What do you think of a virtual office?

[Software Guy]

I own a small software company and we rarely visit customers face to face anymore. Support is all phone and remote software. I already have 1 employee who works from home 80% of the time and the rest of us work from home as needed. We have a phone system that can be upgraded to VOIP which means no hardware needed! I could take phone calls on my cell phone no matter where I'm at. The cost is a wash voip vs landline.

Goodbye land lines. I can throw our data server in the cloud fairly cheaply and replicate it to my house. I can get a PO box for all of the bills. We can do face to face meetings with Skype as needed and we already chat over IM a lot to keep interruptions down.

I'd save $1500 a month on rent, $260 a month on parking, $300 a month on 10x10 internet at the office. My employees have *mostly* reliable internet, say 90% or better. Even if it cost me $500 a month for the cloud server... I'm still ahead.

Fuel for all of us....

We are all fairly seasoned at what we do. The tough part would be breaking in a new employee, I have a very specialized business. However, I could train someone at my house in a few months.

I know I'm more productive when I'm at home working, only the dogs and cats bug me. I have 30 meg down and 5 up internet at home.

So I'm curious what everyone thinks? I know it's my decision, just looking for opinions.

So, fire away, good or bad.

[jc000]

I own a small software company with two partners… we've been distributed since day one, coming up on two years in business. One partner is right up the street and we'll occasionally meet at his place, other partner is in the next county. We have employees scattered about, one across country from us.

Honestly there are no problems whatsoever. I couldn't imagine shelling out the money for an office, at least at our current size. We do try to meet up when we can, but really… its just not something we ever think of or worry about. Sounds like your team can handle it. I think you'll be alright.

[Software Guy]

There are 5 of us now. When it snows, there isn't anyone in the office! We just stay home. It's very tempting right now.

[littlejerry]

I'm a mech engineer and I've worked in medical R&D and consumer product development for most of my career. I(we) build physical things. My current company is pretty fractured with offices all over the east coast. Different job functions in diff locations.

Due to the nature of our work its critical to have each function interact with prototypes and production samples. It's a massive burden to either build multiple models or fly around the country demoing and reviewing concepts.

Our corporate overlords are starting to push even more fragmentation. They want people to work from home and in some cases hire people in other states. It's great in theory but in practice its caused some pretty major delays and miscommunication.

For jobs which deal with a physical product I think it simply doesn't work. I'm also skeptical of how you effectively build a team via virtual office. It's conceivable that virtual works with existing relationships and comraderie but building it groundup would be a stretch.

[Clobbersaurus]

Do it.

If productivity goes down you can address it on an individual basis. Save your cash and throw a kick ass staff party at the end of the year.

[StraitR]

I won't pretend to understand your business, but I'd say you can always go back to renting another office in short order, so I see no reason not to try.

It's not like you nerds would be lost without IT support. :p

[Software Guy]

I'm a mech engineer and I've worked in medical R&D and consumer product development for most of my career. I(we) build physical things. My current company is pretty fractured with offices all over the east coast. Different job functions in diff locations.

Due to the nature of our work its critical to have each function interact with prototypes and production samples. It's a massive burden to either build multiple models or fly around the country demoing and reviewing concepts.

Our corporate overlords are starting to push even more fragmentation. They want people to work from home and in some cases hire people in other states. It's great in theory but in practice its caused some pretty major delays and miscommunication.

For jobs which deal with a physical product I think it simply doesn't work. I'm also skeptical of how you effectively build a team via virtual office. It's conceivable that virtual works with existing relationships and comraderie but building it groundup would be a stretch.

Fortunately we are software and that only.

It's tough to describe everything up front but it is all software. Accounting software for property taxes in NY.

Seeing as I have just a few employees AND I'd like to think that I listen to them... I think we could do well.

BUT, the delays ect is exactly why I am asking. Can we work through it each day. Can we make it work. In reality (or so I think) $1500 a month is cheap for 1200 sq ft of space gas and electric included.

And I will get my employees within a week. I just really want outside thoughts. (heck, I already work nights...)

I truly appreciate each response ( I know it sounds lame but it is true)

[Software Guy]

I won't pretend to understand your business, but I'd say you can always go back to renting another office in short order, so I see no reason not to try.

It's not like you nerds would be lost without IT support. :p

Life is good as a nerd. 60% of my house is automated (thank you smarthome and insteon) so I can just speak to "Alexa" in my kitchen and have her turn on/off lights ect at will. For those that don't know, Alexa is Amazon's AI.

