告别固定的办公区域，初创公司Doist推出远程工作方案
八年多前，当Amir Salihefendic开发Todoist时，并不是想建立一个供员工大范围使用的网络。
Salihefendic在Bosnia长大，他在开发这个任务管理工具的时候还只是在丹麦念书的大学生，主要目的也只是供自己使用。几年后，他决定全心投入在这个工具上，他发现自己需要雇几名员工，而且经济情况不允许他对工作地点挑三拣四。
现在，这家正式名称叫做Doist的公司已经在20多个国家有了40多名员工，遍及白俄罗斯、巴西、加拿大、德国、意大利、日本、葡萄牙、俄罗斯、韩国和西班牙等等，在美国还有五名兼职员工。这个团队为100多万用户提供服务。没有依靠任何风投，公司仅通过订阅内容，从一开始就保持着稳定的盈利能力，每天新增注册用户大约有1万人。
这样的经历让Salihefendic变成了远程工作的传道者。他不是一个人在战斗，开发了WordPress的Automattic以及Buffer多年来都一直在宣扬分布式劳动力的好处，但有趣的是Doist出于自身利益做到了远超过其他公司的程度。它为远程工作者提供工具，并且能将这一过程中学到的东西都充分利用起来。
远离科技城市
Salihefendic正通过Skype从葡萄牙波尔图和我聊天，他和他未来的妻子几年前决定搬到这个城市。Doist有九名员工都在葡萄牙安家，Salihefendic也在一次游玩中爱上了这个国家，所以他们理应在这里建一个办公室。但他们并不需要呀！
Salihefendic说Doist采用分布式劳动力主要是出于必要性。在台湾为社交网络Plurk工作时，他突发奇想地申请了智利的初创公司孵化器，一获得批准他就打包离开了，从2008年起他就不太重视的Todoist重新得到了他的注意。在开发这个应用的第一个移动端版本时，Salihefendic开始远程雇用员工。
Doist的第一名员工来自Salihefendic在孵化器中同事的推荐。为了更好地扩大队伍，Doist采取了“游击战术”，从Hacker News、Github和Reddit之类的论坛上招兵买马，至少在公司发展到足以吸引求职者之前都是这样做的。
“在圣地亚哥并不是我出去转一圈就能雇到厉害的安卓开发者的，”Salihefendic说，“可能是有一些，但是我找不到。”
很快，Salihefendic发现远程工作还有其他好处。不算办公室和管理费用，光是雇用费用和在旧金山这样的科技城市相比就只要二分之一到三分之一，而且还不用担心Facebook和谷歌这样的科技巨头挖自己墙角。
“这不仅仅是开销的问题，还有人才。”Salihefendic说，“如果你去旧金山，你就是在和拥有数百万投资的大公司竞争。”
不过，最大的好处大概就是Doist能按自己的步调发展，一点一点地学着怎样建立一家远程公司。和其他创业者相比，Salihefendic对来自硅谷的投资以及它给公司带来的压力非常谨慎 。
他说：“这种投资会迫使公司非常快速地发展，但却无法真正地去建立一个优秀的团队或去发展企业文化及经历所必要的过程。”
完善及推广远程工具
Doist的发展过程和其他宣扬远程工作的公司相比并没有很大的不同，它也一样在招揽新员工，其中包括一项能看出求职者在独立工作的情况下将如何表现的测试。员工津贴中包括员工的办公场所费用和团队偶尔见面需要的费用。Salihefendic还强调了书面沟通的必要性，并且每过一段时间一定要达成特定的目标。也就是说，雇主必须要完全投入这种远程工作的模式，否则这种工作方式就注定失败。
但在这些年来建立远程公司的过程中，Salihefendic也发现所需的工具并不完备，而随着Doist的发展，它可以制造更好的工具。Todoist本身就已经开始了这方面的尝试，因为公司首先要迎合自己员工的需求。
比如说，遇到支持不同语言的问题时，Doist就因为在中国有一名财务经理而让问题简单了很多，他帮着解决了日期表述的复杂问题。Salihefendic说：“对一般的公司来说，我觉得他们可能不需要为中文日期花费大量的时间来改进、测试，但对我们来说这都是很正常的。”
Salihefendic认为如果一件产品是由世界各地的人制造的，那么它就更有可能和全世界的用户产生共鸣。他说Doist在台湾有一个设计师，提供的观点就和欧洲的设计师很不一样。他补充说：“现在这个时代，我们制造的产品必须面向整个世界而不只是富有的白种人。”
除了待办清单软件，Doist受自己的分布式劳动力的经验影响，正在研发全新的产品。Salihefendic认为它有点像Slack，公司已经在用Slack了，不过新软件更注重线程通讯。
“我们正在研发这个通讯软件，我们内部也在使用它，并对它进行优化，让它更符合我们的结构。”Salihefendic说，“在Todoist身上也是一样的，我们优化我们的产品使它们符合我们的要求，很可能最终它们也能满足其他远程公司的要求。”
虽然远程工作有一些成功的例子，但规模都比较小。并没有足够的事实能证明大型公司也能采用远程工作。但Salihefendic想试一试。
“我不觉得扩大到几千人的规模是不可能的。”Salihefendic说，“我们想做的事之一就是制造出支持远程工作的工具。你会看到我们在这些工具上的许多创新，它们能帮我们沟通、分享以及在一个庞大的团队中安排活动。”
WITH 40 PEOPLE IN 20+ COUNTRIES, THIS STARTUP WANTS TO MAKE PHYSICAL OFFICES IRRELEVANT
A network of far-flung employees wasn't what Amir Salihefendic had in mind when he created Todoist more than eight years ago.
