Howdy leaders,
Culture share:
Here's a video from TED’s The Way We Work series with Matt, CEO of Automattic, on how we do distributed work. I wish we'd had this to show during the blogging chat at the leadership meetup.
My TED Video on the Future of Work – Matt Mullenweg
“Document everything.”
“Always leave a trail of where you were and what you were thinking about” so that people will see how decisions were made and understand the why.
“Move communications online.”
“When everything is shared and public, it allows new people to catch up quickly.”
“Experiment with different tools that enable collaboration, see what works.”
“Give people the flexibility to make their own work evironment.”
“I predict that 90 percent of companies that are going to be changing the course of the world are going to function this way.”
Blog, and show your work. Those are norms in our culture, a culture that is taking over teams and companies.
I don't think tech folks quite understand how pervasive remote work has become. It's not even a debate anymore, it's a full on revolution. Hard to do any recruiting these days and not constantly run into talented folks who will never go back to working in an office again.
— Max Lynch (@maxlynch) January 14, 2019
For organizations, the single biggest difference between remote and physical teams is the greater dependence on writing to establish the permanence and portability of organizational culture, norms and habits. Writing is different than speaking because it forces concision, deliberation, and structure, and this impacts how politics plays out in remote teams.
Writing changes the politics of meetings. Every Friday, Zapier employees send out a bulletin with: (1) things I said I’d do this week and their results, (2) other issues that came up, (3) things I’m doing next week. Everyone spends the first 10 minutes of the meeting in silence reading everyone’s updates.
Remote teams practice this context setting out of necessity, but it also provides positive auxiliary benefits of “hearing” from everyone around the table, and not letting meetings default to the loudest or most senior in the room. This practice can be adopted by companies with physical workplaces as well (in fact, Zapier CEO Wade Foster borrowed this from Amazon), but it takes discipline and leadership to change behavior, particularly when it is much easier for everyone to just show up like they’re used to.
Writing changes the politics of information sharing and transparency. At Basecamp, there are no all-hands or town hall meetings. All updates, decisions, and subsequent discussions are posted publicly to the entire company. For companies, this is pretty bold. It’s like having a Facebook wall with all your friends chiming in on your questionable decisions of the distant past that you can’t erase. But the beauty is that there is now a body of written decisions and discussions that serves as a rich and permanent artifact of institutional knowledge, accessible to anyone in the company. Documenting major decisions in writing depoliticizes access to information.
Source: Distributed teams are rewriting the rules of office(less) politics | TechCrunch
Blog in open-by-default cultures. It’s the future.