The open source model for managing virtual offices

Both Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal have fresh articles about Automattic, the company sponsoring and developing the open source content management system WordPress and a range of related products. Both articles echo an item in Fortune from over six years ago about the database company MySQL. The subject of all three articles is how to run a virtual office.

What these articles seem to overlook is that both companies have simply formalized the practices of successful open source communities all over the world. Who better to do that than two successful, open source-based businesses?

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I realize that not every business lends itself to a distributed workforce. Some managers can’t cope with unseen staff and assume anyone they can’t look on isn’t working. But when the virtual office works, it works very well: Instead of hiring only people who can physically come into your offices, you can hire the very best staff from anywhere with a broadband connection.

A similar notion underlies open source. Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy once observed that you can’t hire all the smart people, but open source comes close to that ideal, because you get to work with smart people who work for other companies too.

How open source can inspire management

What does open source-style management look like? An examination of Automattic (and MySQL before it) provides some insight. The core of the company’s approach is to treat the whole team — including those located at the HQ who might otherwise regard themselves as “central” — as part of the distributed team. Email is avoided; chat rooms and blogging, which are inherently open to anyone to see, are the norm, complemented with VoIP and videoconferencing for more spontaneous conversation. There are company-organized get-togethers for staff both regionally and (once each year) globally.

Isn’t all that travel expensive? It would be if the company maintained offices and the remote staff were outliers, but by having everyone working remotely, the overhead (and perhaps the payroll) is significantly reduced. Even when offices are required — most obviously for meetings — they can be arranged flexibly.

Don’t people slack and goof off? Actually, constant electronic communication means staff are likely to work more, not less. Chat rooms, blogs, and issue trackers can all be checked from mobile devices, so any place with a connection is a place people can work. That creates an expectation of responsiveness, and anyone dropping off the radar is more, not less likely to be noticed.

I believe it’s no accident that companies working with open source are more likely to use this approach. An open source community is a distributed community of equals, in touch asynchronously through various online tools. For example, the Apache community has a basic rule: If it didn’t happen on a mailing list, it didn’t happen.

The virtual office can reduce costs and pick up the pace of the business while connecting and unifying teams. But my own experience suggests it can fail badly, too. There appear to be two critical success factors.

• The leadership has to be 100 percent part of the team. When a manager insists out of sight is out of control, refuses to use the online technologies the rest of the team uses, and sticks to phone and email conversations, the whole system quickly breaks down. Worse, when executives decide the distributed approach is for the staff and not for the leaders, they quickly create isolation and division. For distributed workforces to be effective, there must be buy-in from everyone in the whole organization, particularly the executives.
• An open culture is essential. While different people have different roles and are hired for the skills they bring to the team, it’s important to view the team as peers and not as a hierarchy. That can be a challenge for some, so a tolerance for robust communication and a willingness to read written missives with an open mind are both crucial.

No, the virtual office isn’t for everyone. But strong, visionary leaders who realize that influence yields better results than tightfisted control in our modern, meshed society should consider it seriously.

This article, “The open source model for managing virtual offices,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.