Would it be good or not good if the company you were interested in had no home office and the colleagues were distributed around the world to work where they like.
In 2013 I co-lead the acquisition of a San Francisco travel company. We took it remote. We immediately shed $240,000 per year in office overhead and all the colleagues came along. I have learned a lot of lessons along the way.
Now that the company is stable and has 5 years of profitability, I wonder if it is more or less attractive to investors than it would be otherwise. We have 45 people in 12 countries.
The 100% distributed company (no offices): do you value it higher or lower?
by a searcher from Stanford University
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We were left with a company where everyone in Customer Support (based in San Francisco) earned more than our existing software developers (based in E. Europe). This was an acquisition by an existing company. Over time the SF folks either moved out of SF or left the company unless they had a great reason to stay (they have kids, money does not matter, or they were in sales making a great commission, or extreme inertia). So over years, we have organically moved our Support to lower cost places like Asia or smaller cities in the USA. I have learned that the USA might have the best reputation for Support in the world.
I can share a few more factors at play because when I think of productivity across a company, I think more about turnover and collaboration quality and motivation/engagement. In small or medium information companies, I think these are the drivers for productivity. EG, when you lose your lead developer, that's a huge hit to productivity that can take months to recover from vs. the lead developer only working 5 hours per day most of the time.
In our company, I would say that the productivity per hour worked is much higher than if we were all in an office. Perhaps because meeting time and working time are so clearly differentiated. You simply do not have as many interruptions for work or non-work issues.
I would guess that productivity as a whole might be about the same, but hours worked is less, especially if you consider the commute! I would say our happiness is higher and our voluntary turnover is lower, especially when compared to compensation.. I decided early on that for our company, we would play the long-game and try to accrue an advantage by reducing turnover and increasing job satisfaction vs. pushing for more productivity.
Maybe this is another way to think about productivity: the company is not paying the colleague for commute or work clothing. I estimate that at 20% savings on compensation. So, productivity per labor cost, I would say has been much higher.
On the other hand, I think it is uncommon for any of our colleagues to work over 40 hours per week. Perhaps our average is 30 hours per week. I don't know. I do suspect that some colleagues "punish" the company when unhappy by simply working fewer hours or being less productive. And of course it is easy to abuse the system. If the company is not going to put care and trust into every colleague, I think remote work for info workers would be a disaster. But for work with clearly defined outcomes, like Uber driver, it seems to work fine.