For years, Google held its Friday afternoon all-hands meeting at 4:30 p.m. Pacific time — a great late-afternoon slot for local employees, but hardly conducive to those based afar, from New York to London and from Tokyo to Sydney. Eventually, the disconnects and inevitable feelings of being left out led to some new rules. Local teams created their own timezone-friendly all-hands sessions to talk about their own issues. The HQ Friday meetings were taped for people in every office to watch the following week.

So many businesses operate from multiple locationss that building and maintaining a wide-ranging workforce has become a big and complicated deal. It takes a lot of corporate expertise to keep the non-HQ people motivated in every way — from pay to benefits and local customs. Even the lingo signals a shift in company culture: “Remote” workers signifies an old-school, exclusive view. That’s a reason why the phrase “distributed offices” has come into vogue.

Of course, working in one of those distributed offices can be a boon professionally. There’s nothing like the perspective and expertise (not to mention friends) you gain when working away from home base. At most jobs I’ve had, I’ve always made it a point to visit non-HQ offices to connect with colleagues and observe the differences in culture and style.

Adjustments like this are imperative because the overall challenge is a constant. Wherever they work, people need to feel connected and valued. Companies perform best when everyone is motivated by a unified mission. A technical team that is located in, say, India or Canada can effectively provide round-the-clock product development. Customer support that is responsive 24/7 across timezones can make or break a company that prides itself on being “global” (not to mention customer-focused).

This organizational matrix is more complex because there are many degrees of “remote,” including:

• Full-time employees who work in places other than headquarters (usually the flashiest, most important, most fun office).
• Contractors who work on long-term assignments as representatives through a third party — say, a staffing company providing recruiting, or HR functions, or a food service company preparing on-site meals. People get their paychecks and benefits from the third party, but they are part of the daily life of the business they’re servicing, and so they too must feel connected.
• Employees or contractors who work in cheaper-than-US locationss to support global business needs (customer service or an engineering team with a specific task or skill). The company’s wellbeing depends on these people feeling engaged and, yes, connected to the mothership.

All of this points to the need to get the culture right for everyone. Often it’s the “outside” people, however they’re categorized, who can make an overall operation really work smoothly across timezones, markets, and the organization as a whole. Wherever they are, whatever the classification, people need to feel like they’re part of the overall team and that their work matters.

I’m writing from Chile. We are considering offering the ability to work remotely as a way to improve the quality of life of our workers. What’s the best way to incorporate remote workers in a small company (less than 100 people)?

Working from home (popular acronym: WFH) can be fraught with problems for all sides. It’s a great benefit when people can determine for themselves when they really need to be in the office. For those who have no meetings scheduled, need quiet time to concentrate, have family needs, or deal with punishing commutes, WFH is a wonderful offering. And it’s great that your company’s motivation is to provide a benefit. In so many instances today, especially in leading tech or service businesses, there are fewer reasons than ever to sit at a desk M–F, 9–5.

Because your company’s small, you have a chance of establishing a practice that people will understand culturally — and that can continue as you grow. The ideal situation is one where everyone understands that it’s fine to work from home sometimes, with a bit of advance notice to a manager and teammates, without having to police it. If this works right, long-time employees informally let the newer ones know not to overdo it.

Before you roll out such a plan, you’ll want to consider all the edge cases. There are always going to be people who will take, shall we say, extreme advantage. Here are few things worth considering:

• Can people work from home as much as they’d like? (If so, would some decide to they only need to show up rarely, if ever? How does that affect the rest of the team?)
• If there is a limit to how much time working remotely, how will you determine it: days per week or quarter, or maybe by function? (How might time away affect performance evalsuations?)
• Does every type of worker get this benefit — business, support, product, sales — or would you limit it to certain categories? (Expect blowback from those you do exclude.)
• Do you want to track time in or out of the office — and if so, how will you do that? (If you need to keep count, it probably falls to the manager to do the tracking. How will that go over?)

As a small company, you have the advantage of extreme candor. You can present this idea as an experiment for, say, three or six months, and see how everyone does with it. Just be sure you have a firm plan for assessing and refining after this initial period, and follow through. Good luck!

I am a contractor for a US tech company, living and working remotely outside the US. It’s a great job at a good wage and there’s nothing equivalent where I live. I know many people who work remotely for companies that are not technically “doing business” outside the US, so they can’t/won’t hire international remote workers as employees. As a result, these people don’t have many of the benefits regular employees get (equity, paid vacation, etc.). And despite their massive contributions to the company’s success, they are largely invisible within the company culture. I realize it’s a complicated subject without a clear simple answer, and I find that confusion around the best relationship to have with remote/international workers is pretty widespread in tech. Can you shed some light on what might be considered “best practices” and positive examples for both contractors and companies looking for the right answers in a confusing situation?

Please note, I’m not a labor expert. (This Findlaw article on distinctions between employees and independent contractors may be of interest.)

But my broad take: there are a few different scenarioses featuring “remote” workers of the sort you describe. One is a team working somewhere outside the US — for example, a group of engineers in, say, Israel or Romania or Taiwan — that has actually developed a product. Chances are these people are employees, and a North American office becomes the way to organize and extend product development with marketing, distribution, and sales. I fervently hope these “remote” folks are employees (if not actually founders!), as they are performing a critical service.

Another common scenario is to outsource work to people who cost less outside the US (this often involves something like tech support or — god help us! — editorial reporting). Or because BigCorp wants to limit its payroll to essential functions, it brings on a third party for functions like background checks or facility management. Typically these workers do not enjoy the parent company’s equity, but they do get salaries and benefits from the third party.

Neither of these has to skirt a company’s moral obligations to its workers. There are legitimate reasons to have some kinds of work done by non-employees — having to do with both the bottom line, and what business the company is in. Where things get sketchy is when a company may be trying to avoid greater overhead by keeping a contractor workforce — doing exactly the same work, on premises — but classifying people slightly differently to avoid payroll ballooning. (This famous Microsoft case from 2000 is the reason a lot of tech companies today have very exacting definitions, and limitations, around their contractors and temp workers.)

Speaking as a longtime observer of organizations, it seems to me that companies need to be smart about assessing the roles necessary to the company’s success, as opposed to the “nice to haves” that might be best served by a third party business or by contractors/temps. But regardless of any organizational chart, it’s imperative that companies work hard to build connections and share the company culture across all kinds of workers.

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