How to Manage Virtual Employees

Kevin Hale of Wufoo fame on developing a system for tracking performance

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Graham Smith

Infinity Box is a software company whose signature product, Wufoo, creates forms for websites. The seven-person company, which was founded in 2006 and is based in Tampa, turned a profit in its first year and has 350,000 users. CEO and co-founder Kevin Hale talks about tracking employee performance at a virtual company.

→ We try to keep things really simple. Every night, our employees open up a shared text file and write down anything they did that took more than a half an hour. Then, on Friday, we meet at 2 p.m. at someone's house and review what everyone accomplished and how it compares with what they said they were going to do. It's hard to slack off when you have to face everyone else. The other four days of the week, we don't have meetings. I might do some short video chats or a burst of instant messages, but anything that takes more than 10 minutes needs to be tabled until we meet in person. One of the great side effects of this system is that it causes people to sleep on things. And it causes us to focus on accomplishing things instead of talking about things.

Senior contributing writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. @chafkin