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Former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos Talks About Managing Remote Workers (Video)
Millions of pixels have been used to talk about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to ban telecommuting and her reasons for doing it. Today's interviewee, Mårten Mickos, built MySQL AB into a billion-dollar company with 70% of its workers, all over the world, telecommuting instead of working in offices. Now he's CEO of another young open source company, Eucalyptus, and is following a similar hiring pattern. Mårten says (toward the end of the video/transcript) that he believes people working out of their homes is entirely natural; that this is how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution.
Robin: Marten, what percentage of your MySQL workers work from home?
Mårten: We had 70% working from home when we were 500 employees in total.
Robin: Okay, okay. 70%?
Mårten: We were based in 32 countries across 18 time zones.
Robin: 32 countries, 18 time zones.
Mårten: Yeah.
Robin: How did you manage those workers?
Mårten: I wonder if I did, meaning I mean something with it, I think when you manage a distributed team, you cannot manage through command and control; you must manage through vision and culture.
Robin: Okay.
Mårten: You must get the vision across to everybody. You must agree on how you behave, and what the company culture is. And then you let them do what they know they need to do. And that is how it works. But if you think you must observe them and monitor them and command them, and control them, then it won’t work for you.
Robin: Okay. So you need very self-motivated people, that you are telling me.
Mårten: Very true. I call it the fishing village analogy. Meaning our people at MySQL and now at Eucalyptus are like fishermen. They live in a fishing village and are very social together, but every morning before the sun dawns, they go out in their small boats to sea and they are all on their own, and they come back only when they have caught fish.
Robin: Okay, now recruiting these fishing people, (that’s a beautiful analogy) recruiting these independent workers, is it different from recruiting people you are going to be able to watch at their desks?
Mårten: Yes and no. First you have to interview them like you do with anybody, you have to post your open reqs like you do with anybody, but of course you must check that they truly belong to the portion of the world population that is capable of working from home, because not everybody is. It is not for everybody. It is for some of the best people in the industry but it is not for everybody.
Robin: Okay, and in the industry, what jobs work best filled by remote workers? And what works worst?
Mårten: As main rules I would say if your product is an intangible product, then it works well. And it so happens that software was the first industry to do it, but you can do it in politics, medicine, science and arts as well. The second rule is that for this to work, people need to be able to go all in online. They need to be able to live not just their professional life, but convey their personality online as well. Because the argument against distributed teams is that body language doesn’t work, and you don’t get the sort of the closeness, but on the contrary, we say no, that is not true. You can bring your personality and even your body language online if you decide to do so. And that is how you make it work.
Robin: Now you are talking about creative people, programmers, scientists, the artists; what about people like finance and marketing? Are they good, as good remotely?
Mårten: They are. And I would say their job is increasingly creative. But we had people working from home in every part of the company. We had accounts receivables, which was operated as a home operation, marketing was done, some of the accounting as well; of course, there are functions where you have to be in an office, you have to put things on real paper and store them in a real cabinet. So I am not saying you can live completely without it. But I don’t see any part of the organization that couldn’t be at least partly distributed among people who work from their homes.
Robin: How much money does it save if you have a quantification, how much does it save with all these people working from home?
Mårten: We never did it for the purpose of saving money. And we told ourselves that what we saved in office costs, we spent in travel costs. And that is probably more or less true. Maybe we saved a little bit but not much. A benefit we got and whether that is a saving or not I don’t know, but we managed