While I was at Mozilla, John O'Duinn gave a pretty great presentation about this sort of stuff.
The core message (mixed with my own takeaway) was that you have to consider all of your offices, even HQ, more like just another field office or coworking site--no location is "central" compared to others. As long as you consider accommodating remote people to be a separate task, it's a task that can be deprioritized. Ideally, anyone in your office should be able to work remotely at moment's notice with little-to-no change in procedure.
Much of his presentation was outlining concrete techniques towards making this actually doable. He still has the slide deck online.
In practice, of course, real life was imperfect and there's no question that you take a productivity hit over people in the same room. But if you do want a heavily location-agnostic organization as a core value, his take is a nice start.
The core message (mixed with my own takeaway) was that you have to consider all of your offices, even HQ, more like just another field office or coworking site--no location is "central" compared to others. As long as you consider accommodating remote people to be a separate task, it's a task that can be deprioritized. Ideally, anyone in your office should be able to work remotely at moment's notice with little-to-no change in procedure.
Much of his presentation was outlining concrete techniques towards making this actually doable. He still has the slide deck online.
http://oduinn.com/blog/2014/11/09/we-are-all-remoties-nov201...
In practice, of course, real life was imperfect and there's no question that you take a productivity hit over people in the same room. But if you do want a heavily location-agnostic organization as a core value, his take is a nice start.