The traditional in-office departments are dying. Not slowly. Fast.
GitLab runs 2,000+ people across 65+ countries with zero offices. Automattic powers WordPress (43% of the entire internet) with 1,900+ employees and no headquarters.
How do they run this model efficiently? Let's break down.
How does each physical department in an enterprise get replaced?
Here's what's actually happening inside enterprises. Department by department.
Engineering
The old model is dead. Fifty engineers in one building. Shuffling into a conference room for morning standups.
Now you've got 8-person squads spread across four time zones. Code reviews happen async on GitHub or Linear. Someone's always awake, so deployments run around the clock.
GitLab ships software this way with 2,000+ employees across 65+ countries. They IPO'd at $11B. No office required. The engineering department just exploded into multiple remote squads.
Marketing
A 20-person marketing department in one building is slow. Decisions wait for meetings. Meetings wait for schedules.
Now you've got a three-person content squad, empowered with AI and automation, spread globally. A two-person paid acquisition pod on different continents. Design gets contracted out or handled offshore. Marketing is one of the top remote job categories going right now.
Each pod owns its function completely. No hand-holding. No committee approvals. Shopify went "digital by default" in 2020 and [permanently closed offices](https://news.shopify.com/shopify-is-going-digital-by-default). Their marketing org didn't collapse. It restructured into focused, distributed pods.
Customer Support
The old call center model is brutal. A hundred agents in one city means night shifts, overtime pay, and coverage gaps.
Distributed agents fix this automatically. You put people in Manila, Lagos, and São Paulo. Now you've got 24/7 coverage and nobody's working 3am shifts. Zapier runs this exact model with 800+ employees fully remote since 2011.
It's called the follow-the-sun model. Someone's always in business hours somewhere. Your customers never wait until Monday morning. Customer service is consistently one of the top remote job categories.
Finance & Accounting
The old HQ finance department took two weeks to close the books every month. Everyone was in the same building, yet somehow nothing moved fast.
The new model looks like this: offshore bookkeeping team handles day-to-day transactions. A US-based controller reviews and signs off. Accounting is a top remote job category. And employers save $11,000 per person per year.
With a five-person distributed finance pod, you're saving $55,000 annually just on overhead. That's before you factor in real estate. Office space runs $6,000–$12,000 per employee per year.
Do the math.
HR & People Ops
Ten HR people sitting at HQ used to handle everything. Hiring, payroll, compliance, and onboarding. All centralized. All slow.
Now the people ops pod is distributed by design. Your hiring manager is in Berlin. Your recruiter is in Manila. Your onboarding specialist is in Mexico City. Tools like Deel, Remote.com, and BambooHR handle global payroll and compliance automatically.
Automattic runs 1,900+ employees with no HQ at all. They closed their San Francisco office because nobody used it. HR just became infrastructure instead of a physical team. Distributed teams replacing departmental work especially well here because people ops is already about systems, not proximity.
Sales
The sales floor with a bell is almost gone. That model assumes your clients are nearby and your reps should be supervised in person.
Distributed SDRs now qualify leads globally. An SDR in Dublin handles European prospects during EU business hours. One in Austin covers the Americas. Account executives align their schedules to client time zones, not office hours. The CRM — Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever — is the shared workspace now.
This model actually improves coverage. You stop losing deals because nobody was available at the right time. Only 1.6% of US workers relocated for a job in early 2023. Your best sales talent isn't moving to your city. You go to where they are.
Six departments. Same conclusion every time.
The physical department wasn't the point. The function was. And the function runs better when distributed teams replace the department entirely.
How should an enterprise move from departments to distributed teams?
Don't do it all at once. You'll break everything.
Phase 1: Pick one department. Start with the team already working async. Usually, that's Engineering or Marketing. They're already used to Slack threads and async reviews.
Phase 2: Build the playbook. Document everything like comms norms, meeting cadence, tools, and escalation paths. GitLab's internal handbook is 10,000+ pages. That's not overkill. That's how Gitlab scaled to 2,000+ employees across 65+ countries and IPO'd at $11B.
Phase 3: Roll it to the next department. Take what worked. Kill what didn't. Don't copy-paste the whole playbook blindly. Each team has different rhythms.
Phase 4: Kill the org chart. Seriously. Replace it with cross-functional squads. Each squad owns a business outcome. Your "Marketing Department" becomes a Growth Squad that includes a dev, a designer, a data analyst, and a writer. They ship together. They own the number together.
This is exactly how distributed teams replacing departments actually work in practice.
Challenges in an enterprise that break distributed teams
Distributed teams fail when you do it wrong.
The #1 killer is no async-first culture. If you just move your 9am standup to Zoom, you've made everything worse. You haven't gone distributed. You've gone remote in the most painful way possible.
