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The founders at our company are all remote, with developers spread across India, UK and USA. We are doing well, having won Seedcamp last year. It still amazes me the visceral reaction people have against remote working. This would be fine as a principle, if the same people did not also complain to me that doctors do not embrace technology. But given that our platform is designed for doctors and patients to work together online (including online consultations) it behooves us to practice what we preach. I will give the following tips:
- You need different habits to work online. In my case, I have a lot of experience in setting up teams to work together virtually based on all my previous IT projects, including writing software for medical students to share their education across hospitals using Palm Pilots, and migraiting 300 employees to use a wiki. I also worked as a management consultant in a company that took pride in working with 2,700 hospitals but without traveling to the hospitals - all research was through phone and email.
- You have to teach the rest of the team these habits, few people know them already. For example, in a telephone conference, you have to explicitly laugh when you would have smiled, as you cannot rely on visual cues for bonding.
- Make use of wikis and document every meeting you have, as you have it, with everyone seeing what you type as you type it.
- my co-founders were either people I knew, or people I got to know in person through volunteer work I would ask them to do over coffee meetings before I asked them to join the company. By far the biggest saving we have is time. It is not being cheap and cutting costs of office space, it is about slashing the time we spend on commuting and meeting, and I would definitely say that we would never have achieved as much as we did, as quickly as we did, if it was not for working virtually. |