javivazquez at Zentyal

During the just on Wednesday finished Innovate! Europe hold in Zaragoza, we have enjoyed a couple of days with excellent and experienced people from the IT world, and also raise in our own confidence on eBox as a promising and attractive company.

Not by chance, eBox was selected within the top ten finalists among the >100 initial applicants and the 34 finalists that came to Zaragoza from the whole Europe. Moreover, our company was the only Spanish in that 10 most promising European start-ups group.

However, despite of the many interesting lessons and good advise I personally gathered, I first would like to share one not really that important, but that caught my attention and suggest me to continue with the posts dedicated (more or less intentionally) our foundations as a company. That was working from “home”, or teleworking.

This small lesson, it is referred to coordination among staff who works from anywhere, mostly not together. In our case, we are 11 eleven guys working mainly from Zaragoza, but actually: 2 are based in Ireland and the rest of us work very often from home or any other cities.

In my case, I like going to the office every day, but also I work at least 7-10 days each month from Vigo (my original city, in Galicia), Madrid, Barcelona or any other place I go to visit my family and friends, or just as a tourist. And I am probably one of the guys who are more often working from our HQ…

On the one hand, this situation is something we like and look for: eBox staff is encouraged to work from wherever they want and when they like to. We don’t have fixed time schedules or any obligation to go to the office. On the other hand, it raises some issues: it needs an extra effort to be well coordinated.

Reaching to the point, Marten Mickos pointed out on his talk at Innovate that 70% of his former company MySQL still works from home. 70% of 400 guys of from >40 cities worldwide, with different time zones and the like. And the 2 main things he cited to keep this working, IMO, were:

• Pick people who like working mainly alone, from home. Kind of lone wolfs.
• Reporting, reporting and reporting, with objectives clearly set for every single people in the company.

Here at eBox we rely on tickets (tasks, whatever) and wiki to keep high the coordination among us, being Redmine the  tool selected for it. Some people don’t like that much planning and being accountable for achieving objectives, but what’s more fair and efficient that let guys planning themselves as far as the global objectives of the company are reached?

In a company that pretends to be global by nature as it was MySQL, MySQL itself is the best example to follow regarding work organization.