Scrap face-time at work – this CEO believes that distributed teams are the way to go

“I wish I could chat more, but I gotta be at my desk by 1pm on the dot, or my boss is going to give me the stink eye again! The last time I was five minutes late, I swear I could feel his disapproving gaze burrowing into the back of my head.”

Sound familiar? If it does, then you’re probably familiar with the concept of face-time – the amount of time your boss gets to see your face at work.

It might seem like an antiquated idea, but even today many organizations follow this unspoken rule: if you’re not at your desk from 9-5 everyday, you’re not working – simple as that. Of course, we know the reality isn’t that simple. Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, anyone?

Not only is it incorrect to equate face-time with work-time, but being hardball about the minutes and seconds that employees clock also engender a sense of mistrust. Workers will feel like they’re being treated like children, and will behave as such, finding creative ways to skive and entertain themselves. With the focus being diverted toward the hours they spend in the office instead of measurable goals to meet, naturally their performance will suffer.

Thankfully, the rise of flexible working arrangements in recent years has sought to correct this imbalance. Some companies have started allowing their employees to work from home once or twice a week, while others have gone all the way and given their entire team the freedom to work from wherever in the world they want to.

The perks of being global

Communication-as-a-service platform Unified Inbox is one of these progressive companies (as is Tech in Asia, too). Spread across Singapore, New Zealand, Germany, the US, and India, CEO Toby Ruckert and his employees believe strongly in the power of a distributed team.

The Unified Inbox team, who hail from all over the globe.

“A distributed team enables you to think simultaneously globally, and in a very diversified way from day one. For a startup, this isn’t easy to achieve,” he explains. Ruckert adds that it allows the company to understand and overcome cultural differences quickly “by internationalizing your product and making it broadly attractive early on.”

A common complaint that startups tend to have is that the local talent pool is too small. For Ruckert, this is never a problem, simply because he has the entire world to pick from when hiring. “The best are everywhere […] While they can afford not to move, you as an entrepreneur can’t afford not to hire them. Everybody knows – the best team wins,” he says.

Having employees across multiple time zones also offers the unique advantage of being able to be “online” every hour of the day. “[We are able to] keep the energy constantly coming […] being live all the time can be done only by truly overcoming timezones and appearing ‘alive’ all the time,” Ruckert says. “Your audience lives in every single time zone if you’re a global startup, so equally your business needs to be active constantly as well.”

The downside isn’t so bad

That being said, a huge problem that distributed teams face is in the area of communication. Ruckert admits that it’s difficult to get people who speak different languages and reside in different time zones together for a meeting.

Above and beyond that, not having a physical office means that employees will miss out on “water cooler chats.” “Sure, there is Yammer and other tools, but they aren’t quite the same,” he claims. “Often the best ideas evolve over a cuppa, and they do so because there is no work pressure involved.”