Creating the Organization 377Working in a Virtual Office
The company’s director of support greets
each of his staff members every morning by
name. “It sends a message that each individ-
ual is important to me,” explains Thomas
Basil. Managers at many companies do the
same, but Basil’s greeting is a little different:
He says hello from an office in the basement
of his Baltimore home, using an Internet
Relay chat (IRC) to greet employees scat-
tered around the globe.
MySQL AB is a Swedish company that
develops and markets high-performance
database servers and software (the initials
“SQL” stand for structured query language,
the language used to make the commands by
which data is extracted, sorted, updated,
deleted and inserted in a database). With
more than ten million installations MySQL is
the most popular open source database in
the world. Its wide range of customers
includes NASA, Amazon, the U.S, Census
Bureau, Google, Dow Jones, and the
Associated Press.
Seventy percent of MySQL’s 320 employ-
ees work from home. Most of them are soft-
ware developers and engineers, workers who
don’t need a centralized location or a fixed
schedule to provide technical support to the
company’s customers. Many employees
were hired over the Internet without meeting
or even speaking to another MySQL employ-
ee. “We have people with lots of tattoos,”
says Michael “Monty” Widenius, company co-
founder and chief technical officer. “Some of
them I would not like to be with in the office
every day.” Some employees were formerly
unpaid users recruited after they developed a
new application or an improvement to
MySQL software on their own.
Employee productivity is measured by out-
put. “We are strictly a management-by-
objective company,” says marketing manager
Erik Granström. “If you don’t produce what
you say, you will only get so many chances.”
In addition to the IRC, employees use a com-
pany-developed software product called
Worklog to check off tasks as they complete
them. While most work in physical isolation,
supervisors and co-workers alike are very
aware of who is signing in to the IRC or leav-
ing other cyber footprints. “I have a very low
opinion of human nature, which is that people
are both greedy and lazy,” says Widenius,
who has put a lot of thought into how to man-
age people in cyberspace. “Of course you
have noble people, but they are a small frac-
tion.”
The company is sometimes challenged to
duplicate the social or bonding events avail-
able to employees in a traditional office. Last
December Basil hosted a virtual holiday party
for his staff, playing the role of cyber Santa
while distributing virtual gifts and drinks to
staffers as far away as Russia. “When a
company is as spread out as this one you
have to think of virtual ways to imitate the
dynamics of what goes on in a more familiar
employment situation,” he says.
SOURCE: Adapted from John Hyatt, “MySQL: Workers
in 25 Countries with no HQ,” CNNMoney.com, June 1,- Retrieved from the Web June 7, 2006. http://cnn-
money.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=FO
RTUNE%3A+Banishand http://www.mysql.com.
STREET STORY 9.4