Robert Glazer - How to Make Virtual Teams Work: Manage and Empower a Virtual Team That Thrives While Working from Home

Its been said that the only constant in life (and business) is change.

For years, remote work has been slowly gaining momentum, moving out of the fringes of the business world and being more readily adopted both by employees and companieseven large, well-known organizations. It no longer needs to be a secret; companies that offer remote work are more comfortable sharing the practice openly with clients and see it as an emerging competitive advantage to attract the best talent. The image in many peoples heads of a legion of remote workers slacking off in their pajamas and avoiding responsibility has been replaced by a track record of performance and results.

At the same time, weve come to acknowledge the drawbacks of office life. The average American worker spent 225 hours, or nine days, commuting last year, and commute times have risen steadily over the past forty years.

At the office, the great open-concept workplace experiment has continued to be debunked from a productivity standpoint. One study by the Guardian found that employees in open-concept offices lose an average of eighty-six minutes per day to distractions, are 70 percent more likely to take sick days, and are more likely to leave the office earlier in the day.

The net result is that employees spend more time than ever commuting to work and getting less done while theyre there. Its not a positive or productive trend.

All of these developments were already converging before COVID-19 hit in early 2020 and the largest remote work experiment in history suddenly arrived on a global scale. Millions of workers were abruptly forced to work remotely, and theres every reason to believe this will be the galvanizing event that accelerates the work-from-home revolution. Companies as large as Twitter have already told employees they never have to return to the office. Moreover, I believe the organizations that can build a thriving culture in a remote workplace will be the leaders of tomorrow.

When I started Acceleration Partners (AP) in 2007, the decision to make our workforce 100 percent remote was initially an attempt to preemptively solve a pain-point. We were a specialized agency in an industry called affiliate marketing, which has grown considerably over the past decade but was more of a niche business at the time, with small and diffuse pockets of talent. We were winning large accounts and needed experienced account managers from the industrytalent that was scattered all over the country.

We started AP outside of Boston, but it became clear we would need to hire people from across the United States to acquire the experience and aptitude required to do the job. While we were able to find great operations people in our area, there wasnt enough experienced and available account management talent in any single city.

Our journey to building an award-winning remote business started out of necessity, not ideology. But as many businesses have learnedand as many more will learn during a crisisthese types of problem-solving attempts can develop into the foundation of a new strategy for an organization. As we began hiring account managers all over the United States, we realized we could excel by recruiting and hiring people who valued the flexibility of a remote work environment. Flexibility was always the thing we valued most, and remote work was the best way we saw to achieve it.

In 2011, with a team of seven employees, we decided to fully commit to our remote strategy. We set ourselves on the path toward intentionally building a great company, one known for being a great place to work and an industry leader, while also offering the flexibility and independence enabled by remote work. At the time, being fully remote was a distinguishing factor for AP, both negatively and positively.

There were widely held misconceptions about remote work we had to overcome. I know many people imagined remote employees constantly struggling with young children, watching television while working, running personal errands or otherwise being unaccountable for their time and schedule. Because we were a client service business working with very well-known brands, we had to work hard to disprove those myths and perceptions and show clients we had a very high standard of service. We found a way to make it work.

In 2013, we won our first Inc. 500 award as one of the five hundred fastest growing companies in the United States. We won it again in 2014 and 2015 too. That was a game-changer from a credibility standpointI even had a couple of our employees joke that their spouses didnt believe they worked for a real company until we won that first Inc. award.

Since we decided to go all-in on remote culture in 2011, weve grown exponentially, over 1,000 percent in the past eight years, and have been profitable without external funding. Weve expanded from seven employees to 170 globally across eight countries. More importantly, weve been recognized with over thirty awards for our company culture, including awards from Glassdoor, Inc. , Fortune , Entrepreneur , Forbes , and the Boston Globe .

And to be clear, these arent just awards for remote companies. Weve established ourselves as a top workplace even when compared to companies with luxurious offices, ping-pong tables in the breakroom, and other perks. Clearly thats not what makes a great culture. In many cases, those perks are actually used to cover up a poor work environment and encourage people to never leave the office.

Weve made our investment in people a foundation of our culture. Because we are not together each day, we excel by hiring people who value independence and flexibility and invest in their growth and development from day one. Weve even grown most of our own leaders80 percent of people in leadership roles at AP have been promoted from within. The vast majority of our employees are happy, present, and engaged.