[StraitR]

Life is good as a nerd. 60% of my house is automated (thank you smarthome and insteon) so I can just speak to "Alexa" in my kitchen and have her turn on/off lights ect at will. For those that don't know, Alexa is Amazon's AI.

That's pretty cool. I'm just jealous because I WOULD be lost without our IT guy.

And my suggestion was sincere.

[okie john]

I've worked in advertising, telecommunications, and technology for the last 15 years, and I've worked both ways. Some projects demand face-to-face collaboration, others can be done remotely, and others need both.

Deciding which is which is an art, and nobody gets it right 100% of the time. Give remote a shot. It won't take long to figure out whether you need offices.


Okie John

[orionz06]

Depends on the job and how things work. For what I'm working on I may interact with 10 different people face to face because instant messaging doesn't cut it. Other days I'll go a week and not need to talk to anyone. If it weren't for the NRC I think we'd be a little more open to work from home and we can pull it off when sick and not take as much PTO but there needs to be some time.

A few of us have joked around about a small consulting company that would have a few working lunches each week and the rest would be from home. For the smaller scale stuff it would work, not so much for multiple engineering groups working on a power plant.

As it stands I am seeking a job in a smaller company with less government restrictions so that working from home is more feasible.

[Salamander]

Not quite the same thing, but I spent six years telecommuting for a large consulting firm. At the time I joked that I could work from anyplace with internet access, electricity to recharge all my gear, and an airport to get to my clients. It worked pretty well for me.

A lot depends on personality (for the individual) and culture (if doing this for a company). The place I was at then encouraged working from wherever, and that's nothing new, Tom Peters said so in the early 90s. The company I work for now, it depends of which pre-merger piece of the total one is part of. The guys I work with most of the time really struggle with this, they have trouble dealing with anyone they can't see whenever they want to. A couple of young folks have tried to work remotely and have been set up to fail, because their managers have failed to think globally or even regionally. And at least one person failed because she didn't have the self-discipline to work away from the structure of the office. Other offices and people in the same firm thrive on it though. Perhaps surprisingly, I've yet to encounter a client that wasn't OK with a non-traditional setup, as long as they got what they needed on time and within budget. Many of them understand that reducing overhead and distractions can be a good thing for them.

So, I can speak to working from anyplace but a real office in the context of global firms with thousands of people, but that's not exactly the same as what you're contemplating and I can't really speak to a start up situation. A good resource though is nunomad.com all kinds of tips there.

[Archimagirus]

I worked for a really big company doing support from home and I loved it. Until we moved to a state where I didn't know anyone had no social contact.

The only thing I might recommend you consider is offering to reimburse your employees a portion of the fees for their connectivity. If you do, it might be motivation to get a faster/ more consistent internet connection and phone provider. In your situation you might even choose to reimburse a portion of their cell phone bills as well since they have no office number.

All that is assuming you don't do that or have company phones already.

[tremiles]

If you haven't already, you might want to look into Vonage Business for phone service. I do some net admin work for a travel agency with multiple offices serviced by different net providers as well as home workers so the bundled packages from net provider didn't work. No contracts, free VOIP hard phones connecting to Vonage's cloud switch so I can overflow one office to another, virtual attendant for routing to specific folks/departments, flat fee for NA calling. It's pretty slick. Between Vonage and Rackspace hosted mail that includes chat through the webmail portal, the agency has moved to 50% teleworking.

Sent from my D5503 using Tapatalk

[jc000]

I'll just reiterate that one of our guys (the west coast guy) I've worked with for 4 years now and I've yet to meet him face-to-face. I don't even have a great idea of what he looks like. This is someone who was my tech lead on two (successful) year-long projects among a multitude of other initiatives.

It is personality dependent but if you're talking 5 people you already know, again I think you'll be fine. IM, email, phone calls ensure no one is ever not reachable, and we are all flexible to meet somewhere as needed.

[Software Guy]

If you haven't already, you might want to look into Vonage Business for phone service. I do some net admin work for a travel agency with multiple offices serviced by different net providers as well as home workers so the bundled packages from net provider didn't work. No contracts, free VOIP hard phones connecting to Vonage's cloud switch so I can overflow one office to another, virtual attendant for routing to specific folks/departments, flat fee for NA calling. It's pretty slick. Between Vonage and Rackspace hosted mail that includes chat through the webmail portal, the agency has moved to 50% teleworking.

Sent from my D5503 using Tapatalk

I love my shoretel phone system and they have a hosted solution and it's very flexible.

I've also worked form trade shows and people have no clue which is great.

[Sal Picante]

I work for a mid-sized software company. There are ~12 of us on the engineering side. All remote.

