"A remote company? What's that? Does it move around?"
This is a simple question I'm often asked and in short, yes. However, to go a bit deeper into the answer I should first make it clear that "somewhere else" is a fluid concept. If you've been reading the series so far you'll have been introduced to the team - now it's time to find out where they do what they do for Stanga Games.
To begin with, "somewhere else" implies that I'm in one location and the rest of the team in a another - this is in fact far from the case. I'm born and bred in Warwickshire, England and I'm not the only one in the country: both Gozza and Ant also live in England but are based in London and different parts of London at that. Just to bring more factors into consideration, the three of us all work at other jobs etc. at different hours and in different capacities so we might as well not be in the same timezone.
Speaking of timezones, if we take a step back by a few hours from UK time, we reach Timothy in a completely different timezone. Timothy lives in Canada and because of this works different hours to any of the English team members. I remember times in the past we've ended up doing midweek midday meetings which basically took up my lunch break from my full time position. That's one of the things about a remote company though - you end up finding the hours you can to the hours you need. Anyway, that's a story for another day, back to locating team members.
Heading east, we find (at least to begin with) the rest of the team; Adi, Roi, Noam and Gili are all from Israel. Seems simple enough, right? 3 of us in England, 1 in Canada and the rest in Israel.... not quite. Anthony, Gozza and I have all travelled to do work from various places and Roi likes to keep things simple and stay in his country, but the other 3 team members from Israel tend to travel a lot! Noam tends to mainly travel between various parts of the US and Israel, although he's also been to South America amongst a number of other places, but Adi and Gili travel a lot - especially in the past year. Israel, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatamala, Belize, Mexico, Cuba, the US, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Thailand.... the list goes on!
So we have all these people from all these different places, travelling to more different places at different times and working to collective deadlines each week. It seems totally crazy and near-impossible to orchestrate, but we manage it. A few more of the posts in this series will cover the various aspects of our overseas organisation, but the staple of all our plans is the weekly meeting we have. It's had to move over by an hour or two every now and again, but on the whole it's the one thing we throw everything else in life aside for and knuckle down to catch up with everyone's work for the week. There's been a couple of cases where each person in the team hasn't been able to make it, but 99% of the time everyone's there to share their progress and find out where we're heading over the next 7 days.
What about those weeks where one or two people can't make it though? Well, due to the wonders of technology these days nobody is isolated from anybody else at any time. If a meeting is missed, there's usually a Skype session shortly before or after to keep those out of the loop up to speed. We've tried a few different technologies out as well (another thing which will be covered in forthcoming episodes of 'Stanga Stories') but mainly that's our method.
Who knows, maybe our dedication to our seemingly-ridiculous setup will inspire some of you in your daily lives with your.... shall we say, more regular setups.
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