tech-company, growth, hiring, remoteThis is mainly for a tech startup, but:
As you begun hiring employees, if you didn’t want to have to acquire a building and all of that, could you hire all of your employees remotely?
The general idea would be to interview them over Skype (or some similar service), and then send them the tools they would need (MacBook Pro), synchronize with them by using cloud services (Google Docs, Campfire, GitHub, etc.), possibly fly them down to one or two conferences a year (paid for by the company) and meet up there in addition to online meetings.
What might be some pros and cons of such an approach? Are there any specific things that ought to be watched out for?
I already worked on this model already, either in small start-ups or even very large companies where teams were scattered around the globe.
I would say that definitely it is possible, but …
Pros:
Cons:
Difficult management setup (particularly in scheduling, backlogs, and feedback loops)
Periodically frequent skepticism from peers (depending on who your peers are)
Less confrontational (also a con because lack of direct communication)
Edit: I was reading back through my answer, and wanted to make an important distinction. I would argue it can potentially become cost-ineffective to run a remote model; if you don’t tighten the system, you can dump lots of cash by failing to get your ideas through to your extended team.
These are my first thoughts regarding a remote-model. I’ve been working with multiple development teams in India as I myself am a US resident and company founder.
Important to note - managers will often have difficulty working on a similar schedule. As I am responsible for most mgmt operations in the USA and the entire development oversight, I have trouble getting respect from my coworkers as, in all reality, nobody has any idea what I do past 11PM (admittedly, there is an occasional glance at Startups SE).
This causes some interesting imbalances in respect I get from people - “Oh, you work on with Indian developers? I hear __”
The reality? India has more developers than anywhere in the world. Just means you may have to search better. It is as you’ve said, though: Skype interviews are a must. Get to know them as a person, but also as a professional. Do your best research with background checks and don’t relinquish too much trust, even to very kind and seemingly-trustworthy individuals. You can easily get burned.
tl;dr Possible, but not for the weak minded
2nd Edit: It’s also important to take into consideration I am from the USA. Cost for programming salaries tend to go Northern EU > USA > Argentina > India (many Americans prefer remote Argentina workers because of more aligned timezones). Just making the note that the cost variable is dependent on where your headquarters are.
Yes, it does work. The company I work for now is all remotely. Our phones are VoIP, office system, accounting all via online portals. All employees work from home. Each department has a weekly conference call, then the company in whole will meet once a month in person. We have contests at dept lvls for productivity goals, and some stupid ones as well… it’s all in fun, but also keeps us together as a team.
The overhead of the company is low, thus in turn they give us plenty of perks. As a mother of two, it gives me more time to spend with them since I don’t have to commute to and from work.
Finding the key employees is the hardest, ones that have the discipline to work from home.
In short - yes it is for some sectors - in IT definitely yes. In long - my company does this way and many of my preferred supplier do the same.
There are more advantages in my eyes:
For Setup as disadvantage I also agree. So maybe you find my tooling landscape useful? I use
Stack Exchange has a lot of people that are working remotely.
http://stackexchange.com/work-here
We should probably figure out a way to get Joel Spolsky on this topic.
Yes, completely virtual companies are possible, though not that common at scale.
Core problem that you run into is that surprisingly that in my experience most people don't like working remotely; number of reasons, but in the end, the reasons don't matter as much as the core pattern that people just like having people around in person for a reasons; ego, socializing, etc.
If would you like to learn more, my suggestions would be to:
I’m working on a (relatively) large research project where separate few-person teams are remote and each is in a different geographical region. Everyone on the entire project gets together about two times each year. Conference calls are about once per week or every other week, though in my view, even more frequent conference calls wouldn’t help. This is highly technical and intellectually challenging research, and so would benefit from tight collaboration. However, people are disincentivized from tight collaboration because they like to do their own work and are burdened when they have to interact a lot especially with others outside of their immediate (local) team. It places a burden on them as they have to communicate more with people who aren’t directly colleagues or bosses. It takes time. Even if they valued this kind of communication, the lack of proximity makes it difficult in my experience to have the most productive discussions. In my experience, there’s a hard and very noticeable limit as to the depth of what people can accomplish in terms of remote productive discussion, especially as they try to figure out issues within difficult topics (we’re talking about advanced research, but I assume it’s a similar challenge with anything technical). Also, researchers want maximum independence to pursue their ideas.
Now, assume we wanted to make the project more collaborative, and I think it should be because we’re trying to solve some hard problems that in my view would benefit from having all the pieces fit together better. In this case, we’d need to collaborate more. Teleconferences are not up to par. We have far far better discussions in person, but twice a year is just not enough …
If I were building my own team, I would not have it be remote because in-person collaboration and discussion are important to me. I’d prefer teams that are local to the same area who can see each other face to face at least once or twice a week. Aside from this, if I’m working with people whom I trust and if the management structure and communications are strong, then I’d be okay with people working from home a couple of days each week. Given this kind of structure, I would be okay with a few remote workers (probably contractors rather than full-time employees) being in a different region as long as someone from the local team is managing them closely, and as long as the remote worker’s task doesn’t require a lot of discussion, brainstorming sessions, frequent team interactions for feedback, etc.
In my view, nothing beats communicating face to face, and if the work is intellectually challenging and requires creative team effort, then all the more is this kind of interaction necessary on a regular basis. This is not to mention the importance of developing social connections among the team. People don’t have to be best friends, but it’s difficult to feel even any connection with co-workers if one never sees them face to face.
you should implement something to schedule tasks. There are very nice free application to use. At the moment I am using trello.com I have all my guys link their google calendars using mozilla thunderbird to organize working hours, free time, contacts etc. A google drive is also nice to have to share anything through your standard explorer(like a netdrive) Also you should use a Teamspeak 3 server or any other communication server. This might increase the team feeling if you require all of your guys to be on the server while working(everyone should have their own channel for privacy + team channels). These Programs are much better then calls via skype. Because with skype you have much less personal contact and just call if you need anything.
Always over-communicate. It is a necessary evil if you want to make things clear. Be considerate when setting up comms across time zones. Meet-up at least once a year.
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