How important is remote work to your business model?
10up Inc.
That depends on how broadly you define our business model.
Clearly, there are plenty of consultancies and web agencies that are co-located, or located in a few scattered offices, so the core business model – agency work – doesn’t mandate distribution, although I think there are very few examples of successful technology centric agencies that achieve this scale with colocation.
I would say the nuances of 10up’s business model has been entirely built around a distributed workforce. At least in some measure, our success is built on a couple of core principles that I can’t see succeeding in a co-located model (having helped build colocated shops, as well):
- Differentiating ourselves from thousands of generic web agencies by striving to be the absolute, stand-out-from-the-crowd best within a specific industry segment: WordPress implementation. If we’re going to hire the best talent within a niche skillset, at any kind of scale, we need to get outside the 50 mile radius around an office building. And while we might be able to achieve that scale in a major population center, the sheer cost of comparable talent would make us utterly uncompetitive.
- A loosely “just in time” talent acquisition strategy, that lets us scale to the market and customer needs with relative fluidity. While we can take 4-6 weeks to onboard and train new talent, we can’t just bring in any software engineer and wait 6 months to a year for them to become productive, especially when we were much smaller and, having always bootstrapped the business, on a lean budget.
Acceleration Partners
It is not important to our business model as much as it is important to our company vision and culture. We believe high-quality work and a high-quality lifestyle are not mutually exclusive. Our team works hard, but we are equally passionate about the hours we spend away from work with family and friends and pursuing our passions.
Aha!
Aha! was built on the promise and premise of remote work. We have been an entirely distributed company from day-one, and we now have team members working in locations throughout the U.S. and a few international locations too. Our team is rapidly expanding to meet customer demand for our roadmapping software.
We have a framework for success that we pioneered and named The Responsive Method (TRM). It is centered around the belief that interactions with urgency are what propel people and organizations forward. TRM helps our team work from where they are happiest while still staying on track towards our ultimate goal — to create real value for customers and sustainable happiness for the team.
American Express
Our mission is to become the world’s most respected service brand. To do that, we must be able to attract and select the very best talent, people with a passion for service. Having a remote workforce allows us to cast a wider net, reaching prospective employees who may not live within commuting distance of one of our brick-and-mortar customer care locations. We also can attract people who have the right profile but who have specific needs that make virtual work a good fit, such as parents, students, veterans and their spouses, and people with limited mobility.
Having employees across time zones and with a more flexible working model also helps us respond to volumes and be there for our customers when they need us.
Answer Connect
Remote work is essential for us. We have employees in every time zone across the US, which helps us to staff 24/7/365 with people who are awake and ready to work! We’ve been able to recruit and keep employees who would not want to work in a traditional contact center environment, but love our company because of the freedom remote work allows. Remote also helps us maintain our excellent uptime by ensuring that natural disasters, ISP outages and other catastrophes do not impact our ability to get the job done. We have also seen the clear benefit of happier, more productive employees through this model, and from an environmental standpoint, remote is a no brainer. We’ve become evangelical about this model because it is the right answer for us and so many other businesses.
AnswerFirst
Remote work is paramount to our success. Our customer service professionals are ready around the clock, ensuring our clients never miss a call. Our clients always have a live person to answer their calls.
Appirio
Remote work is extremely important to our business model as we are a company that encourages flexibility, work-life balance, and employee experience. We believe in what we call “the Virtuous Cycle.” What that means is, when our employees are happy and are given the tools and flexibility they need to do their jobs, in turn our customers will be happy with the experience they receive from us. Empowered workers lead to empowered customers. Flexibility is a key component of a successful virtuous cycle.
Articulate, Inc.
Extremely important given our entire culture and business is founded on the remote principal. We’ve been remote from the beginning.
Attentiv
While working remotely isn’t particularly impactful on how we run, it has shaped how we think about and design our software platform. Attentiv was created with remote teams in mind, so how remote teams would use the tool has largely impacted the features, layout, and experience we’ve crafted with Attentiv.
Automattic
It’s essential! Automattic started from the very beginning as a distributed company. It didn’t happen gradually, it was from the start.
