extra hours and are very much driven to perform. However, the motivation that makes them such good workers differs for each.

Ambitious employees are focused on personal success, are pragmatic and seek rewards, recognition and promotions. However, they are often insecure and that makes them poor collaborators.

Passionate employees are motivated by the work itself and the company’s purpose. They think outside the box and tend to be more centred, confident, and willing to collaborate.

Seek and reward passion, not ambition.

5 Remote Project Management Strategies to Ensure Project Success
The book covers all aspects of taking a project from start to finish. These tips seemed the most interesting to me:

Start every project by asking questions to determine what the project originator would consider a success. It is only from here that you can start determining outputs and outcomes.
Follow Agile principles like dividing larger projects into small achievable pieces to produce successful outcomes along the way.
Establish RACI early on – who is Responsible, who is Accountable for the project, who needs to be Consulted and who needs to be Involved in decision-making. The list of all these people should be accurate, up-to-date and publicly available for all those involved in the project at all times.
Use Days of the Week (a methodology developed and used by the authors of the book at their own company, Virtira) – this is a weekly cadence for regular actions that should be done inside a project. It is a practical way to organise project communication and make sure documentation stays up to date. I highly advise you to read the book and find out all about it!
Establish an Escalation Strategy – the most important thing about this is to create a comfortable environment where team members can easily share their issues with managers.
Conclusion
“The Power of Remote” is created by two authors who have built a successful organisation operating with mostly remote workers. They have witnessed and learned from tens of online projects and use the book to share their knowledge.

Just about three years ago I started working from home… and I never want to go back! The company that I work at now is fully remote (YAY!) and the second I saw this book on NetGalley, I jumped at the chance to read it. Part of my responsibilities include some operations duties, and I learned a lot from this book about team building and company growth when everyone’s interacting virtually instead of in-person.

My favorite chapters included…
🏛An introduction which set up the history of remote work
👩🏻‍💻Advice on finding employees that thrive remotely
💬How to socialize long-distance without it sucking your soul
💡Tips on building & sustaining company culture

Aside from the tactical advice, I also really appreciated all of the research and data that the authors illustrated in this book. I know that working from home has skyrocketed in the last three years. I know that I love this setup. But I didn’t quite grasp the scale and the scope of the shift towards remote work until now!

Not every chapter was super-relevant to my particular industry, but overall I learned a lot from this book and I’m excited to apply some of the learnings to my day-to-day job. Definitely recommend if you also work remotely (or if you have coworkers who do)!