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Last year, we had a crisis in our company. We had been imploring our landlord to give us more space, but a few months after he finally did, our office emptied out. Some days we had just one or two people showing up. Not only was it an epic waste of money, but the office felt empty – and the solitude was hurting morale.

For almost six years, I have been working in a fairly unorthodox way. All of my company's employees are located in Szeged, Hungary, but I work from my home office in Belgium. When I tell people that I am a remote boss, one of the first things they ask is how often I travel to Hungary. They are puzzled when I tell them that I typically travel back to Hungary every three months or so. How can I lead the company when I’m not there? How do I make sure people do their jobs?

This was never really a problem. I started the company with my wife when we still lived in Hungary, and we were able to build a terrific enterprise with people we could trust. We also had the necessary tools in place to enable remote work. Between Skype, Google Docs, ticket management systems, and e-mail, we were able to run the business without any real issues. We had our office in Szeged, a great office manager who handled all the paperwork, and that was that.

But as I said, that changed abruptly last year, as soon as our office space expanded: several colleagues who had been with us for a long period left the company and, after a policy change that accommodated work from home, people started working remotely. Later, we merged with another Drupal agency that never had an office. As a result during the winter days, when snow was falling and the weather freezing, few people felt inclined to come in.

There were some weird aspects to this. Often the same people who complained about the empty office and low morale were also working more from their homes. Even if several people preferred working centrally, there were not enough colleagues at any given time for the office to reach critical mass.