Culture

I’ve been working from home with UpBuild for over four years now, and since the onset of the COIVD pandemic, legions of the workforce have joined us in remote work. Many have loved the transition to remote work, while others missed the clear separation of home vs. work-life, longing for human interaction and perhaps even the commute. Wherever you land, one thing needs to be clear: setting boundaries is one of the most important aspects of thriving when working from home, especially during COVID.

[Read more…] about How Remote Work has Changed Since COVID

As society cautiously begins to return to “normal,” I’m seeing a lot of my friends and colleagues debating whether or not it’s time to bring their teams back into the office after a protracted period of working from home. There are industries where a permanently distributed workforce just isn’t feasible, but digital marketing isn’t one of them; I heartily recommend that any agency owner (or anyone who’s thinking of starting an agency) at least consider permanently moving their business to fully remote work.

Being a fully remote, distributed team has been a core part of the way UpBuild does business since our inception, and working here has really sold me on building a distributed team. The benefits to doing so include:

[Read more…] about Building a Distributed Culture That Feels Like a Culture

This post is about how to do a work-from-anywhere job during times when you don’t actually know where you’re going to be from one day to the next. I didn’t expect to be writing this post until Oregon’s wildfires thrust me into the middle of that experience one week ago today; now, I am finding it difficult to imagine writing about anything else.

See, here’s the sad part. After three months of a rather strict lockdown, we Oregonians were even more excited than usual for the arrival of summer because we knew we could congregate outdoors at greatly reduced risk. Sure enough, June ushered in a bunch of socially distant backyard hangs, and they really were a soothing tonic. We got to see our friends’ actual faces, scratching that ancient itch for immediate social contact that we’d tried to ignore all spring. Never mind that we still had to constantly maintain six feet of distance, refrain from sharing food or drinks, undertake rigorous and convoluted bathroom access protocols, and put up with the thousands of mosquitoes that didn’t get the Covid memo; it was all worth it! We knew that fall would bring an end to this blissful phase before too terribly long, but being that September is typically the nicest month of the year in Oregon, my wife and I had booked thirst-quenching social activity of this kind for every weekend through the end of the month. We could make plans again! Things were looking up.

As Deadwood’s Al Swearingen once said, “announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.”

[Read more…] about Working from Wherever

This past September, my girlfriend and I decided to leave Chicago winters for good and find ourselves a new home. So we packed our car with all our belongings, including our dog Morris, and began our year-long cross country road trip. We got rid of our apartment, sold our belongings, and secured Airbnbs along the way. Making this trip happen took a lot of effort, but let’s make no mistake, our ability to go on this adventure was made possible by one thing: remote work.

[Read more…] about Being a Digital Nomad at UpBuild

Many of us can recall a time when the thought of working from home was merely a daydream we’d have while fighting the traffic on our morning commute to the office. More and more people have been making the switch in recent years: remote work in the U.S. increased by 159% between 2005 and 2017. Even more dramatically, the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 has shifted the work-from-home concept from a rare job perk to a standard protocol worldwide in just a matter of days. Whether you find yourself working remotely by choice or by chance, there’s no denying that becoming a full-time work-from-home employee requires a complete mindset shift from the days back at the office.  [Read more…] about 10 Work From Home Tips From The UpBuild Team