Blend Me started as a research question. In 2010, Jennifer Cameron was finishing her master's in Human Resource Management at the University of Connecticut, and one puzzle kept pulling at her. People at nonprofits often earn less than they could elsewhere, and plenty of them are more engaged in their work anyway. Why? And the harder version: how does an organization keep people engaged when they don't share an office at all? 

Her thesis answered it through the employee value proposition: the promise an organization makes to its people, and whether daily life inside it keeps that promise. Her case study was Concepts4Charity, an all-volunteer nonprofit run entirely online, with people spread across five cities. Its founder was Kaleem Clarkson. Virtual organizations, she wrote, "mandate trust, open and honest communication, team-work, and strong leadership," and they reward "performance results rather than physical presence." That was 2010. It took us two more years to see a company in it. 

The obvious next step was a job doing this work. There weren't many. The recession had barely ended, "people operations" was hardly a phrase yet, and the few organizational development roles out there belonged to people who weren't leaving. So we looked at what we had. Jennifer brought the research and the HR training. Kaleem brought years of operations and marketing. Put together, that looked less like two job searches and more like a firm. 

We made one rule before we had a single client. We would not spend our time convincing leaders that culture matters. We wanted leaders who already believed culture eats strategy for breakfast, and who would push for it themselves. Which left a fair question: where do you find those companies? 

The answer turned up in March 2012, at DrupalCon Denver. Kaleem, a web developer by then, sat in on a session called "Growing a Virtual Company & Maintaining Team Moxie." Matt Westgate, co-founder of Lullabot, was explaining how he had built a company people wanted to work for without ever opening an office. Partway through he put up a photograph from his team's first retreat. He had organized it, he said, because there were people at his own company he had never met in person. 

Kaleem walked out of that room, called Jennifer, and said: "I got it. We're gonna be HR consultants for remote companies only." 

Here is what he had just worked out, and it is still the thing we believe most. Remote companies are not accidentally better at culture. They are forced into it. Without an office, you have to write things down. You have to decide what in-person time is actually for. You have to answer out loud how work gets done and how performance gets measured. An office lets you skip every one of those, because you can read the room instead. Take the room away and you have to build the real thing. 

Jennifer didn't need convincing. A year earlier, at a global bank, she had helped run a week-long event to connect the company's remote employees, ending in a two-day retreat in person. She had already watched a distributed workforce work. Then in January 2013, expecting her first child, she looked hard at a two-hour commute and decided she was not going to spend her daughter's childhood in traffic. She had grown up watching her own mother run a business from the house: 

"She may have burned rubber to get there but she always made it to our piano lessons, basketball games, and dance recitals." 

What we could not find anywhere was the instruction manual. As Jennifer wrote in the first article this company ever published: "How does a remote worker use sick time? How do supervisors manage employees they cannot meet at the watercooler? Wait, where is the watercooler?" Nobody had written it down. Early adopters were sinking or swimming and adjusting as they went.

So we wrote it down. Blend Me incorporated on 3 July 2013. Remote and hybrid organizations, and nothing else, ever since.