The Remote Working Handbook: The Definitive Guide for Operationalizing Remote Work as a Competitive Business Strategy

The Remote Work Handbook: The Definitive Guide for Operationalizing Remote Work as a Competitive Business Strategy is for readers seeking to leverage the business benefits of a flexible, remote workforce. It is a practical guide for building and implementing remote work at any size organization. C-suite executives, operation leaders, business owners, or entrepreneurs who recognize the workplace is changing can use it to re-tool their operations for a strategic business advantage. Mari Anne Snow, the author, is a recognized remote work expert with over 20 years of experience leading remote teams and has re-written the rules of leadership to unlock the potential in remote and distributed teams. In this book, she shares all her secrets.

The book explores the untapped potential of remote teams and lays out the business case for adopting a new, flexible workplace model to build organizational resilience and a competitive edge. It takes the reader through the step-by-step process of constructing a remote work operating model, staging an implementation, then institutionalizing and sustaining the change. It includes down-to-earth professional and personal stories that alert the reader to the top priorities and operational realities they will face as they craft their own implementation plan for operationalizing remote work at their company.

Mari Anne Snow, CEO of Sophaya and Remote Nation Institute, successfully led remote/distributed teams for over twenty years. Early on, she sensed the growing strategic business implications of remote work as a global financial services executive where she launched an online corporate learning university that served 28,000 people in 32 countries. And as a professor at Bentley and Suffolk Universities during the early days of digital/social media, she helped position her students for success by helping them craft a place for themselves as the first digital professionals at Reebok, Mike, the New England Patriots, Fidelity Investments, and other notable organizations. Early on, she saw the strategic implications of these new technologies on remote/distributed teamwork.

A passionate businesswoman committed to people-centric leadership; Mari Anne recognized both the enormous potential of these emerging technologies to support remote work. She developed new leadership approaches to meet the needs of the people impacted by this seismic shift. Then she left corporate life in 2010 to launch her remote work/distributed team consultancy, Sophaya, to help visionary early adopters transform their organizations to accommodate the structural needs of their growing remote/distributed workforce.

Over the next ten years, Mari Anne devoted herself to refining best practices for leading a productive, engaged remote workforce. During this time, she focused on two questions: 1. How do we maintain meaningful human contact over distance? 2. What actions can smart leaders take to build trust and engage people who work remotely? Her research spanned multiple continents, testing alternate operating models, and gathering input from hundreds of remote work practitioners worldwide. The results? A new set of business principles for creating highly productive remote teams to support the workplace revolution that’s happening right now.