How Skystra Stays Up And Running During The Holidays
By: Skystra Cloud
Tags: Company Culture, Entrepreneurship, Small Business, Startup, Business

Disclosure : I am the founder of Skystra.com. Everything detailed here happens, exactly as described. The only edits are to names or places, protecting the privacy of those involved.

Running a business that is open 24/7 is a challenge, and running one during the big holidays is usually an even bigger challenge.

One of the key ways the entire company runs is via our globally distributed remote workforce. On a daily level, this means we have people working from all over the world, in various time zones and countries, which means we have 24/7 coverage, and everyone gets to work during their day time.

On a practical level, this works pretty well. Any time you can distribute your team across multiple geographic regions, you gain an inherent recruiting and staffing advantage. For years, the remote workforce theory said that as you distribute your workforce, you gain a larger talent pool and build a fairly redundant team. If one area of one country goes dark for whatever reason (internet outage, storms), the rest of the team is there to still make things go.

Over the years, we’ve also incorporated something else, a little bit different than normal recruiting. And if we had a normal HR department, I’m sure they’d be raising tons of red flags about this, but thankfully, for better or worse, we don’t have a traditional HR department.

We also hire based on beliefs. Yes, beliefs. We don’t judge based on beliefs, but we do make hiring decisions based on various beliefs and practices. The biggest factor for this is especially felt during the holidays.

No one wants to be the manager to deny their team some time off during the holidays, especially the big ones like Christmas, New Year, Easter and others. The majority of our customer base comes from countries that celebrate those holidays, however, we have a very sizable customer base that do not celebrate those holidays, or not at the same time.

Instead of forcing people to work during their holidays, we hire a very diverse team, across the spectrum. Here’s a great example of why this works :

In December, as the holidays approach, the volume of support requests that come in drop by about 63%, and are almost 90% lower on Christmas day itself (and about the same on New Year). If you’ve ever had to work a holiday, or had to manage a staff during one, you’ll know that you can’t always rely on these numbers. Emergencies can happen. Stuff does happen.

So having a part of our workforce that celebrates their Christmas at a different time (or don’t celebrate Christmas at all), we can staff these major holidays without ever having to force anyone to work when they want to be with their families and friends.

This applies to virtually all major holidays, across the entire spectrum. Since our team have various times to celebrate their own holidays, and their countries have their own mandatory days off, we never have to ask someone to work when they’d rather spend their time celebrating.

So there you have it. Everyone has their own beliefs and celebrations, and we value that greatly. It not only helps our own business, but it helps our customers always have someone there, and it especially helps our own team members, who never have to stress about taking time off for the holidays, or feeling like they need to work since others are.

Happy holidays everyone!