“I don’t think you can put the genie back in the bottle,” said Scott Siegert, chief operating officer at Buildertrend, an Omaha-based company that makes software for home contractors that acquired three small businesses during the pandemic. that are nearby. “I don’t think that’s what employees expect, and I don’t think that’s best for the company.”
Mr. Fuller said he was not disappointed that it seemed implausible to return FreightWaves to the office in full. His business improved when the company moved to a virtual office, he said, and he’s had no trouble filling vacancies, even if it meant paying higher salaries and hiring a recruiter for the first time.
“Every stat you would care about actually increased,” he said. “Sales increased, momentum increased.” Most of its employees continue to work from home, even though they are based in Chattanooga.
Robert Hatta, a partner at the Columbus, Ohio-based venture capital firm Drive Capital, which invests in companies outside coastal cities, said that before the pandemic, about 20 percent of the company’s 70 or so portfolio companies allowed remote working. Now about 90 percent have added some form of virtual login to their regular office plans.
But he’s not convinced that remote working will remain the norm.
“I think most people would agree that the co-located team beats the distributed team, even in technology, and this remains kind of a standard belief in the start-up world,” he said.
Mr Hatta said it is too early to say which model would become the new normal. “Right now we have more than 60 companies, each running 60 different versions of an experiment on what works from the workforce perspective,” he said.