Balsamiq
We like to compete on customer service, so it’s very important for us to have both sales and tech support people spread around the world to cover more timezones. Being geographically dispersed also gives us the advantage of moving faster…the software gets tested while the developers sleep, for instance.
Batchbook
Remote work is very important to our business model. Because we are open to remote employees, we have access to a much bigger talent pool. Also, because Batchbook is a SaaS product, we are working with customers from all over the world. Having a distributed team helps us to be available at different times and in different time zones for our customers. We also understand the challenges that other businesses face when sharing information and collaborating with team members, which Batchbook is a great tool for!
Beutler Ink
Having a distributed team is very important to us. First and foremost, it allows us to hire the most talented team members, without having to narrow our focus by location. That’s huge! It means we can get the best person for the role, not the best person within a 100 mile radius. And we don’t lose team members if they move to a new city or state. It also keeps our costs lower. And it means we can be responsive to our clients, whichever time zone they’re in, since we have team members across the US.
Bitovi
Extremely important! Remote work gives us the flexibility to work with the best talent anywhere and everywhere in the world. It has enabled Bitovi to create a team with varied perspectives, skill sets, experiences, and backgrounds, which best supports our mission to deliver amazing applications.
Blossom
Being a globally distributed team gives us many unfair advantages. Here are just some of them.
- Even as a small team we cover almost all timezones without any struggle. This means that for support inquiries, we usually have somebody on top of it without our customers having to wait.
- We can hire the best people globally no matter where they are. Even if they want to work and travel. This would be impossible at other companies.
- Employees can integrate their work and life much better. If you like, you can work traditional hours. If you like to split up your day or have your most productive time at 2 a.m. in the morning, that’s perfectly fine too.
- At many companies relocation would mean the person has to find a new job and the company loses great talent. Being distributed by default means that it is no problem if people choose to relocate permanently or temporarily. You just need an internet connection.
Bright!Tax
We provide all our services online, so location isn’t a key requirement for our employees. We could operate our firm from a physical location, but our remote model gives us access to a global talent pool, rather than a local or regional one, so we can employ the best American CPAs wherever they happen to reside, worldwide.
Canonical
Everything you do at Canonical has the potential to improve millions of people’s lives and have a real impact in the world. We have a long-term vision, and work at a fast pace to make the future happen now. To achieve this we need to view the world through global lens, tapping into the best talent in the industry, regardless of their location. Our very approach provides us with a market of talent that may have been overlooked due to their ability to travel to a traditional office, further supporting diversity across the organisation.
Chargify
Pretty important. Not only does it make finding talent easier (covered in other sections), but having a remote team, across multiple time zones, allows us to provide better support. We also have a lot of customers that also have distributed teams, and they appreciate that we are a distributed team.
Ciao Bambino! Inc.
Essential. Our flexible work model enables women with children to be moms and work, i.e. they can work when they want from home or wherever they are in the world.
CloudPeeps
Remote work is the most important thing in our business model. The entire premise of CloudPeeps is about matching talented individuals with online-based, remote work opportunities. We like to practice what we preach at HQ so we work remotely too.
Coalition Technologies
Absolutely critical. The best and brightest can be found all around the world, and it’s important for us to employ only the most talented individuals, no matter where they might be located. We want to work with the world’s leading, most passionate content creators, developers, designers, and SEO and PPC analysts. We can only provide the highest quality services to our clients if we’re willing to invest in the highest quality staff.
Codebusters, Inc.
It’s critical because there is such a fluctuating demand for HIM professionals, especially coders, that having people who can sign on from anywhere makes the burden of completing assignments much lighter. We run into difficulties with onsite jobs where there just aren’t enough candidates in the area, or those who are available can’t make the commute. Having remote capabilities allows people the freedom to develop their own schedule as long as it meets the goals of the work, and in many cases people work a full-time job during the day and a part-time remote job during the evenings and/or weekends.
Collage.com
Remote work has been one of Collage.com’s “secret weapons”. We can recruit people anywhere, and can be more flexible with hours and schedules. Working from home also provides us great advantages when it comes to hiring people. After all, don’t we all want control over the environment we work in – which remote work provides?
