There was plenty of talk for some time back (mostly back in the heady days of the dot com frenzy) about virtual offices and such. These businesses were not going to have an actual office as everyone would work from home.
I’m wondering if anyone has actually been successful in building a virtual office. I’m not referring to a single person who works from home, or even a couple of them. Is there a company whose type of business you would generally expect to see within an office environment, has several employees, and has no office space?
In the early 90s, I worked at a software company with 3 owners & 3-4 employees. We all worked from home.
Mr. Athena and his partners all work from home. Wait - one of 'em actually rents an office he goes to every day. But he could work at home if he wanted to.
I’m a tech writer, and am a private contractor and work from home. I primarily work for a couple people who have about 5 people who do the same thing I do - work from home, contract with them.
I work for a software company with about 40 full-time employees.
We have no office. We are spread across about 20 states.
All our work is done over modems or VPN’s to connect to our customer sites.
We have a phone system that provides a set of numbers that are mapped to the actual phone number of the employee. Company provides two phone lines and high speed internet (cable, DSL or
satellite).
Programming has got to be the ideal kind of business for a virtual company, especially when the programming gets done remotely anyway.
Thanks jdc. That is the sort of thing I am looking for. I agree that there is probably no better business for geographic diversity than software development. Does your company have any kind of events where everyone comes together? An annual meeting or party or some such?
Is anyone else aware of any such companies that are outside of the tech world? To clarify (sorry, Athena, I wasn’t all that clear with numbers), I’m looking for examples that have more than just a “few” employees. Something in the order of 15 would make a good minimum, I suppose. That starts to take on the qualities of a large small-business.
We do not have any forum where all the employees get together.
We have an annual party, but only the local folks attend.
We often hire people just based on phone interviews and references. When I travel, if I get within reasonable distance of an employee we go out to dinner or something.
I still have not met one of the staff from my division, even though I am her manager.
Recently we had a meeting of upper management, face-to-face, which meant that one manager had to fly in. We may do this kind of thing every year or so.
The advantages of flexible schedule, no commute, minimal office politics (hard to have much of that when you have to call someone and cause trouble by phone), minimal corporate bs outweigh the two biggest problems (1) the work is always there and (2) job can be a bit isolating esp for folks in the company who don’t travel.