As of January 1, 2020, Fractured Atlas has no physical headquarters, no home office, no official shared workspace whatsoever. As you can read elsewhere, the organization (for which I’m honored to serve on the board) decided not to renew its lease on its long-standing Manhattan office, instead embracing an entirely “virtual” workforce.

In the fall of 2018, I learned my grandma had a brain aneurysm and needed to get surgery to remove it. My grandma raised me when I was young, so when I heard the news I knew I needed to go back home. The thing was my home is a long 15-hour plane ride away in South Korea, and I had just started a new job at Fractured Atlas after spending over a year in job hunting purgatory.

Since we embarked on our new leadership journey, I (in my role as Chair of the Fractured Atlas Board) have been asked a number of times “Why take the risk?” As Fractured Atlas is in the risk business with regard to innovation and services for our members, the better question to me is why not take the risk – it's what we do.  This brief post is an outline of the benefits thus far, as well as an honest admission about what we still haven’t figured out. (My fellow board member Chris Mackie will be writing on the detailed list of what we have yet to resolve and design – this will be a quick pass in anticipation of his contribution which is coming soon.)

How can a small People team administer payroll, benefits, and HR compliance when team members are scattered across 11 U.S. states and 6 countries? This was a key question we wrestled with before it was even possible for us to consider becoming an entirely virtual organization. Fortunately, we found an answer to that question in a service that’s been on the market since the 1980s.

Challenge How does a Board of Directors (re)craft its annual assessment of the CEO when that role is filled by a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team? This was precisely the challenge the Fractured Atlas Board faced in early 2019. Below, in detail, we describe the process we crafted to answer this question.

[Heads up: While I am a certified Professional in Human Resources (PHR), I’m not an employment attorney. If you have questions about whether and how these laws below apply to you and your organization you should connect with legal counsel.] In 2018, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, state and local governments took action and enacted a number of laws to address sexual harassment in the workplace. Places like California, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maine introduced new and updated provisions and laws to increase employee protections. You might remember hearing about these laws when they were first proposed and signed. This is a reminder that specific, mandatory employer provisions are now going into effect, with one deadline in New York State on October 9, 2019.

Virtual Realities and a Fully Distributed Workplace Fractured Atlas “Fun” Fact Of the eight staff members currently at the Senior Director and C-level tiers, none live and work in the same state (Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Vermont). And more than half of our Fractured Atlas team now live in 11 U.S. states and 6 countries, with fewer than half spending any time in our sole physical office on 35th Street in New York City. Long exposure image I captured after a productive day of writing in this former one-room school house.

by Nicola Carpenter, Associate Director, People Operations at Fractured Atlas This is part of a series. If you read part one, two, or three, skip the intro and head straight to the interview. At Fractured Atlas, we really love sharing many of the inner workings around how our organization works. By sharing the things that work (or don’t) for us, we hope to help out in making the sector, as a whole, stronger. A few years ago, we shared our How We Work site so that anyone could see how we work at Fractured Atlas. We’ve also shared how our use of OKRs increases transparency, alignment, and accountability (that post even included a free template). We’ve shared updates on our Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression journey, why we have race-based caucusing, and so many other things.

by Nicola Carpenter, Associate Director, People Operations at Fractured Atlas This is part of a series. If you read part one or part two, skip the intro and head straight to the interview. At Fractured Atlas, we really love sharing many of the inner workings around how our organization works. By sharing the things that work (or don’t) for us, we hope to help out in making the sector, as a whole, stronger. A few years ago, we shared our How We Work site so that anyone could see how we work at Fractured Atlas. We’ve also shared how our use of OKRs increases transparency, alignment, and accountability (that post even included a free template). We’ve shared updates on our Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression journey, why we have race-based caucusing, and so many other things.

by Nicola Carpenter, Associate Director, People Operations at Fractured Atlas This is part two of a series. If you read part one, skip the intro and head straight to the interview.