In 2019, Corona was still only known as a beer brand and working from home was the exception. The rule was: if you had a job, you belonged in the office.
When my business partner Christoph and I founded iits-consulting, it was already clear to us that we wanted to break new ground and rethink the way we work. Based on our extensive experience with international teams from India and Vietnam, we opted for the remote-first approach.
In 2025, working from home is still controversial. Many companies are bringing their employees back to the office - often with questionable justifications. Elon Musk, known for his radical opinions, called remote working a "moral and anti-productivity problem".
But wait a minute - is that really the case?
Why are companies like GitLab or Zapier - all remote-first companies - achieving record profits?
We can also deliver impressive figures in terms of morale and productivity:
- MoraleOur company achieves a Kununu score of 4.8/5, and 98% of our employees recommend us as an employer. We have been recognized several times as best employer in Germany award.
- ProductivityAs Germany's most successful IT service start-up, our turnover puts us in the top 1% of companies in Germany. This was already the case 5 years after the company was founded and without venture capital.
There is therefore no doubt that Christoph and I were on the right track with our decision for Remote-First.
But how do you achieve this success and what distinguishes a successful home office from a bad one?
Successful vs. bad home office
To evaluate the success of a home office concept, it is important to distinguish between a successful and a bad approach. The difference between these two extremes is enormous.
How do I recognize a bad home office?
In short, if employees feel isolated and the corporate culture suffers, the right concept is missing.
Characteristics of a poor home office concept
With a poor home office concept, Microsoft Teams is often used as the only communication medium. Meetings are discontinued and employees are expected to attend. When there is no meeting, employees are expected to go about their normal activities without encouraging socializing and small talk. This can lead to employee isolation and negatively impact team dynamics.
Characteristics of a successful home office concept
A successful home office concept aims to move away from a meeting culture and towards a virtual office concept, as shown in the screenshot above. By a virtual office, we mean a room concept similar to that of Discord, where every employee is in a virtual room. If the room is not locked, any employee can join this room.
The aim is not to sit in isolation at home, but to spend most of the time working together with other team members in virtual offices. This includes not only collaborating on day-to-day tasks, but also creating events that strengthen team spirit.
We offer the following events, for example:
- 🥐 Every morning from 08:30, employees often meet in the breakfast TV channel, which functions in a similar way to the coffee machine in a conventional office.
- 🍔 Every second Wednesday, we pay for lunch for all employees and we eat lunch together in the virtual lunchroom.
- 🧘 An online yoga class takes place every Thursday.
- 🎮 Once a month, we have a gaming night where we play games together.
- ☕️ Every Friday, all employees meet for a half-hour "coffee and cake". The employees are randomly assigned to different rooms, with a maximum of 5 employees per room. This allows employees to meet outside of their project teams and share ideas, hobbies, etc. with others. This is an excellent way for new employees in particular to network.
- 🏄♂️ Onsite events are always held sporadically, where every employee can join in. Examples of this are team meetings, where the employees of a team meet at a location in Germany for a few days, or company-wide events such as surfing at RheinRiff in Düsseldorf or the end-of-year party in Berlin last year.
- Many other activities
Successful home office needs co-determination: The best ideas often come from employees, not management.
Tooling
Once the home office concept has been developed and implemented, tooling is the second important aspect that enables effective collaboration. In our view, the following features are indispensable:
- Spatial principle Virtual rooms are crucial for success. The software should not be too complex or playful, but should fulfill its purpose. I can only advise against an avatar technique where you have to walk around in a map.
- Multiscreenshare Every employee in the virtual room should be able to share their screen.
- Remote desktop control I should be able to collaborate with someone else via screen sharing.
- Ease of use The user interface should follow a standard and not be overloaded with elements.
- Data protection and data security A very important feature that is often overlooked. It is important to analyze in more detail how secure the software is and with which third-party companies the software shares your data.
Our solution
Our favorite would undoubtedly be a business version of Discord. However, this is not possible for data protection and security reasons.
At the beginning of our company history, we started with the Whereby tool. However, this tool only supports one virtual room and does not scale accordingly. We then tried out tools such as Gather or Workadventure, but quickly realized that they were not suitable for day-to-day work. With over 50 employees, it's easy to lose track and waste a lot of time trying to find someone to talk to.
In the end, we developed our own tool, cendo.eu, which we use on a daily basis for collaboration. This tool is hosted on a German cloud(OpenTelekomCloud) and offers all the features we need.
Conclusion
The problem is not home office, but "a bad home office concept".
Companies that simply "let employees work from home" and then wonder why the culture suffers have not understood the concept.
Our experience with working from home has shown that a well-thought-out home office concept and the right tools are crucial for success. By combining virtual spaces, regular events and open communication, we have been able to build a strong and productive team culture. We are convinced that our approach is also suitable for other companies and hope that our experiences can serve as inspiration to develop and improve your own home office strategy.
If you would like to learn more about iits-consulting you can do so here or have a look at our blog section from time to time.
