Making It Work Remotely

Maintaining an all-remote workforce is no longer a fringe notion. But you have to do it thoughtfully. Meet the entrepreneurs who have gone completely remote and seen growth and productivity soar.

- Elizabeth Dunn

Robert Glazer didn’t set out to build a 100 percent remote workforce. But in 2007, while forming his company, Acceleration Partners, he realized two things: One, fierce competition in hubs like New York and San Francisco had driven the salaries of even less-desirable candidates through the roof; and two, there was untapped talent in Acceleration’s niche field of affiliate marketing across the country.

So Glazer began figuring out how to run a company flexible enough to hire workers who could work remotely. Back then, this was a rarity. Telecommuting was a concession you might make to individual workers, not a corporate strategy. There were few established protocols for making it work as well as, if not better than, a centralized workplace. So Glazer had to figure them out as he went along.

Ten years in, Acceleration has grown an average of 30 percent a year, while piling up accolades for its workplace culture from the likes of Glassdoor, AdAge, Forbes, and The Boston Globe. Glazer sees his company’s flexible work policy not as a handicap that it has overcome but a key driver of its success.

These days remote work has entered the business mainstream, with about 43 percent of the U.S. workforce occasionally doing their jobs from outside the confines of a corporate office. While some large employers like IBM, Bank of America, Aetna, and Yahoo made headlines in recent years for ending or scaling back their telecommuting programs, the number of remote-first startups has surged. Acceleration Partners is one of more than 170 fully remote companies with 20 or more employees in the U.S. today, up from 26 in 2014, according to FlexJobs, an online platform specializing in remote and flexible employment. So, what can entrepreneurs learn from the companies that have made remote work work?