Why working from home is good for business The Way We Work a TED series
Transcriber: Ivana Korom
Reviewer: Joanna Pietrulewicz
The basic problem
with working in an office
is you’re just not in control
of your work environment.
[The Way We Work]
Howdy, my name is Matt,
and I’m the CEO of Automattic,
the company behind WordPress.com,
Jetpack and WooCommerce.
We’re coming up on over 800 employees,
and they live everywhere,
from California to Alabama, Mississippi,
to where I live in Texas.
They’re also in 67 countries.
Canada, Mexico, India, New Zealand.
Some of them choose not even
to have a home base, they’re nomads.
Whether they are in RVs
or traveling through Airbnbs,
they are in new places
every day, week or month.
As long as they can find good Wi-Fi,
we don’t care where they are.
Our focus on distributed work
didn’t happen accidentally.
It was a conscious choice
from the very beginning.
Notice I don’t use the word “remote,”
because it sets up the expectation,
that some people are essential
and some aren’t.
I use the word “distributed”
to describe what we do,
where everyone is
on an equal playing field.
I think a distributed workforce
is the most effective way
to build a company.
The key is you have to
approach it consciously.
When we started WordPress,
many of the first 20 hires
were people I’d never met in person.
But we’d collaborated online,
sometimes for years.
I wanted to continue that
for one simple reason.
I believe that talent and intelligence
are equally distributed
throughout the world.
But opportunity is not.
In Silicon Valley,
the big tech companies fish
from essentially
the same small pond or bay.
A distributed company
can fish from the entire ocean.
Instead of hiring someone who grew up
in Japan but lives in California,
you can gain someone who lives, works,
wakes up and goes to sleep
wherever they are in the world.
They bring a different
understanding of that culture
and a different lived experience.
At the base of the decision
to go distributed,
there’s a desire to give people autonomy
over how they do their work.
Unless you’re in a role
where specific hours are important,
you can make your own schedule.
Everyone can have a corner office,
their windows, the food they want to eat,
you can choose when there’s music
and when there’s silence.
You can choose what temperature
the room should be.
You can save the time
you’d spend commuting
and put it into things
that are important to you.
A distributed workforce
is ideal for a technology company.
But people often ask me,
“This works great for y’all,
but what about everyone else?”
If you have an office,
you can do a few things
to build distributed capability.
First: document everything.
In an office, it’s easy
to make decisions in the moment,
in the kitchen, in the hall.
But if people work remotely
and some members of the team
are having those conversations
they don’t have access to,
they’ll see these decisions being made
without understanding the why.
Always leave a trail of where you were
and what you were thinking about.
This allows others to pick up
where you left off.
It allows people in different
time zones to interact,
it’s also great to think about
as an organization evolves,
people leaving and people joining.
Try to have as much communication
as possible online.
When everything’s shared and public,
it allows new people to catch up quickly.
You also need to find the right tools.
There are so many apps and services
that help with day-to-day communication,
video conferencing, project management.
The things that changed how you work
probably aren’t objects anymore.
They’re things you access
through your computer.
So experiment with different
tools that enable collaboration,
see what works.
Create productive, face-to-face time.
In a traditional office,
you’re in the same place
48 weeks out of the year
and you might have
three or four weeks apart.
We try to flip that: we come together
for short, intense bursts.
Once a year we do a grand meet-up
where the entire company
comes together for a week.
It’s half-work, half-play.
The primary goal is connecting people.
We want to make sure
everyone’s aligned and on the same page,
and they have a deeper connection
with their colleagues.
When they work together
the rest of the year,
they can bring together
that understanding and empathy.
And the final practice:
give people the flexibility
to make their own work environment.
Every person at Automattic
has a co-working stipend
that they can put
towards a co-working space
or just to buy coffee, so they don’t
get kicked out of the coffee shop.
One group in Seattle
decided to pool their stipends together
and rented a workspace on a fishing pier.
Each person who joins the company
gets a home-office stipend.
This is money they can invest
in getting the right chair, monitor,
the right desk setup, so they can have
the most productive environment for them.
Today, there are just a few companies
that are distributed first.
In a decade or two,
I predict that 90 percent of companies
that are going to be changing
the course of the world
are going to function this way.
They will evolve to be distributed first,
or they’ll be replaced by those that are.
As you think about
what you’re going to build next,
consider how you can tap
into global talent,
give people autonomy to live and work
where they feel they should
and still participate fully in whatever
it is that you’re creating together.