How to make remote working work

Not too long ago, the concept of letting your employees work anywhere besides the office seemed like insanity.

How would you know whether they’re working or not?

Wouldn’t they be tempted by the sand and sea at their doorsteps?

The office is the best place for focused, productive work, no?

Today, these questions are asked far less frequently. Granted, many managers may still harbor the same doubts in their minds, but the success of several fully distributed companies (Buffer, Automattic, and Zapier immediately come to mind) have at least planted the possibility that, hey, it might actually work.

At Piktochart, we’ve chosen to go a third way: by being semi-distributed. This means that we do have headquarters — located on the sunny island of Penang — where some of us work. But at the same time, there are several team members (myself included) who work in the US, Argentina, Barcelona, Singapore, Melbourne, and most recently, Japan.

Going semi-distributed

It wasn’t always this way. Back in 2011, the early Piktochart team worked exclusively out of our headquarters in Penang.

Circumstances, however, caused our fearless leader and founder Ai Ching to reconsider this. A huge fraction of our users come from the USA, and she was inundated with customer service calls from this part of the world as late (or as early) as 2am.

As you can imagine, it was hard to keep up.

Making remote working work