There is a statistic that says 40% of the work force is going to be freelance by 2020. Or something like that. Today on the show we discuss the pros and cons of remote teams. Steli says he is slowly easing into this culture shift, but Hiten has some experience with it.  We share our opinions on this style of working and how we’ve made it work for our companies.

There are businesses that have embraced the whole remote team model. And some of those companies are big names like Buffer and Automattic. With any remote team the issue of business culture is going to be a problem. There are ways to build a positive remote culture through retreats and meetups. But no matter what the hack for the dynamic issues, team culture does suffer when you choose the remote style.

We outline the pros and cons of remote teams with these points:

Our backgrounds in remote teams

Have you worked with remote teams? Do you work as part of a remote team? We’d love to hear about your experience.

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Hiten Shah:  Hi, this is Hiten Shah on The Startup Chat.

Steli Efti:  And this is Steli Efti. And in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about remote teams, how to manage remote teams, how to build a remote company. The reason I want to talk about this today, Hiten, is that Close.io today is kind of a semi-remote company in the sense that we do have an office in Palo Alto and most of our employees are in the Bay Area. But, we do have a few employees that are fully remote. We have an increasing amount of employees—the next 4 offers that we’re putting out there are all remote, and even the people that are currently in the Bay Area, half of them are planning to move somewhere else in the next 12 months. So we are kind of making a transition to becoming more and more remote.

Even before having any remote employees, I would say that, you know, two-thirds of the time a large number of people would not be in the office. So people would work from home or travel like so we are kind—we’ve always been used to being semi-remote. So we enjoy working from wherever. We enjoy traveling. We like people that are talented from all around the world, but we also kind of still like to be around once in a while with each other. We do a lot of team retreats and things of that nature.

And now we’re in this phase where we’re starting to hire more and more remote. I see some people that have worked for the last 4 years very closely with planning to leave and this is both an excitement and an anxiety about how we’re going to make this transition to being better at remote especially when it comes to like the fun stuff, the cultural stuff, the you know trust, the relationship building because we were able to do a lot of that because we knew each other already. So, if you fuck off and travel and only work with me in chat, I already know who you are.

But now we’re starting to hire people that I don’t know well and I only communicate through chat, so how do we do this? We’re also now having people that are in totally different time zones ...