Most advice about working from home is about discipline. Get dressed, make a routine, be strict with yourself.
We have run a distributed business for years, with people in Spain and the Netherlands. In our experience the things that decide whether it works are boring and technical, and you can fix them in a weekend.
A place you can leave
Not a home office necessarily. A desk in a corner is enough. What matters is that it is somewhere you stop being at, because the thing that burns people out is not overwork, it is never being off.
If the laptop lives on the kitchen table, work never ends. That is the whole argument for a dedicated spot.
Files that are not on one machine
The most common failure we see is not motivation. It is somebody who cannot do their job from home because the file they need is on the office computer.
Everything shared, in one place, reachable from anywhere and backed up. That is a day of setup and it is the difference between remote work being possible and being theatre. We wrote about a client who had exactly this problem and what it took to fix.
Logging in as you, not as a computer
If each person is tied to one machine because that is where their software and settings live, nobody can work anywhere. Accounts should follow the person. Then a broken laptop is an inconvenience rather than a lost week.
Breaks that are in the calendar
In an office breaks happen to you: someone gets up, someone makes coffee. At home nothing interrupts you, so you look up at four having not moved. Put them in the calendar like meetings, because that is the only thing that works.
Talking more than feels necessary
Distance removes all the small signals. The five-minute conversation that used to happen by walking past someone now has to be scheduled or it does not happen, and that is where things quietly go wrong.
Over-communicating feels excessive for about two weeks and then it feels normal.
The honest bit
Remote work suits some jobs and some people, and it is not a moral position. What is true regardless is that the technical foundation decides most of it, and it is the part nobody wants to deal with.
If your team cannot properly work from anywhere, it is usually a setup problem rather than a people problem. We fix those.
Builds websites and the systems behind them for small businesses in Spain and the Netherlands. Writes down the things clients ask twice.
