The other day, I saw an article in The Boston Globe about a local tech company that's transitioning to a hybrid work culture, and that's leaning its balance more towards remote than in-person. One way in which this is being manifest at the company profiled is that, when they're now hiring new executives, they're no longer asking them to move to Boston.
The company is LogMeIn, and I know them well.
For eight-and-a-half years (2008-2016), I did a ton of writing projects for them. Customer stories, web copy, brochures, data sheets, white papers, ebooks, webinar presentations. Lots of stuff, including vetting (and coaching) their customers to present at webinars. For a few years, they were the anchor tenant of my business, the client I could most rely on for a steady income stream as opposed to working on ad hoc projects. I had an @logmein email address I used to communicate with their customers, and at one point I was told that I personally knew more clients than anyone else in marketing.
There were a few things I didn't like about LogMeIn, but mostly working with them was a terrific experience. The folks I worked with were great - I'm doing a project now at another company for someone I met at LogMeIn - and their customers loved them. Finding customers to kvell over them was easy. One of my first projects there was doing an extensive win-loss analysis that involved interviewing those both who chose LogMeIn and those who went with another vendor. Even those who'd gone with the competition were exceedingly positive about LogMeIn. I think we gave those who'd gone with us a LogMeIn shirt. But as an incentive to survey participants who had not picked us, we offered the option of an Apple Music Card or a free subscription to the home, consumer version of what at that time was LogMeIn's core product. Pretty much every one of those losses picked the LogMeIn product.
And I must, of course, mention that for years, LogMeIn kept my husband supplied in very nice logo'd polo shirts. I think he ended up with about a half dozen of them. Not to get too morbid, Jim was wearing a navy blue LogMeIn polo shirt when he died.
Originally, when I saw my clients up close and personal, which I did pretty regularly, I had to schlepp out to the suburbs. But then LogMeIn decided that they'd have more appeal to potential employees if they came in town. Now I could walk to their hip and happening offices in Boston's Fort Point (the old Leather District). Yay!
About five years ago, I called it quits there.
LogMeIn had merged with another company and was now requiring contractors to jump through all sorts of hoops, including dropping your fees by 15%. Whether your work is project or hourly based - and I worked on both bases - there's a pretty easy workaround for this. I.e., agree, ignore, adjust. But I wasn't interested in doing that. Plus I couldn't be bothered with the other hoops. And the person I was working with most closely had left the company. So I moved on, too.
But I've kept vague tabs on them, and they've come across my radar as supporters of St. Francis House, the day shelter I've been involved with for decades. (For many years, I was a board member. I recently left the board, but have continued my volunteer work there. Couldn't find a picture of a LogMeIn polo shirt, but did find a pic of some employees volunteering in the clothing department at St. Francis House.)LogMeIn is well positioned for hybrid/working from home (WFH) they're makers of remote collaboration software.
Funny, though, when I was working with them, even though their products supported it, and even though I wrote plenty of copy about how it was the wave of the future, they pretty much frowned on their employees WFH. An LOL if ever.
But now they're all in on - even when it comes to their most senior executives.
Their just hired head of global sales is staying put in Chicago. Their chief revenue officer lives in George. Their chief marketing officer is in California; the head of information security is in Houston. And once the work-from-wherever policy clicked in big time during the pandemic, the head of human resources upped stakes and moved to California. The CFO is in New Jersey.
It's not just the bigwigs who are remote. Even when the pandemic dies out, LogMeIn will remain primarily a remote workplace. Very few employees are coming into the office five days a week, and the company wants to keep it that way.
Even CEO Bill Wagner decided he hated the commute. He'll be coming in only two days a week. The company subleasing half of their workspace in Fort Point. (Wagner swears that this is not purely for cost savings reasons. It's actually what his employees want. And I believe him. If I were still working full time, I'd want some level of in-person - maybe two, maybe three days a week - but would be delighted to have work from home days the rest of the time.)
Wagner acknowledges that a remote-centric workplace isn't 100% grand and glorious.
Sure, working remotely has its downsides, as anyone who has sat through a day’s worth of Zoom meetings knows. Wagner has to work harder to build relationships with new employees, regardless of where they sit in the corporate hierarchy. He makes it a point to talk with his five direct reports, all C-level executives, on a daily basis. Only one of them, chief product officer Paddy Srinivasan, lives in the Boston area. (Source: Boston Globe)
WFH will, of course, be good for the body and soul of commuters, not to mention the environment, if people aren't sitting in traffic hours a day every day of the week, cursing the ghost of Henry Ford. But it's not that great (as Wagner notes) when it comes to bringing new employees on board. Or for those who want to get out of the house, or who view in-person working as an important component of their social life. (I always did - up to a point.) Management by walking around is also important - and harder to do when you're in California and your reports are in Boston. I also think those who come into the office at least some of the time will find it easier to get recognition/promotion.
Still, working from home sure is where a lot of the white collar, professional-knowledge worker workplace is moving to.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with the commercial real estate market. And even to the residential real estate market, especially in high cost areas like Boston, when people can live someplace cheaper and still "work in Boston." Not to mention the lunch places that are supported by office workers.
We really are in the brave new world on so many different fronts...
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