Cate Hudson leads the developer experience team for Automattic, a large multi-national company where every single one of the 930 staff work remotely. The business has no fixed office presence at all.
“Talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is often not. Working this way means you can access that talent and also give opportunity.” says Cate Huston.
“I’m office-free. We all just love the freedom and we travel to meet each other so we enjoy those adventures as well.”
Saving costs
Because they don’t have a central office, Automattic hire staff from multiple locations and ask them to work from home or from shared working spaces near where they live.
Having no office helps them work more effectively because of faster internet connections, messaging and video apps, and the rise of collaborative and monitoring software.
This allows them to save cost too since instead of paying for a central office, the company pays to fly staff to regular meet-ups throughout the year. It also pays workers to equip their home offices and helps them meet the cost of renting a work space, or for drinks if they work in a coffee house. But that is still cheaper than an office.
“There’s definitely some cost saving to not having an office; you don’t spend money on the office, especially in the tech hubs like London and San Francisco and New York where office rental costs are shockingly high,” says Cate.
“But because we do really value the in-person time together we have these regular meet-ups.
“We spend money on that, on flying everyone together. My team met up earlier this year in Thailand.”
Increasing trend
“It’s definitely an increasing trend. It’s certainly very cost effective and attractive for start-ups,” says Ilke Inceoglu, professor of organization behavior at the University of Exeter Business School.
More than 1.54 million people work from home for their main job – up from 884,000 ten years ago, according to the Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey, the largest study of employment circumstances in the UK.
“From the perspective of employees, you don’t have a commute and that is a huge benefit.”
But still, working from home has its disadvantages.
Prof Inceoglu says: “Some people find it a challenge to draw a line between work and home-life. If you always work from home because you are office-less then where does your work stop and your home-life start again?”
“It’s important to take steps to make sure there are boundaries.”
Also, Mental health charity Mind has highlighted that remote workers may be at a higher risk of feeling lonely and isolated.
However, in a fully remote business, Prof Inceoglu says that risk may be reduced: “Feeling isolated is certainly a risk of remote working but if everyone is in the same boat then you already feel a sense of connectedness.”
Jess Sims used to work for a company where every member of staff was in the office except for her. She now works for a fully-remote collective of freelancers called The Doers and says it’s definitely easier when everyone is scattered.
“When you are remote but everyone else is in the same place, you’re effectively watching through a window at all the office camaraderie that happens but you can’t be included,” she says.
“People forget to update you because you’re not around all the time. You have to chase people to remind them you exist.
“Now, I work with a remote collective and we are all in the same boat, we all work from home. And so we are all a bit more aware of what everyone is feeling and look after each other.”
Communicating well
Cate Huston believes fully remote working can actually be good for communication. “Remote work makes the problems of work more explicit and then we can set out deliberately to address them.
“When your team is spread all around the world like my team currently, we think much more deliberately about how to build ourselves as a team, how to make sure we are communicating well, are we documenting things clearly.”
