What This CEO Says About Leading a Company That's Worked Remotely for 15 Years

25.08.2023 - 14:00 / skift.com / Matthew Parsons

“Scrappy” is how Ann Schlemmer, CEO of Percona, describes her company’s approach to booking team travel and retreats.

If you work in the travel industry, that word translates as “unmanaged” and companies like Percona are currently of huge interest to agencies and other new platforms being built to help manage the complexities of travel in an increasingly remote world.

Percona, a database software company, has 350 employees and has been a remote organization for more than 15 years, well before it was a thing. Yet for almost all that time it’s made do without a travel agency.

From Airbnbs on the beach in Brazil to an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic, Schlemmer notes that Percona has always a had decentralized approach to managing travel. There’s not even a real expense policy — she advocates for her teams to be “frugal smart.”

You could call the technology company “mature” in terms of its remote working culture, but it has always supplemented the Zooming with in-person meetings.

There’s a lot of trust in staff to get things done, and Schlemmer said she leaves the budgeting to individual departments.

“We tend to be a little scrappy even though we’ve been around for 16 years,” she joked. “Each team will study where their team members are, and then pick a location. We look at visas, we look for places that are economical. One of our expense policies is to be ‘frugal smart.’”

Locations are then assessed on whether they are good transportation hubs, with airports or train stations. “We have some teams that are geographically concentrated, and we’d go with the majority decision in that case. Others are truly global,” she added.

Another insight is that travel decisions are also dependent on team personalities. New travel booking software may come up with the most logical solutions, but can it take into account the human factor? For example, Schlemmer said some engineers fall under the “frugal” category so you can find them congregating in eastern Europe. Previous destinations include Montenegro and Croatia.

Some teams will also naturally fall way under budget because of their location in the world, or they’re willing to “bunk together.”

Another team has three main groups, but when they get together they want to be really immersed, she added. They’re the ones who rented the Airbnb in Brazil. They bring in a cook, and then they go out for team building. “It’s a mix of working hard, and being in a beautiful setting as well,” she said.

Last October some of the staff headed to Turkey, with rafting and zip lining on the menu. And in 2022 Lisbon, Portugal, hosted a total of four meetings. Percona has even taken over an entire hotel.

And for the wow factor? “We once did sales kick-off in the Dominican