Salihefendic, who fled Bosnia when he was six years old, was just a college student in Denmark when he designed the to-do list manager, primarily for his own use. When he decided to work on it full-time a few years later, he realized he needed employees, and couldn't afford to be picky about their locale.
Todoist creator, Amir Salihefendic
Today, Doist—that's the official company name—employs more than 40 people in more than 20 countries: Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, and elsewhere—including five who work in the U.S. at least part of the time. This team serves more than one million active Todoist users. Through optional subscriptions, it has remained profitable from the beginning without any venture capital, and is adding roughly 10,000 new registered users every day.
The experience has turned Salihefendic into something of a remote-work evangelist. He's hardly alone—companies like WordPress creator Automattic and Buffer have been preaching the benefits of distributed workforces for years—but what's interesting about Doist is the extent to which it's powered by its own self interests. It's a distributed workforce making tools for remote workers, drawing on everything it learns in the process.
WORKING OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE
Salihefendic is talking to me via Skype from an office space in Porto, Portugal, where he and his wife-to-be decided to move a couple years ago. Nine of Doist's employees list Portugal as home—Salihefendic fell in love with the country during a visit—so having an office makes sense. But no one is required to be on the premises.
TO BUILD ITS WORKFORCE, DOIST USED "GUERRILLA TACTICS."Doist's distributed workforce arose largely out of necessity, Salihefendic says. He'd been working from Taiwan on the social network Plurk, when on a whim he applied for a grant from a startup accelerator in Chile. He packed up and moved upon acceptance, and Todoist, which had been on the backburner since 2008, became his focus once again. Salihefendic started hiring remotely while building the app's first mobile versions.
Doist's first employees were recommendations from Salihefendic's accelerator colleagues. To build the workforce further, Doist used "guerrilla tactics," he says, recruiting through forums like Hacker News, Github, and Reddit—at least until the company was large enough to attract applicants directly.
"It's not like I can go out and hire great Android developers in Santiago," Salihefendic says. "There were probably some, but I could not find them."
Salihefendic quickly figured out that a remote workforce had other virtues. He estimates that his employee costs are a half to a third what they would be in a tech hub such as San Francisco—not counting savings on office space and other overheads—and he doesn't have to worry about tech giants like Facebook and Google stealing his best employees.
"It's not only about expenses, it's also about talent," Salihefendic says. "If you go to San Francisco, you're competing against companies that have a lot of millions in investment."
Perhaps the greatest benefit, however, is that Doist was able to grow on its own schedule, learning how to build a remote company as it went along. By comparison, Salihefendic seems wary of Silicon Valley funding, and the pressure it puts on companies to rapidly staff up.
"This kind of thing forces you to grow really fast without having time to really build a team, build a culture, build a process," he says.
FASHIONING THE TOOLS
Much of Doist's process doesn't sound drastically different from what's being preached by other remote-work evangelists. The company's screening for new hires, for instance, involves a test project to see how well the candidate works independently. Employee perks include an offer to pay for co-working space and the occasional team meet-up. Salihefendic also stresses the need for written communication and an emphasis on achieving specific goals over time. In other words, employers must go all-in with a remote-work mindset, otherwise they'll fail.
But in building a remote company over many years, Salihefendic has also started thinking that the tools are incomplete, and that Doist can build better ones as it grows. Todoist itself has already been part of that process, as the company adapts it to the needs of its own employees.
SALIHEFENDIC BELIEVES A PRODUCT STANDS A BETTER CHANCE OF RESONATING WITH A GLOBAL WORKFORCE WHEN IT'S CREATED BY PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.When it came to supporting different languages, for instance, Doist's job was made easier by having a financial manager in China, who helped deal with the complexities of date parsing. "For a normal company, I don't think you would focus on implementing Chinese date parsing, and spending a ton of time on improving and using and testing it, but for us it's just natural," Salihefendic says.
More broadly, Salihefendic believes a product stands a better chance of resonating with a global workforce when it's created by people around the world. He points out that Doist has a designer in Taiwan, who provides a different perspective on design than someone in Europe. "In the current world, the product that we need to build has to target the whole world, and not only white rich people," he says.
Beyond just its to-do list product, Doist is working on something completely new, borne from its own experience as a distributed workforce. Salihefendic describes it as somewhat similar to Slack—which the company already uses—but with an emphasis on threaded communications. It's in early alpha, but the plan is to eventually release it publicly. Not unlike Todoist in its dorm room days, it could be another self-serving tool that ends up being useful to millions.
"We are doing this communication app, and we are using it inside our team, and we can evolve it and fit it to our structure," Salihefendic says. "And the same thing with Todoist: We can develop stuff that solves our needs, and maybe in the end will solve the needs of other remote companies as well."
While remote work has plenty of success stories, most of them have head counts in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. There's not a lot of proof that a massive organization can have a fully distributed workforce. Salihefendic wants to try.
"I can't really see why you should not be able to scale to thousands of people," Salihefendic says. "One of the things we want to do as a company is create tools that enable remote work. You will see a lot of innovation in the tools that we have access to that enable us to communicate, share thoughts, and organize thoughts inside huge remote organizations."
Source:Fastcompany
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