Crossover
It’s definitely at the core of our company. Our mission is to find the best talent in the world and match them with jobs according to their skills. We couldn’t do this without utilizing a remote workforce. Even within Crossover we all work remotely–everyone from sales, marketing, and support to the CEO himself. It makes a lot of sense to us: if the best talent has no zip code, then of course we should be capitalizing on this as well!
DevriX
It’s essential – finding talent shouldn’t be limited to a single location. Daily commuting or sticking to specific business hours is inefficient as we have clients in North America, Europe and Asia. And there are plenty of rock star developers living in a small house at the beach, willing to support your business without any reasonable incentive to relocate!
Doist
Doist is– and always has been– bootstrapped, independent and profitable. Our remote-first structure has truly allowed us to thrive as a business. Since we don’t run the exorbitant costs of renting an office in an expensive tech hub or hiring a team who lives exclusively in said tech hub, we have been able to grow completely organically without having to live and die on VC funding.
DVMelite
Remote work is essential in our business model, we would not be able to do what we do without remote. With clients all over North America and Team members to match, the remote model allows for greater flexibility in meeting the time constraints of our clients. This flexibility also means we are able to attract highly qualified Team Members who can flex their day around personal commitments.
Edgar
Remote work is extremely important to our business model! In theory, we could do what we do from a central location like an office, but we don’t have to. That means we get the flexibility of hiring the best person for any position regardless of where they are, which in turn means we can create a better product and grow a more successful business. In many ways, working remotely actually helps us build and maintain a more cohesive team, because we get to focus on priorities other than someone’s location on a map!
Envato
It makes sense to tap into talent from all over the world rather than setting geographical boundaries. For some teams having people work across different time zones works in our favour, for example the Help Team can support our community 24 hours a day! We also see remote work as simply keeping up with a changing workforce. There is no such thing as work life balance any more, there is just life and work is a part of it like everything else.
Team members who are based in Melbourne, near Envato’s head office, still have the flexibility to work from home (or wherever they like) on a regular basis. They can also work from anywhere in the world for up to three months a year. Providing this kind of flexibility makes it easier for team members to factor in other aspects of their life like family, hobbies and travel.
ezhome
Remote work is key to our success and fundamental to our identity. Co-founder and CTO Odysseas Tastalos previously founded oDesk, now Upwork, and is passionate about providing the best work opportunities for the best talent regardless of location. Additionally, our eagerness to hire remote gives us access to a global talent pool and allows us to hire experts without the typical challenges of market constraints.
Fire Engine RED
It’s crucial to our business model. As a 100% virtual company, we’re able to hire the very best people, regardless of where they live. Our team members have experience working on brands such as Apple®, DIRECTV®, Disney®, eBay®, Intuit®, Razorfish®, and Vanguard®. And of course, by not spending money on office space, we’re able to invest more in serving our clients better.
Flex Professionals
The remote work model has been critical to our success and growth. We are a small, high-growth business. Hiring a remote workforce has allowed us to attract and retain top talent and reduce our overhead costs. This in turn has fueled our growth.
FlexJobs
Remote work IS our business model. As a company that specializes in and promotes flexible work options, our own remote workforce is showing that we walk the talk. FlexJobs is proof that virtual companies do work and can be successful.
On a more micro level, remote work is the foundation of our culture. It’s humbling to see where and why team members really need to utilize that flexibility. We’ve seen people work from hospital rooms while a family member recovers from major surgery and from hotel rooms while searching for a loved one who has disappeared. We’ve had a director working from bed as she recovered from a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. Each of those people were able to take time off. The ability to keep working actually helped them get through difficult times and situations. At the same time, remote work also allows our team to create schedules that fit more wholly into their day to day lives, whether that means having the flexibility to attend kids’ school and sports events, walking their dog during a coffee break, or taking a mid-day hike during lunch. Our culture is based on the understanding that life happens. That speaks volumes about how we value our people.
