In the past, remote work may have meant part-time transcribing on a contract basis for a boss you’ve never seen. Today, it’s an option more and more professionals look for in a job description. How do 6 a.m. alarms, 45-minute commutes and fluorescent-lit cubicles make people better at their jobs?

Remote working is no longer a second-class working capacity. Thanks to the latest technology for collaboration, whole companies can go remote and it might result in better hiring decisions and employee productivity. 

Folks stepping into a remote-working role for the first time often harbor misgivings. They worry it might hurt team spirit, collective decision-making, and overall productivity. They may fear that independence will allow them to get away with less than tightly structured, in-office oversight would. However, these fears are not borne out in teams that commit to remote-working best practices, according to Darren Murph (pictured), head of remote at GitLab Inc. 

“The truth is that all-remote forces you to do things that you should be doing anyway,” Murph said. Guidelines around transparency, documentation and iteration don’t go away. In fact, they shift from the periphery into the daily drill. “We just have to do them much more quickly and much more intentionally,” he added.

Murph spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the GitLab Commit event in San Francisco. They discussed the benefits of remote working for companies and employees.

This week, theCUBE spotlights GitLab in its Startup of the Week Feature.

New tech market for remote work economy

Today in the U.S., 48% of employees work remotely at least once a week, while 30% work remotely full-time, according to a recent study from Owl Labs Inc. Some 16% of companies are staffed 100% by remote workers, according to the study.

Telecommuting is steadily rising as technology enables workers to easily communicate via messaging, voice, video, etc. Last year, freelancing platform, UpWork Global Inc., predicted that by 2028, 73% of all departments within companies will have remote workers and 33% of employees will work entirely remotely. Workers appear happy about the trend, which might even shake out to a four-day work week for some.

However, “we still have not figured everything out to make this work,” Amir Salihefendic, chief executive officer of Doist Ltd., told Buffer Inc. “Many entirely remote teams still use real-time chat such as Slack for communication — in the process, removing all the good parts of being a remote company,” he said. A market of new technology is developing for those desiring seamless collaboration across different geographies and time zones.

As one of the 16% of companies going it all-remote, all the time, GitLab serves as its own ongoing experiment in long-distance, digital collaboration; the company’s roster of employees are spread across 65 countries. Together, they maintain and improve the open-source toolkit that enables software developers to collaborate on and manage projects. Founded by Ukrainian developers Valery Sizov and Dmitriy Zaporozhets in 2011, GitLab has some similarities to GitHub — the world’s largest repository for source code — but with greater emphasis on collaboration features.

A day — or afternoon, night, wee morning hours — in the life

The first thing to know about a typical day in the life of a remote worker is that there isn’t one. “We have over 1,100 employees, but none of them operate their days quite the same as anyone else,” Murph said. 

Even “working from home” is too narrow to describe the gamut of remote-work regimens possible today. For example, some of GitLab’s employees do work from home, breaking intermittently to pick up kids from school, grocery shop, etc. Others travel the world constantly and are in a different time zone each month. Some feel they need an office environment and other people’s energy to get in the proper mindset for work.

These employees may choose to take their laptops into a co-working space each day — the fee for which, GitLab will reimburse. GitLab has one employee in New Zealand who is more or less totally cut off from the outside world except for an internet connection. You’d never know it, though, according to Murph. All-remote makes everyone a “first-class citizen” regardless, so this employee is just a part of the team like everyone else.

Successful remote collaboration requires that everyone follow project etiquette to a T. For example, diligent documentation is needed to keep track of project input from different members and overall progress. When collaborators put in their six or eight or 10 hours at totally different periods of the day, picking up where one left can’t be a drawn-out affair. GitLab workers won’t be seeing their teammates tomorrow morning in the office, so they can’t wait until then to provide notes about the changes they made or directions on how to revert them in case of disagreement.

“We say any part of a project that you’re moving forward, try to move that forwards and add context in a way that someone else who may be asleep right now, when they wake up and read your stuff along the way, they have context of what you did and can pick it up from there and move it on to the next step,” Murph explained. 

Other best practices for remote teams include scheduling real-world meetings and taking breaks when needed to avoid burnout.

Remote work packs productive punch

As an all-remote company, GitLab is constantly testing its own collaboration software and working its discoveries back into the product and its 3,000-page, publicly accessible handbook. “We as a GitLab team see things that could be done better and more efficiently, and that gives us a flywheel of making the product better, and then making the handbook better, and so on and so forth,” Murph said. 

Last November, Microsoft Corp. conducted a study in Japan on remote work and productivity. The company let its Japanese employees experiment with various unconventional working methods, including remote work, in a four-day work week. The results — happier employees and a 40% productivity increase — made headlines.

Some have questioned whether that study’s results can be replicated outside Japan. Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear the remote-work trend is attractive to many people and will continue to grow, according to Murph.

It’s the ideal matchmaking model for employers and employees. It allows companies to hire the very best people to fill roles regardless of their zip code. Soon, it will seem silly to move for work; a person’s job will just go with him or her. And, remote work encapsulates more important, high-value work, and noise and furry, according to Murph.

“We’re getting close to a tipping point where people are just to their limit on how many more Slack messages or emails or pings or urgent, urgent, urgent things they can do while also doing their job well,” he said. “We may be a little bit ahead of the curve, but my hope is that the industry at large embraces that and allows their people more time to actually do the work they were hired to do. We’ve seen massive improvements on the product and just team morale when we embrace that.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the GitLab Commit event: 

Photo: SiliconANGLE