I'm wintering in FL now.

I love work, but I love seeing my daughter everyday and love being at home.

[jh9]

I'm just coming off a year and change of 100% remote (startup) and it's...ok. Not bad, certainly. Better than working on post with the ridiculous traffic and constantly having to badge in to everything. But going from working at home "as needed" to 100% is a big jump. I was surprised at the difference.

I would do it again if the right opportunity popped up, but at this point I don't consider it a perk. I know some people that love it, but some people really don't work well without having a defined morning commute and a completely different space to work from. Just saying that because you have employees. What are you going to do if enough of them don't make the transition to 100% remote as well as you'd like?

You might consider just closing it down for a spell and having everybody try out the remote thing. TBH, it took a while for the novelty to wear off for me to realize how indifferent I was about it. So going a few weeks or a couple months with an empty office might be a worthwhile investment if you have several people that don't like it and you'd rather keep them than replace them.

[mtnbkr]

I'm a manager in a tech firm (IT security-SIEM, IDS/IPS, FW, etc). I have 3 managers and about 25 people (including those managers) below me. About 3/4s of my various teams work remotely part or full-time (some are remote to my location but work out of other corp offices). Some I've never met face to face, others I've had visit our office for specific needs, but they work from home otherwise.

Some folks can work effectively offsite, others not so much. You need to define a policy that allows effective communication between your team members and set expectations on comms methods, availability, and working hours. This should be defined in your SOP.

For us, we're a 9-5 shop (or 9-5 in your locale, we have folks in other TZ and overseas). While "at work", you will be on our instant messenger app and respond to emails in a reasonable amount of time. During work hours, you'll answer your "work phone" or respond to messages in a reasonable time frame. If you're working an on-call rota (one team does that), you must answer your "work phone" when it rings 24/7 for the week you're on call.

This isn't to micromanage people, but to ensure they're available as we're a highly interactive group of teams. Since we're not all together in the same building, we can't just walk over to each others' desks, so the policy is to be available via those three main methods. I don't check to see if everyone is "online", but if I start getting reports of missed deadlines or folks being non-responsive, I will follow up on that and seek to find out why the person isn't following SOP as evidenced by their performance.

Web Conferencing tools (Go2Meeting, Livemeeting, Webex, etc) are very useful. They improve collaboration and foster a sense of team by creating a virtual conference room.

So, my suggestion is to define what it means to be working from home define the tools to be used. Be mindful of their workloads and make allowances for them to disconnect in order to focus on high priority deliverables, but make that the exception rather than the rule ("I'm busy" isn't sufficient, they need to define the need). Remember, this is in lieu of being at an office where everyone can interact directly.

Chris

[LittleLebowski]

There are 5 of us now. When it snows, there isn't anyone in the office! We just stay home. It's very tempting right now.

I guess I'll be That Guy and say "why not move to a free state now?" :D

[scjbash]

I work for a marketing company that has 20ish employees. Half of us are spread out around the country, from New York to California. The other half are in one city. As the number of employees in the same city grew they decided to open an office there a couple years ago. Most of those employees are back to spending some or most of their time working from home and I think they might be closing the office. I know I'm much more productive working from home than I would be in an office.

[Software Guy]

I'm a manager in a tech firm (IT security-SIEM, IDS/IPS, FW, etc).

So, my suggestion is to define what it means to be working from home define the tools to be used. Be mindful of their workloads and make allowances for them to disconnect in order to focus on high priority deliverables, but make that the exception rather than the rule ("I'm busy" isn't sufficient, they need to define the need). Remember, this is in lieu of being at an office where everyone can interact directly.

Chris

We are working on this now. After spending half of yesterday discussing it, 1 person is working from home today to test it out as she hasn't done it before. The rest of us have. We are looking into productivity tools which we have found would really help us regardless of having a physical or virtual office. We are moving certain things up to MS Azure (we get credit for being developers) and that allows me to download the source for safe keeping vs uploading it. I'm working with my accountant, Lawyer and insurance agent on the ups and downs.

We would probably meet in person on a bi-weekly basis as well.

[Duces Tecum]

OP, the larger institutions are presently requiring additional documentation to support at-home businesses. This might impact both you and your employees.

Yesterday one underwriter required the following (the borrower is a retired cop now running a profitable general contracting business out of his home):

(1) Written self employment confirmation: Verification of existence of borrower's business from a third party (CPA, Regulatory Agency, or applicable licensing bureau (a website is not acceptable third party verification).

(2) Listing the address of the borrower's business using as telephone book, internet, or directory assistance.

(3) Name and title of person completing the verification.