Fog Creek Software
Our philosophy is if you hire the smartest people and give them everything they need to create, they’ll make the best products. Hiring remotely has allowed us to continue to be competitive, and to take that first step that makes the whole process work.
Formstack
Remote work has become an essential part of our culture. Our goal as a company is to “change lives through inspired software,” and I can’t imagine us working toward this goal now without our fantastic team. Because of remote work, we’ve been able to attract hard-working Formstackers around the globe who believe in our mission and have a blast while accomplishing great things. We’ve created a structure of communication and transparency so that we all feel connected no matter where we’re located. It’s been amazing to see us celebrate big wins together.
GitHub, Inc.
I’m not sure I’d say remote work is connected with our business model, since it’s possible that GitHub could’ve been built by a non-distributed team. Facilitating asynchronous communication within distributed teams is critical to our product’s success though, so it would’ve been much, much harder to build something that does this job to the same high standard if we didn’t have first-hand experience on a daily basis with the problems involved in remote work.
Go Fish Digital
It is incredibly important to us. We realized early on that we wanted to build a business based on remote work for two reasons: 1. Quality of life – having been in the DC area for over 10 years, I know what it’s like spending 15% or more of your time commuting. It isn’t fun, and it doesn’t help with work/life balance. Happier employees means more loyal employees, so less turnover. That has proven to be the case thus far. 2. Hiring the best – we aren’t just limited to the best people we can hire who are also located within a 30 mile radius of our office. We can now hire the best candidate in the country, period.
GOhiring GmbH
We are building a complex digital product and want to implement this aim for digital transformation in all processes, which of course includes how we work. We want to reflect our aim for digitalization to our customers, employees, and partners. Working remotely is one important aspect that has to be considered here.
Goodway Group
It is critical, and we see its impact primarily in two areas. First, we can source the right talent from anywhere in the nation; we aren’t restricted to the over-tapped and overpriced markets of San Francisco and New York. We never have to try to convince the right person to move somewhere he or she doesn’t want to. Second, our employee retention rate is outstanding. We have had dozens of employees move due to changing life circumstances and not have to leave Goodway – they can take their job with them. Also, in a service-based business, retention is key for building relationships. Our clients get to work with the same people for years.
Greenback Expat Tax Services
A remote business structure is critical to our business model, as it allows us to recruit the very best team possible—regardless of their physical location. We operate in a niche market- US accountants who specialize in expat tax preparation- and operating remotely allows us to recruit accountants who live anywhere in the world. If we limited ourselves to hiring only those who could commute to a city location, it would seriously hamper our ability to find the kind of highly skilled (and specialized) talent we need to offer our customers the very best service.
Hippo Education
Huge. We recruit the absolute best people from basically anywhere. It’s a huge advantage and I’m not sure we could work any other way.
Hubstaff
Remote work is vital to our business model, because our company caters to remote teams. We are a completely virtual team using our own software and practicing what we preach. Our valued team members from all around the world wouldn’t be part of our company if we didn’t have a remote business model.
ICUC Social
ICUC was built on a remote workforce. With a global client list and service offering, it is critical that we focus on the management of results, not the management of people. The remote work model is very compatible with a results-based management style.
iDoneThis
It definitely has a huge influence on how we work, on our processes and conventions. Being remote changes how you communicate — err on the side of too much –, how you collaborate, and even how you celebrate company success.
While many recent tools make that a lot easier, that isn’t enough: how the company works has to default to remote work. When we design a process or a policy for working together, our default assumption has to be that we will be remote. Buying in fully into remote and being aware of it I believe are preconditions to making remote work a success.
Incsub
Growing the team remotely has given us quite a few advantages. We get the best of the best in new hires thanks to a completely global applicant pool. And having team members in all timezones makes it easy for us to support our customers and respond to anything at all hours of the day. Someone is always around when needed. This is especially important as our business is global too, with customers in nearly every single country in the world.
Inspired HR
I believe remote work is extremely important to our business model. We strive to meet our client’s needs and to build long-term meaningful relationships with our clients. Therefore, it was imperative that we focused our attention and resources on the clients, rather than on expensive overhead and a flashy office. By switching over to home offices and client sites, we are more able to be there for our clients 24/7 and truly understand their needs, which is directly related to our goal of creating great workplaces!
