Who Needs a HQ?

By Jim Tholen, Managing Partner

At BroadSoft we drove the Future of Work as a core foundation of what we were about. It animated our strategic thinking and direction as well as our company positioning. We engaged in conversations with our customers and our industry. We evangelized cloud collaboration and communication tools to enable such a digitally based collaboration future.

As we envision a post pandemic world, this notion of the future of work has become more urgent but also perhaps more settled — trends driving distributed and remote work have accelerated faster and impacted work more profoundly than even we evangelists thought possible.

So what does a post pandemic work world look like? We have more observations and questions than answers, but we wanted to start a dialog with all of you on these trends.

• Remote work and work from home appears here to stay. Companies may be more flexible for their employees to continue remote work long after the pandemic ends.
• We suspect offices (and office buildings) presumably will still exist — but become destinations to collaborate — perhaps not to work from every day?
• This last year has shown us we have the tools and the capabilities of being highly productive and functional remotely. In fact I have several CEO friends who were adamantly against remote work historically and after this year have become true believers.
• What works well in this new world? What have we lost? Are there ways to adjust our work models to bring back what we feel we may have lost?
• If much of our work is remote, what does the concept of location mean? How do we think about a company’s headquarters?

At BroadSoft we were huge advocates and practitioners of the concept of the global start up — we drove international expansion very early in our journey, and as a result became the global leader in unified communications.

But how do we think about such an expansion in a world of remote work?

Or differently, how do you create a culture, especially a worldwide culture, in a truly remotely structured workforce? How do we build teams in such a distributed world? Do we even think about the concept of The Company differently? Of leadership differently?

We have learned much about how our collaboration platforms have powered and nurtured this new founded remote work culture. From social distancing has brought forth virtual happy hours and online coffee chats (as well, of course, of seemingly endless Zoom video meetings). How does all this evolve for companies and individuals? How will we adapt to these profound changes and find new ways to build and grow companies?

We are excited we can see the beginning of the end of this awful pandemic. If there is a silver lining for us it would be that the tools and capabilities we so passionately developed were foundational enabling thousands of companies and millions of humans to be able to function, work, and even prosper during these trying times.

We look forward to continuing our dialog with all of you about our new Future of Work.

Scott, Mike and Jim