The second killer is manager trust issues. Some managers need to *see* work happening. That instinct destroys distributed teams. You can't surveil your way to productivity. A Stanford study found remote workers showed a 13% productivity increase, but only when managers got out of the way.
Then there's tool overload. Fifteen apps with zero clarity on which one is the source of truth. Is the decision in Slack? Notion? Email? A random Google Doc from 2022? That chaos costs you more than any office lease.
Time zone math is brutal, too. A team split 12 hours apart with zero overlap hours is basically two separate teams pretending to collaborate. You need at least 2-3 hours of real-time overlap per day. Without it, blockers sit for 24 hours minimum.
And here's the honest one nobody wants to say: junior talent struggles. New grads learn fast through proximity, watching senior people work, asking quick questions, absorbing culture by osmosis. However, isolation is still the #1 complaint. That's especially sharp when you're 22 and don't know what you don't know yet.
The enterprise cost comparison - physical departments vs distributed remote teams
Here's the math that makes CFOs pay attention.
Traditional department — 50 people, one office:
- Office space: 50 × $9,000/yr = $450,000 — [Global Workplace Analytics](https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics)
- Relocation packages: ~$20K each × 10 new hires = $200,000
- High-cost city salary premium: 20–30% above market rate
- Total overhead: $650,000+/yr before a single salary is paid
Distributed team — 50 people, global:
- Office space: $0
- Relocation costs: $0
- Tool stack (Slack, Notion, Zoom, Deel): ~$200/person/month = $120,000/yr
- Remote work stipend ($200/mo per person): $120,000/yr
- Total: $240,000/yr
You save $410,000+ per year on one team of 50. That's not a rounding error. That's a full engineering hire.
Employers already save $11,000/year per half-time remote worker. Scale that across five departments and you're looking at millions in annual savings. Automattic runs 1,900+ employees with no HQ at all. They closed their San Francisco office because nobody used it. That's not a cost-cutting story. That's a structural clarity story.
The numbers are clear. Distributed teams replacing departments is a balance sheet play. And the companies that figured that out first, like GitLab, Shopify, Automattic, and Zapier aren't going back.
Where Wishup fits into this shift?
You don’t need to rebuild your org from scratch to go distributed.
You need the first pod that actually works.
That’s where Wishup comes in.
Instead of hiring 5 people across geographies, figuring out payroll, training, and workflows, you start with pre-trained remote virtual assistants that plugs into your existing team immediately.
What this looks like in practice
- Marketing pod → 1 VA handling content ops, scheduling, research
- Sales pod → 1 VA managing CRM, lead enrichment, follow-ups
- Founder support → 1 VA owning inbox, calendar, and task tracking
No hiring cycles. No trial-and-error.
Why this works for distributed teams
- Already async-trained → no hand-holding needed
- Process-driven → fits into documented workflows
- Fast onboarding → days, not months
- Cost-efficient → build pods without bloating payroll
This is not mere outsourcing. You’re testing a distributed department model without the risk.
The smarter way to start
Don’t try to distribute an entire department on Day 1.
- Start with one function
- Plug in a virtual assistant
- Build your async workflow around it
- Then scale into a full pod
The real takeaway
Distributed teams don’t fail because the model is broken.
They fail because companies overcomplicate the starting point.
Start small. Start structured. Start with people who already know how to work this way.
That’s the difference between theory and execution.
Schedule a free consultation to see how it works for your business.
FAQs About distributed teams replacing departments in enterprises
1. What is a distributed team?
A distributed team works across different locations — no central office required. For example: GitLab - 2,000+ employees across 65+ countries, fully remote.
2. How is a distributed team different from a remote team?
Remote teams usually still revolve around a central office. Distributed teams have no HQ. The entire team works across locations.
3. Which departments can be replaced by distributed teams?
Most of them, including IT, marketing, finance, HR, and customer support.
4. How much money do companies save with distributed teams?
Significant savings. Around $11,000 per half-time remote worker annually, plus $6,000–$12,000 saved per employee on office space.
5. Do distributed teams hurt company culture?
No, if built intentionally. Strong processes and communication keep culture intact.
6. What tools do distributed teams need?
Async-first tools like Notion, Slack, Loom, Linear, plus clear documentation systems.
7. Can you manage distributed teams across time zones?
Yes. It can even improve speed with round-the-clock progress.
8. Is distributed work only for tech companies?
No. Many industries can adopt distributed work successfully.
9. What's the biggest mistake when going distributed?
Trying to copy office workflows instead of building async-first systems.
10. How long does it take to transition a department to distributed?
Typically, 3–6 months to stabilize workflows; hiring globally may take longer.