Intridea/ Mobomo
Very. It enables us to hire only the best. Location isn’t a limiting factor when it comes to finding top talent.
InVisionApp
Our existence as a remote team has been intentional since day 1. It enables us to tap into talent from all across the globe, rather than being limited by geographic location. We can bring on the best and the brightest regardless of where they’re located.
iTutorGroup
The only way to leverage the talent needed for our business is through remote work!
Jackson River
Remote work is huge to us, an incredibly important factor to our success. We are able to hire the best talent no matter where they are, and we find that independently-driven people who value a flexible, work-wherever-is-best-for-you professional lifestyle end up making the most dedicated and accomplished employees. Our clients are geographically distributed anyway, so there’s no need to be in a certain place to provide them with a face-to-face experience. Just like we can do great service and support remotely for our clients, so can we collaborate as a team without being in the same room.
Jungle Scout
It has been a key component from day one as a 100 percent remote company, and it’s something that is built into our company culture. It’s important because the whole team has the same opportunities. Some people prefer to stay in one location with their families and others hit the nomad trail, but we all make it work for us and as a result we’re a happy and productive team.`
Knobs.co
It is absolutely core to the business model.
LiquidSpace
Remote work is essential to our business model. Remote workers make up a sizeable chunk of our customers.
LoveToKnow
Remote work is integral to our business model at LoveToKnow. We really focus on the work and don’t need offices or a location to conduct business. It allows us to tap into a diverse workforce, bringing expertise around the world to our websites’ visitors.
Modern Tribe
Remote work isn’t just a perk we offer our team – it’s the core of our business. As a 100% distributed agency, it allows us to tap into the right resources for each project, regardless of where that talent is located. We pride ourselves on being a lifestyle business, offering a foundation for the team to craft a meaningful balance between work, family, friends, fitness and play.
MomsRising
Working remotely has allowed us to hire the best people wherever they live. This is of huge value.
Must Have Menus
Remote work makes our business model possible. We can find talent all over the world.
NodeSource
Vital to our business as we are distributed by design, meaning, we built our business to be completely remote and distributed from the ground up. This allows us to attract the world’s top talent while also reducing op-ex since we don’t have offices, etc. Of course, this may change over time, but while we were bootstrapping our business, it has been a boon.
Omni Interactions
Remote work is critical to our success. We know that people deserve remote work to ensure they have choices in their career. Without remote work, Omni Interactions wouldn’t exist today.
OnTheGo Systems
All of our company members work remotely; headquarters are our own home offices or whatever place people choose to work from. So remote work is crucial to keeping our business running.
OpenSnow
Remote work is essential to our business model. We want our forecasters to live where they forecast because local knowledge leads to more useful forecasts. And our full-time employees who are not forecasters should be free from commuting, which wastes time and energy.
Origin Eight
It’s essential. We look for the best talent independent of location — that’s a key factor in delivering expertise and high-quality project results. It also allows us to scale more easily.
Parse.ly
Sachin Kamdar and Andrew Montalenti co-founded Parse.ly after spending their first few years out of college becoming disillusioned with the failures of large organizations (waste, engineering mismanagement, etc.). They decided to create a company where people would want to work, and knew intrinsically that one of the ways they could keep their team happy and productive was to create an environment that was suited to each individual’s needs. The best way to accomplish this is through a distributed team.
Parse.ly’s entire product, engineering, and design team is distributed across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. However, we also have a “central office” in New York, New York is where our business team works (sales, marketing, and customer success). Here, Parse.ly offers the perks of a start-up — standing desks, flexible hours, work-from-home options, continuous learning, equipment budgets, limiting unnecessary meetings, etc. — while making sure to take employees’ work-life balance seriously.
Giving employees time and space to meld their personal passions and work styles with Parse.ly’s business goals has been one of the most effective ways that Sachin and Andrew have found to inspire and energize their staff.
