József Dániel Farkas

József Dániel Farkas

fellow of Bridge Budapest, Be-novative, Budapest, 2016

We are 23 people, one works from Hawaii, another one from Philippines…

Yepp, the first day at Be-novative talking with the CEO. By the way this list goes on… Berlin, Rotterdam and of course Budapest & San Francisco. Listening to this I am continuously questioning myself: “Wait a minute, so how does this work?”

I mean I wouldn’t call myself a guy with old-fashioned working habits, but this thing seems to be novel to me and something like this, so far, I only dreamt about. But after, on one of our teambuilding sessions talking with Misi – one of our developers who happens to live in Waikiki Beach – I got to know in more detail the remote way of working. Seeing my curiosity, he also recommended me a book: Remote.

Technology has significantly changed the way people are working together nowadays, to some extent I have already experienced these changes personally, but regarding working remotely, although this was something that I was planning to do in my future, I just didn’t imagine that I will encounter this practice this soon.

So, the advantages I think I don’t have to emphasize a lot, it’s pretty clear what benefits you have if you can work from basically wherever you want:

I mean Philippines, Hawaii or San Francisco are not the closest places to Hungary for sure. But yeah, as with everything in general, it also has disadvantages. Let me give you some small insights.

Partially I am working with the marketing team, our CMO lives in San Francisco, yepp, 9 hours behind. This means, when we are about to finish our work and preparing for the evening hours deciding what pub we are going to drink with our friends, he is about drinking his morning coffee. More specifically our weekly marketing meeting starts from 17:00, which is 8:00 in San Francisco. But to be honest it is not a pretty big deal, I just wanted to share some practical examples. I mean I can imagine how will we work together with colleagues living on planet Mars, when Elon finally finds the way to make it work:

By nature, working remotely lays down and really tests some of the key elements of a company culture, like: mutual trust. We are using task and project management softwares, daily stand ups and weekly meetings – where of course everybody has to be present either in person or online – to make sure everybody is aligned and knows what to do.

But mutual trust has to be there when you not always see your team members working in front of you. You just have to trust that somewhere around they do what they are supposed to do. Is that really true by the way? I mean you can also do nothing sitting in the office in front of your boss, I think we all know it. I don’t think that without mutual trust a great company culture can ever be built no matter you are working from all around the world or in one building. Then why the majority of people still has to be imprisoned in an office 9-5, 5 days a week, pretty much only deciding 1 month a year where they want to go. Well, I don’t know. Remains of old ages? One thing is for sure, the world is changing. And this change, I like.