Name: Jorge Gómez Sancha
Title: Founder and Managing Director
Company: BeBanjo
Based in: Madrid, Spain
Established: 2008

Jorge Gómez Sancha

What does BeBanjo do?
We build software for the video-on-demand industry. Basically, a video-on-demand service is something like Netflix. All of the operations that need to take place — from the moment that Netflix acquires content from the Hollywood studios, for instance, until that content is available for a user to watch — all those operations can be managed and tracked with our tools.
How many people work for the company, and of those, how many work remotely?

It goes up and down, but right now, around 16 people. Pretty much everyone works remotely in some fashion or other, but only two people, including myself, go consistently to the office. Some of them have an office to go to if they want; some don’t have an office in the city they’re working from. The main offices are in Madrid and in London. There are also people in the North and South of Spain. They can come to Madrid but they don’t regularly.

“The office is there, and it’s great, but it’s pretty often empty,” Sancha says. “I often find myself working on my own with six or seven empty desks around me, and that’s absolutely fine. The reason I go the office every day is because I have children, and it’s difficult to work at home. But I used to work at home all the time.”

Why did you make the decision to go remote?
From the beginning, we realized we didn’t want to limit ourselves to working with local people. Also, we wanted it to be an international company because most of our customers, we knew, would likely be outside of Spain, which is the case. We only have one customer in Spain; the rest are all in the UK, France, the U.S., various countries. We made a point of making sure everyone felt OK with working remotely and very soon we were hiring foreign people.
My cofounder is Dutch. He was living in Madrid as well. Our language was always English; every communication is English. So it’s been in our DNA from the beginning, working remotely and being an international company.
What tools do you use to collaborate remotely?
For our code repositories for our software we use GitHub. For communications or for chat we use Campfire — we always have a Campfire room open. We use Basecamp when we work with customers. We use an internally built tool, a digital kanban board, to have a place where anyone can look and see exactly what development stage each feature is in. That’s become the heart of our day-to-day. All our infrastructure is virtual, so we use Amazon web services. There are no physical servers or anything, just our laptops.
What challenges did you face in setting up as a remote company?
One thing we realized very quickly is that not everybody is cut out to work remotely. It became obvious that we needed to find self-motivated, responsible, professional guys who like what they do, and it’s not a problem for them to sit in front of their computers at home. There’s no easy way to micromanage someone remotely, and we didn’t want to. We wanted to work with guys who would raise the bar. We find that good, self-motivated, responsible guys are also perfectly capable and willing to work remotely as well. Maybe not everyone we worked with initially was perfectly suited for that. Soon that stopped being a problem because everybody we hired was aware that this was the case.
Working remotely also requires an extra effort in terms of communication. If someone is sitting in the office, I pretty much know what he’s doing. If we’re not in the same office, I sometimes lose track. It requires them to be proactive in providing information. The same goes for me — if I don’t communicate, then no one knows what’s going on with me, whether we’re signing new customers or things like that.
What do you think are the major benefits of being remote for your team?
They feel like grown-ups, if you know what I mean. Normally in Spain, people are used to working a specific number of hours and being watched in terms of what time you come in, what time you leave. For us, the focus has always been: what can you do? What are you giving back? That’s the agreement. You do whatever you need to do — you want to wake up at noon, and start working then? Fine with us, but why are you doing this — does it make you more productive? Basically, people get more and more responsible with their time, because they are given a vote of confidence, and they return that greatly. That’s something people appreciate a lot, being treated as a grown-up.
I don’t even count vacation days or how many hours you work. I expect you to do what you need to do and be responsible, and the moment you aren’t, it’s immediately obvious to everybody. If you’re doing your work, it’s clear to everybody. If you’re not, then it’s also clear — even working remotely, just by the output. That’s one big benefit. They know they’re hired because they’re experts at what they do and they’re not treated like children.
That doesn’t mean that everybody’s left on their own and no one cares about them. We are very conscious about how people are feeling, whether they’re happy or frustrated. We make it a point to manage that. But no one cares about times, vacations, things like that. And people are super responsible in general.
Any advice for other companies who are considering going remote?
If you find the right people, it’s incredibly easy to do. Start with the people you think can manage it — who are responsible, self-motivated, enthusiastic about their work and so on. And also try with the people who request it — they will make a bigger effort to make this work than anyone else, because it’s in their interest.

The BeBanjo team

Another thing is to communicate a lot — try to get in the habit of writing an email every other week or so sharing what’s going on, whether you’re the boss or whether you are just a guy working there. It’s super interesting to everybody to know what’s going on in the company, and just generate a sense of community and team. That is hugely important.
Find a place where people can go to virtually and feel they’re being seen as well. Although people are comfortable working remotely, maybe you’re hacking away at your software for hours, and you’re not talking to anybody because you’re concentrating. People start feeling anxious: “they’re going to be thinking that I’m not doing anything,” when actually they are working very hard. It’s important they have somewhere they can go to get rid of that stress factor, like a chatroom or something they can check into and say “I’m around if you need me; I’m just busy doing something else.” It’s a detail, but we’ve seen that helps.
It should be a big incentive for any company to get into working remotely: good people, good developers, good designers — they are all over the world. They are not just in your local town. Working remotely — opening the door to doing that — just opens the door to finding great people all over the place. If you’re used to working remotely and it’s easy to bring people onboard because everybody works like that, you’ll be able to hire anyone if your project is interesting and you pay good money. This kind of work is attractive to the sort of people you might be looking for: self-motivated, intelligent, and active people are attracted to this way of working.
Visit BeBanjo.