The traditional company structure is giving way to a new one. An office that’s not an office: remote workers. Free money to improve home offices. A bigger travel budget. A protean business structure. For years, some companies have bucked the system, giving employees almost total freedom over where they worked and, in some respects, how much they earn.
Here are 5 companies that revolutionized the concept of “the office,” and how they did it.
Automattic
The company that brought you WordPress (yes, the platform itself) is actually one of the most non-traditional companies in tech. It’s not surprising. It showed the world that remote workers are a great idea – not something sketchy or something only amateurs do.
The company has roughly 190 employees, with most of them working from home. What’s more, they don’t even live in the same city or country. Nope. They are scattered around 141 cities and 28 countries.
This comes with a rather unique benefit. There is no one central base of operations. Because employees are diversified across the globe, no one economic climate will impact the company as a whole. And, the loss of a single employee won’t be catastrophic for the entire enterprise.
Of course, the company does have an official HQ in San Francisco, where a handful of employees choose to work.
The company saves money on having a larger office by letting its employees work from wherever they want. New employees get $2,000 to spend on decking out their home office, and there’s more money allocated to travel expenses so that the “office” can meet up anywhere around the globe for annual meetings.
The company will even reimburse employees for co-location offices, or offices outside the home.
This decentralized company culture reflects the open-source nature of their software.
And, last, but not least, the company doesn’t suffer from the usual office politics because there’s no real office to speak of.
10Up
10Up is a really new startup in the content creation space. But, it already has 60 full-time employees on its distributed team of professionals. These professionals develop and maintain websites. By not having a central office location where every employee comes in to work, it saves money by not having to maintain a large office space.
Online meetings, virtual, and real meetups is how the company survives being a virtual company.
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The company describes itself as “100% distributed,” but does maintain an office in Illinois. Everyone in the company does have the freedom to work from wherever they want. That freedom is one of the company’s core values. Like many companies who run virtual work environments, they make extensive use of virtual meetings spaces. But, it’s the personal workspace of each employee and the freedom to work from anywhere that the company says contributes to its unique, and highly productive, culture.
Art&Logic
Art & Logic is a web and app development company. It’s also a fully distributed company, having operated and directed a virtual team since the software dev company’s founding in 1991. Yes, they’ve been around that long – practically before the Internet was a viable medium for businesses.
During that time, this company has grown both in size and in experience and know-how when it comes to remote working.
The tools and infrastructure that Art & Logic has adopted lets it build and maintain a cohesive team, with employees collaborating on projects without any real disruptions due to the physical space between them.
Basecamp
Basecamp is spread out over 26 different cities around the world. Their central office is in Chicago, but you’d never know it by working with them. Employees hail from pretty much wherever they want.
Other Companies Looking To Make The Switch
As company cultures shift to a more dynamic nature, eliminating traditional time-bound rules like “9-5” work hours, and “weekends off,” the corporate structure needs to shift, as well.
Companies, both new and old alike, are adopting the model. For example, CenturyLink Technology Solutions, Salesforce, Articulate, WhoIsHostingThis?, Balsamiq, Beutler Ink, The Ghost Foundation, SoftwareMill, TNTP, and Teletech all hire remote workers and are becoming more and more of the Michael Malone ideal Protean corporation.
In essence, corporations of the future will be, more or less, one to 5-person teams where the majority of work is outsourced to another company or independent contractors. With this type of structure, each employee is essentially an island unto himself, and is entrepreneurial in nature.
A company culture can develop in the same way as with a traditional structure, but employees are less entitled and more self-starters.
These companies will rely on virtual boardrooms, extended business vacations, phone conferencing, and co-location meeting spaces to conduct work. And, if they’re like any of the companies that have come before them, they’ll do just fine.
