If I had to do one thing over again with Return Path, I'd have kept the entire company in a single office for as long as possible.
Today, we have 12 offices in seven countries on four continents. We have been in business well over a decade and have a significant international sales force, so that's probably to be expected, but even in our early days, our team has been split across multiple locations: we started in New York and San Francisco simultaneously to attract good talent; then an early merger led to offices in New York, San Francisco, and Boulder within two years of the company's founding.
There are situations where remote offices are actually the ideal situation, especially with international sales, and there are ways to mitigate the challenges of having a highly dispersed team. The key is recognizing the value of physical proximity—as old-fashioned as that sounds—and doing what you can to sacrifice as little of that value as possible as your team expands.
As buzzwords go, telecommuting sounds pretty old-fashioned. That's partly because the practice it describes is no longer a distant promise of this new thing called the World Wide Web but a reality that most of us take for granted, at least during part of our lives. Employees at high-tech startups are liable to work from home more than ever these days (although as I'm writing this book, new Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer just banned working from home), or to communicate with colleagues at home or at other offices on a daily basis. Business travel is still essential but with online collaboration and videoconferencing tools at our disposal, the bar for approving a flight is much higher than it was a decade ago.
And yet, there is still real value in having an office. To name just a few:
All of that said, the world is growing more virtual, not less. One of the main consequences of this fact is that people are less willing than ever to move for work. Given the hiring challenge I addressed earlier, this forces you to make a difficult decision. Or, to make it a bit less dramatic and binary, it forces you to perform another of those balancing acts that define the job of the CEO: you want the best people for your team, wherever they are. Ideally, you want them all in the same place. When that can't happen, you have to open and operate remote offices or let people work from home. It will be interesting to see what happens to or as a result of Marissa's policy change at Yahoo!.
Managing remote employees presents a unique set of management challenges. We have had more than our fair share of experience with this at Return Path. I have people on my executive team in four offices and a fifth person works from a co-working space in a city where we have no presence at all.
We give our remote employees a series of guidelines to help them work as effectively as they can from home or from a co-working space. These guidelines include:
As CEO, whether or not you directly manage a remote employee, you can do a lot to reinforce the fact that your company's values don't only apply to employees who are in offices or company headquarters. Teach your managers to modify the way they work and the way they manage to build the extra trust and information flows required to get the most out of remote employees.
Discrete Teams in Separate Locations
Most of what I written in this chapter has to do with having a single team in multiple offices. Having discrete teams in separate locations is different. If you have developers in India or back-office employees in Ireland, the cultural concerns and rotations don't make as much sense. In these scenarios, you're the consumer of a service rather than a manager of team. (The distinction is a bit blurry with development teams.) Offshoring a function is more like a vendor relationship: set expectations clearly and manage according to them. If they aren't met, change vendors.
When sales is in New York and engineering is in Colorado, that's a bigger challenge, and it can't be managed like a vendor relationship. It's easy for those relationships to devolve but you have to learn to work around that and make it a nonissue. Don't be overly reliant on email, especially with difficult conversations. Pick up the phone or use Skype.
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