Plex
Having a remote workforce has been instrumental for Plex in a variety of ways. First, it’s opened up our hiring capabilities to anywhere in the world so we can find the best person for the job, not just the best person within 50 miles of the office. This helps us reduce hiring competition with the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook. Talented people live everywhere, not just Silicon Valley, so we don’t care if you live in an igloo as long as you are talented, dedicated, passionate, kind and have a good Internet connection!
It also helps develop a more culturally sensitive product, something that’s critical for a company whose service is used all over the world. This goes beyond having local language support and includes things like being sensitive to linguistic nuances, user interface preferences and customer use case priorities.
Having people in distributed time zones is also an advantage because the company is always “on” and working around the clock. I should point out here that in order to manage a company this way you do need to implement a set of strong communication tools, but once you have that in place this becomes an absolute benefit.
Project Ricochet
I believe that the core of what we stand for as a business could do fine with or without a distributed team. However, sourcing talent from the Bay Area is extremely challenging and turnover is a problem in such a competitive tech hot spot. Being distributed allows us to spend less time recruiting and retaining talent. Because we are distributed, we also know that we have to work harder to stay connected so on the whole, I believe we are better connected than we would be if we were in an office (where we didn’t feel as compelled to try as hard by default).
Referral Rock
I believe remote work is core to our people and culture, which in turn is a large part of our business model to stay leaner and more efficient than our competitors.
Remote Year
Remote Year has a unique perspective on remote work because as a business, we help professionals from other companies advance their careers while traveling the world. They can do this both by being more productive in different inspiring settings and by interacting with the 50-80 fellow “Remotes” (that’s our word for program participants), all of whom come from a variety of backgrounds. As an employer, we also offer our entire company (over 100 full-time employees) the ability to work remotely.
RunRepeat
RunRepeat.com wouldn’t exist with only a local workforce. Talent is scarce, and expanding quickly wouldn’t be possible.
Scrapinghub
Remote working is not just something we embrace, it’s how we work. Rather than having an office and offer people to work remotely, we hire remotely from day one and suggest them to gather around in co-working spaces, for those who prefer to work in the company of other peers.
Scribendi
Remote work is fundamental to Scribendi’s business model. Through the power of the Internet, we are able to connect people in need of editing services to professional editors around the world. Without our remote editors, we would not be able to build such a qualified and diverse workforce, nor would we be able to keep up with the demand for editing and proofreading services.
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Simple [A]
[A]’s culture emerges in part from our distributed nature. We’re flexible, nimble, constantly learning, working across roles, teams, industries, and skills. It would be difficult to imagine operating [A] in a single location with fixed desks in fixed places. Our distributed nature allows us to grow our brain power, capabilities, diversity, effectiveness, and collective intelligence without the constraints of four walls in one geography.
SimpleTexting
Our business is highly dependent on it. Without remote employees we’d grow at a much slower rate.
SitePen
Very. By allowing everyone to work from their preferred location, SitePen is able to attract and retain highly-skilled individuals who value work-life balance. When we’re competing for talent with the giants like Google and Facebook, it definitely gives us an edge that we offer this kind of flexibility. With a stellar team, we are able to consistently produce high quality results, which allows us to expand our business right along with our team.
Skillcrush
Remote work is a cornerstone of Skillcrush’s business because it provides the flexibility and fulfillment that both our students and employees value most. Many of our Skillcrush students come to us because they feel stuck in their current jobs and are seeking higher salaries, better job security, and more flexible careers.
More and more people are looking to work remotely because they want a career that integrates with their lifestyle and that means finding work that sees them through new chapters and challenges—everything from growing families, health conditions, and relocations. It is Skillcrush’s core mission to show them that they can achieve just that by learning tech skills!
Sococo
Remote work is critical, absolutely critical to our business model! Of course, it is the focus of our product functionality, so we need to live the life of a distributed team in order to understand what our customers need, the gaps in communication presented to them, and how best to address them.
SoftwareMill
Next to a flat company structure and internal financial transparency, remote work is the basis of our business model.
