This post is part of The Holloway Syllabus series. We’ll publish new Holloway Syllabi every other week, and you can read and search the contents of all of them in one place in The Holloway Modern Work Library. To create this Holloway Syllabus, we put in more than 30 hours of research and worked with over 20 people with a range of experience with remote work. We believe this is the most comprehensive and authoritative list (over 120 resources!) to help you master the ins and outs of remote work.
Successfully working from home is a skill, just like programming, designing or writing. It takes time and commitment to develop that skill, and the traditional office culture doesn’t give us any reason to do that.Alex Turnbull, CEO of Groove*
Depending on who you ask, remote work is either the Future of Work, or a trend that’s mostly a time-sink for employers and boondoggle for their employees. It’s also not clear what exactly remote work is. Is it Mary in Accounting working from home a couple days a week, that startup that claims to have “no management levels or titles” and never opened a physical office, an old school conglomerate with offices all over the globe, or that “digital nomad” guy who set up his temporary workspace at an entire table in your neighborhood coffee shop? It’s all those things (and more), which can make it hard to get your arms around how to undertake and manage it as a business leader or manager, or how to find and succeed at a remote job as an employee.
Our goal in creating this syllabus was to help people with zero to some knowledge on the subject of remote work and distributed teams learn key concepts and strategies, and familiarize themselves with the benefits, pitfalls, and unexpected side-effects (like when remote employees in foreign countries have to be independent contractors).
A lot of the resources in this syllabus focus on the benefits and challenges for remote workers and the companies they work for, but the principles and concepts are relevant to anyone who is interested in better understanding what distributed teams mean for the future of work. We cover everything from the very basic (“What is remote work?”), to common pitfalls, suggested coping mechanisms for employees and best practices for companies, plus newsletters, podcasts, and more.