CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MANAGING REMOTE OFFICES AND EMPLOYEES

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.

BRICK-AND-MORTAR VALUES IN A VIRTUAL WORLD

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:

• Human connectivity. Every month seems to bring a new feature article about whether the Internet—and social media in particular—is making us lonelier. Without getting into the details, there's an essential point we have to address: clearly, a global web connecting billions of people virtually hasn't yet met all the needs that prompt us to connect in person. We need look no further than at the growth of “co-working spaces” in recent years to understand this need. Someday, a company composed entirely of remote employees connecting virtually may be a practical reality. It isn't one yet.
• Collaboration. Online collaboration tools are fantastic: Dropbox, Google Drive, and Basecamp continue to change the world in remarkable ways. What they haven't done is replace in-person meetings entirely. An old practice at Intel demonstrates the point: after managers noticed how often employees would stop each other in the hallway to discuss ad hoc ideas, they put up whiteboards to facilitate those conversations. Structured online collaboration is great, but it still can't produce that kind of synergy. (How's that for an old-fashioned concept?)
• Focus. There's a curse that comes along with the blessing of immediate access to everything and anything. It's the immediate access to everything and anything. Part of building a culture of trust means not tracking or blocking URLs on our servers—Facebook and YouTube are always just a click away. Nevertheless, the temptation to make a quick status update is always greater away from the office, to say nothing of the myriad other distractions that working from home (to take the most extreme example) brings with it.

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!.

BEST PRACTICES FOR MANAGING REMOTE EMPLOYEES

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:

• Setting up appropriate work space. We advise remote employees to set up an adequate work space with all the necessary equipment and supplies. Work areas should be quiet and free of distractions, ideally with a door so there's a clear separation of “work” and “home.” We also insist that remote employees have enough bandwidth to support high-intensity business applications, including Skype or a videophone.
• Expenses. We allow remote employees to expense a fixed amount each month to cover supplies and incremental bandwidth charges. Remote employees who want to use a co-working space need to get that approved since it usually costs more than supplying a home office, but we encourage it whenever it makes sense.
• Customizing their operating system. We advise employees who work remotely—particularly those who are not accustomed to doing so—to carefully review and change the way they work to make it match their virtual status. For example, we remind employees that they need to work harder at communication since they're remote, probably using voice and video more as well as having more frequent, shorter meetings with colleagues and managers. When remote employees do go to an office, we make sure they make the most of their time there by scheduling key meetings in advance.
• Implement regular meeting routines. Without necessarily realizing it, you have frequent informal “meetings” with employees who work in the same office with you. You will bump into them in the hallway, they'll swing by your office, you will chat at the proverbial “water cooler.” These interactions are extremely valuable—and you can't have them with your remote employees. To offset this loss, set up frequent, regular meetings over Skype with your remote team members. You can't exactly replicate the serendipity of in-office interactions but you can avoid the mistake of ignoring your remote employees altogether.

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.