Speak
For us, working remotely has literally made the difference between the company dying and surviving. If we were all to be based in San Francisco, which is quite typical for companies funded here, then our burn rate would have been almost double and we would actually have run out of money already!
As it stands we’ve been able to keep iterating on our product for much longer than typical, giving us an extra chance at becoming profitable.
Stack Overflow
Remote work is vital to the success of our product and engineering teams. It allows us to hire the best people wherever they are in the world and makes our team more productive.
Sticker Mule
It’s been critical to our success. People make businesses and going remote is the only way for us to hire the best possible people.
StudySoup
We started as a remote founding team, which has now grown to over 20 full time employees and thousands of contractors worldwide. I think having a remote team early on forced us to create clear communication and process structure early on which later allowed our company to scale very quickly nationwide.
Summit CPA Group
Extremely important. We work remotely with almost all of our clients. So, it is important for our team to experience the same issues. We conduct all of our team meetings through Sococo and really frown upon face-to-face meetings even if anyone happens to be in the office at the same time.
TaxJar
From a financial perspective, the cost-savings from remote work is significant which allows us to deliver an amazing product to our customers at an affordable price. That’s huge in our space.
From a company culture perspective, remote work is also one of the most important parts of running our business. We all value working hard and enjoying life at the same time. Working remotely has allowed us to move faster than our competitors and effectively disrupt the market that we’re in.
TeamGantt
It’s extremely important for a few reasons. One is that we are much more productive working from our homes where we don’t have the office distractions. The other is that it’s a great way to hire talent that lives further than an hour from your main office. It broadens the talent pool greatly. It also makes people happy that they can work from home.
TeamSnap
Extremely important — we’ve been this way from day one. Remote work lets us hire the best people from anywhere. It creates happier employees who cherish and live work-life balance. It makes TeamSnap an attractive destination for employees with families, who are typically more mature, empathetic and users of our product. We aggressively avoid set working hours, encouraging employees to work when they want to, how they want to. We judge people entirely on the work they produce and not when, how or where they do it. We’re not paying people to sit in a specific chair from 9-5 — we’re paying them to get work done.
Teleport
Building what we build, it would be impossible to tell our people they can’t live wherever they want to live – either in shorter spurts or longer stretches of time. If we preach the benefits of location independent lifestyle, we have to make sure we’re equipped to embed top talent from wherever they choose to be.
The Cheat Sheet
Remote work is vital to our business model since we operate in a highly competitive industry. We’re able to seek out the best talent no matter their location in the country.
The Geller Law Group
The ability to work remotely is extremely important to our business model. We believe that you can have it all, but we need to redefine the paradigm of what it means to have it all. In a traditional law firm setting, having it all meant a corner office achieved through long hours and lots of facetime. Our philosophy is to provide a law firm centered on work life balance for our employees. Remote working permits my team to work from home, encourages them to be self-starters and manage their time effectively, while also providing them the flexibility in their lives that they would not otherwise enjoy in a traditional law firm.
ThirdPath Institute
We could not have been as successful using any other approach. Launching our nonprofit as a virtual organization helped us: (a) keep our costs significantly lower (b) develop a strong network of resources across the US (c) become experts in the work we do because every day we learn something new from “practicing what we preach.”
Time Doctor
First, it allows us to be our best user for our product. Second, it allows us to source talent from all over the world. Not having a headquarters means that remote work is in our culture.
Timely
Remote work is a genuine competitive advantage for Timely. We demonstrate every day how to be time efficient and successfully blend work and life. Our customers in industries like beauty and wellbeing are passionate about the same things. They love being on a journey with us to optimise their time and squeeze every bit of joy out of their busy lives.
TNTP
Remote working is critical to TNTP’s business model and impact. We choose projects and partnerships based on where we see the greatest opportunities and needs. This model allows us to quickly respond to these new opportunities – whether helping a new superintendent in a city on the east coast or jumping in to address a teacher shortage in a city on the west coast – rather than restricting our work to a single location. Today we have over 50 active partnerships in more than 25 cities. With staff on the ground or within travel distance of each other, we’re able to work alongside our clients in schools and districts to ensure strong implementation of good ideas designed to help more students learn.
