Our full time staff's homes are already distributed across 4 countries on 2 continents, plus we tend to fly around quite a bit. Just for fun, we actually started a Teleport Pinterest board for the team to be able to share where they're working - you're welcome to follow it too:
Quality of knowledge work is not a function of one's physical location. While the daily team synchronisation does create a few more challenges across 10 timezones than across 10 meters in a single office we do believe we can make it work. As a company we will reap the long-term benefits of a wider pipeline of top talent around the world we can invite to join our mission. And we will win from being a team of happier, more dedicated people who get to live in places that fit the needs of them and their families the best.
For most of us in early Teleport, distributed teams, remote work and frequent travel have been the modus operandi for a many years. At Skype, for example, we probably hit a count of 10 office locations around the globe by the time we had the first 200 employees. Making it all work has taught us a few tricks: how to build relationships in person and maintain them over video calls, the importance of leaving a written trail of your activities, effective use of persistent group chats, growing into hub-and-spoke kind of model of office locations that all fully remote employees could gravitate around and so forth.
We will bring all these experiences to the table at Teleport. Recycle the best tricks, try to get rid of the bad habits, cherish the moments when the team is in the flow together and occasionally grumble when we stumble.
And we would be happy to honestly share how things go with all of you, too. Please leave a comment if there is anything specific you would like us to talk about the remote work setup at Teleport: the tools and processes we use, how we think about meetings, what kind of culture we try to build or whatever else. I'm sure different people at Teleport would be happy to write an occasional blog post of their ways of working.
Sten
Co-founder & CEO
