Running a Business With Staff Scattered Around the World

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/business/smallbusiness/running-a-business-with-employees-around-the-world.html?src=dayp&pagewanted=all

by olegious • 14 years ago

60 15 14 years ago

nytimes.com

runemadsen• 14 years ago

It's funny how most of this advice is about "controlling" employees and making them perform. I wonder what happened if Github was interviewed for the same article.

brandnewlow• 14 years ago

Github's got a huge advantage though: Massive product/employee fit. Every person who works there probably uses the product personally on a daily basis. That really helps smooth things over and has to be a semi-secret weapon for them.

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

Yes, a lot of the GitHub doctrine of letting people choose what to build is great and a refreshing change from a lot of other IT companies. But doesn't apply for an IT company serving the construction industry.

mpchlets• 14 years ago

I work for a globally distributed company and we have similar issues. The only way I see it working is by allowing total freedom and getting people fully immersed to the point of ownership over their tasks.

We also make team collaboration software, so we utilize it and I highly suggest everyone else trying this model does the same. Use the software and do not deviate, then watch your company flourish.

acabal• 14 years ago

I have a few helpers--writing blog posts, creating contests, etc.--for my website, Scribophile, and they're all over the world and I've never met them. So far they've all worked out really well. Maybe I've been lucky.

I basically set a goal and let them do whatever they want. After any initial emails to get them up and running it's not uncommon for me to not email them for weeks or months. If I do email, it's to make a small course correction. People who care about what they're doing don't need to be micro-managed, and like having the freedom to solve problems on their own terms. The trick is finding those people in the first place!

dfischer• 14 years ago

Where did you find people to write blog posts and create contests?

nshankar• 14 years ago

it must be the people who reply to blogs.

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

I've been working with contractors from various parts, and I have to say Trello has been a huge help in keeping track of everything.

Though I agree, working around the clock becomes an issue. You can ask people to work on the same timezone as you, like the article says, but it's a lot harder for casual workers to do that, as they tend to do part-time contracts around their other work or studies.

cageface• 14 years ago

I've been collaborating with a bunch of people all over the globe on my latest contract and so far the hardest thing has been coordinating dependencies. If my task depends on somebody else's task but he's in a different time zone it can take a couple of days of messages to get things going in the right direction.

I think the key here is to nail down the design and any related specs as much as possible upfront. The more you have to sculpt things as they go along the more time you lose in coordination.

bwb• 14 years ago

Nice article, we have ~85 people working from ~18 countries since the business runs 24/7. A bit easier than the business int he article maybe since about 50% of those people are doing customer service shifts, and the others dev / systems.

A lot of fun problems but I love it!

pinaceae• 14 years ago

I work for a global start-up. Currently 350 people all over the world, incl. NZ and LT.

We have a mix, we do have offices in major markets but people scattered all over the place.

Located in Central Europe, I run a team of 3 people, all in different countries, one even one hour away (timezone wise). I report to someone in the SF bay area.

How do we pull it off:

- When going into a new region we establish ownership. One general manager who owns it, who most importantly from now on works in this timezone. No matter where he/she lives, it is the customers and team that matters

- We run on the Google App Stack. Google Chat is my second home. GoToMeeting my third.

- Scheduling things is important. Regular talks with your team, etc. If it is not in people´s calendar, you cannot assume to just "walk by to chat" for important topics.

- English is the corporate language, we do not hire anybody who is not capable of holding a conversation in English. Be it Europe, China or Japan. Our internal documentation is in English. Our customers operate in the same way.

- As a manager: very flexible work hours. a fine ear/eye for issues and conflicts. awareness of cultural differences on communication and perception.

Bjoern• 14 years ago

Do you think it is possible to pull off a startup where the team (e.g. three people) is spread over different timezones? How would possible investors react to something like that?

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

I seem to be losing my sense of wonder

Yesterday I worked with my collegue, me at my desk near London, him in the Pennsylvania sunshine, producing code for a Texan university. We chatted, shared code, pushed updates to servers on two continents.

We were using technology that is according to Arthur C Clarke, magic in any previous human generation.

And I never even noticed.

Co-ordinating humans over vast distances is really no different to doing it in two adjacent rooms. Treat people as craftsmen doing a professional job, individuals capable of coming together for a shared vision, encouraged by peer accolade and pressure.

and don't forget to stop and smell the flowers once in a while. It's a wonderful life.

netcan• 14 years ago

One thing I'm curious about recently is implications for tax regimes. For example, the Argentinian employees decide to work from Costa Rica.

One type of tax is like Goods & services taxes. They are very hard to avoid. Tax makers can set these to whatever rate they want and have to deal mostly with simple economic effects (lower demand at the higher price point). They don't have to worry about "dynamic effects" where people just choose to purchase outside of the tax regime.

Another type of tax is corporate taxes, investment taxes, capital gains taxes & similar taxes. These "have legs". Tax makers do have to consider investment going elsewhere or corporate profit being accumulated elsewhere. Often lowering cooperate taxes can lead to higher totals because companies move in from higher tax regimes.

Income taxes are still much more like the first type but they are getting more like the second. They are tied to the job & the job is tied to a place. But.. as our culture, economy & the companies we work for get more globalized, differences between income tax regimes may become a bigger factor. If you pay $30k a year in income taxes and work from home this becomes paying $30k a year to live in a country.

I've spoken to several people lately that are considering taking such proposals to their employers. Let me work remotely so I can clear an extra $x0,000 per year. These are average income people, not millionaires.

Whatever the ideological disposition of a culture, many governments may be forced to survive on lower revenues. In Ireland for example, it seems that tax revenues reached a peek a few years ago. The current budget is milking lizards. There is no more tax revenue that can be raised without hitting a point of negative return. There is a sense that "recovery" will take a long time but I suspect the decline (at least as a % of GDP) may continue.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

We're distributed across the US. Easier to solve, but still timezone problems. West coast, Midwest mostly. Sometimes folks in the field e.g. Japan, Hong Kong. 75 people in the company.

We're Sococo, and we eat our own dogfood. From the day audio streams came up for Alpha test, we abandoned other tools and have made ourselves live with Teamspace. From the coders to the CEO, we inhabit several virtual spaces by team.

It solves some of the issues brought up here. The presence information is tremendous, making it possible to see who's talking with whom, when a meeting or standup is starting, what they're doing. Yesterday we had an all-hands, the whole company. Half are in Mt View CA, the rest distributed. I didn't know where the meeting would be (which virtual room) so I looked at the map, saw folks congregating in a big meeting room and clicked in. Spookily similar to what happens when physically present - you follow the crowd.

Anyway we had everybody on video (in groups, so 7 or 8 thumbnails); switched our map between Mt View video, shared docs and shared screens as the presentations went on.

Q&A was very interesting. It was actually easier to follow questions from other virtual participants - they all have their own mic, so everybody could hear the questions. Folks physically present were just some mumbling from the back of the room in Mt View; the speaker would forget to repeat the question half the time.

I cannot emphasize enough how much immediate and present you feel in a virtual tool like this. I actually feel anxious when I have to participate in a conference call or talk to somebody on a phone - the experience is so crappy and disconnected. Instead I 'call out' from a virtual space. At least then I can collaborate with my team while interviewing somebody, or talking through a customer problem. I can add a virtual participant into the call with a click. I can leave the call for a moment, get an answer from an Engineer, get back to the customer transparently.

Sorry for the gushing. Its hard to explain how different it is to be virtual without sounding like an advertisement. Anyway, there are definitely many tools out there to help with the distributed-team problem. And now some are integrated complete solutions, which is a whole new ballgame.

Running a Business With Staff Scattered Around the World

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