Toggl
We believe remote work is extremely important to our culture and business model as a company can’t grow without its employees growing and feeling happy and most productive wherever they are. Also, since all Toggl employees are location independent, this helps us hire the best people and broaden our search for great talent.
Toptal
It is critical. It’s at the core of our basic business offering (high-end software development services available across the globe from anywhere in the world), and it is also core to our culture. We hire the best people and empower them to choose any lifestyle they want, no matter where they are located.
For us, remote work does not mean outsourcing, which is typically an attempted arbitrage of costs. Our arbitrage is on opportunity and drive, not money, which is something that works exceptionally well when you remove location from the equation. Take someone who is used to making a San Francisco-level salary but doesn’t want to live there anymore, for example, and enable them to travel and work from anywhere. Or someone from somewhere like Argentina who has incredible skill and drive, but doesn’t have access to companies in the US. We’re able to leverage those situations to create tremendous opportunities for everyone here.
I think most companies try to arbitrage costs. We arbitrage opportunity and drive.
Tortuga
Essential. “Working on our terms,” which includes being remote, is one of our core values and an important part of our mission. For most companies, being remote is a perk. For us, it’s what we do and what many of our products are used for. Working remotely has been part of our DNA since day one.
Trade Conductor
It is critically important. We need to cover worldwide and all time zones. We need to give people flexibility in order to claim their flexibility!
Tropical Travelers
Our business model was specifically designed to work from home. When I opened The Tropical Travelers in 2001, I found there was a need for travel specialists. In order to reach clients around the globe, we didn’t need to be in an office setting. We needed to be able to work early morning or late in the evening and have the proper tools (ie. computer/phone) to service our clients effectively. Our location wasn’t as important as the work we are doing.
Ultimate Software
Remote work is extremely important to our business model. In order to hire and retain the best talent, you must be willing to hire outside of your office locations.
Universal Mind, Inc.
The most important characteristic of our remote workforce is that it fits our culture and values. We promote and maintain a “family comes first” work environment and remain passionate about maintaining that as a priority. The remote workforce grew organically based on our hiring philosophy, which remains to hire the best people in the world, no matter where they live.
Vork Inc
Remote work is critical to our model. We can take advantage of the best talent anywhere in the world without the overhead of a fixed office, without limiting our search for talent to a commutable distance, and therefore we can deliver world-class functionality faster and at a fraction of the cost of a traditional software business.
WAKA Kickball & Social Sports
It is extremely important. The distributed environment allows for a true work-life balance and supports one of our core values, which is Family First.
WooThemes
WooThemes was born remote so it has always been an important ingredient in our recipe for success. Freedom of location has created a melting pot of ideas and influences that have shaped our products and culture. We pride ourselves on a quirkiness that naturally developed as a result of our diversity.
Wordfence
It’s a critical success factor for us. Our team is able to spend less time in traffic and more time thinking about how to better protect our customer websites and businesses and more time making that happen. It also provides our team with a better quality of life. Here’s an anecdote to illustrate:
Wordfence is growing very quickly and over a year ago we were just a team of two. We are now eight people and are hiring as fast as we can. When one of our first team members joined us he came from a brick and mortar software engineering role. He would spend 40 minutes commuting to work and the same 40 minutes getting home in the evening. On his first day with us he sent me a photo of him and his family at the dinner table with the caption “First dinner at home with the family in weeks”. Besides making me get a bit emotional, it really brought home the tangible benefits to team quality of life that the remote model provides.
So to answer your question I’d say it’s critical to our business model – but that’s because it creates a lifestyle where our team can enjoy the things that are really important to them – like spending time with the people they care most about. That makes it easier for us to attract and keep people who are world-class at what they do.
World Wide Web Hosting
Remote work is vital to our business model! It is ingrained in our culture, and we have never considered straying from it.
X-Team
By focusing entirely on remote developers, we’re able to bring companies the best developers to help solve their challenges, rather than them relying on what’s left in their own location. Without remote being an option, our partners would be settling for less quality with their development.
