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Managing People
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How WordPress
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Remote Workforce
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by Scott Berkun
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HBR / Digital Article / How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce
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How WordPress Thrives with
a 100% Remote Workforce
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by Scott Berkun
Published on HBR.org / March 15, 2013 / Reprint H00AAZ
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WordPress.com is the 15th most trafficked website in the world. It is
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run by Automattic Inc, a company that is 100% distributed. That means
everyone works from home, or more precisely, from wherever in the world
they wish. They’ve been amazingly successful with this strategy, but I was
skeptical about how a distributed company really works. Being curious, I
decided to do the obvious: Work there for a year as a team leader and find
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out for myself.
Here’s what I learned:
Creativity thrives online. Recently James Surowicki at The New Yorker
claimed remote work inhibits creativity. This is absurd in the age of the
web, where thousands work on brilliant projects, collaborating with
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people around the world. It’s true that in a distributed company you can’t
just walk down the hall to find serendipity, but chat rooms, social media,
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HBR / Digital Article / How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce
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and blogs provide many chance encounters and serendipitous ideas.
Dozens of times a day, WordPress.com releases new features and updates,
and they collaborate intensely around them on internal blogs and in chat
rooms. Remote work certainly changes the nature of interaction, but to
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assume this inhibits creativity is ridiculous.
Not all remote work is the same. To evaluate remote work as a singular
idea is a paper tiger. There are many policies to choose from and those
choices matter. Managers of remote workers at older companies need to
make adjustments to enable remote workers to thrive, especially during a
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trial period when everyone is experimenting and learning what will work
for them. But to try remote work without making any allowances or
adjustments is foolish. Any progressive idea can be made to fail if the
people in charge don’t support it.
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Culture is critical. Automattic has many policies designed to empower
employees and remote work is just one of them. They believe individual
workers know best how to be productive and that management’s job is to
provide choices and get out of the way. If employees are self-motivated
and empowered, remote work can accelerate productivity. However in
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autocratic or bureaucratic organizations the freedom of remote work runs
against the culture. Of course remote workers will be less productive if
they’re in environments that depend on centralized, rule-oriented, or
committee heavy processes. But even then it can work if managers care
more about results than pretense.
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It should be up to the employee. Workplaces often treat employees like
children. Any wise manager evaluates employees on their results, not
superficially, and physical location might just be one of them. If a worker
proves they can perform as well, or better, from home there’s little reason
to complain. Even at a bureaucratic company, a motivated worker may be
able to find ways to do their job productively in a remote environment.
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Why not let them try? If they’re right everyone wins. The mistake Yahoo’s
Marissa Mayer made was to focus on the means, rather than the ends: The
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[email protected] or 617.783.7860
HBR / Digital Article / How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce
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problem she’s facing is abuse of remote work, not remote work itself.
Automattic has found they can hire better people, since they do not need
to relocate — an advantage more than worth the challenges, if any, that
enabling remote work has cost them.
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Tools make a difference. Automattic employees rarely use email. Instead
they use internal blogs, chat rooms, and Skype. A special kind of blog,
called a P2, solves many of the annoyances of email, and simultaneously
facilitates remote work. Conversations on P2s can be easily linked to via
URL, are searchable and are visible to all, making it easy to catch up on
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what you’ve missed. At Automattic, even when employees meet in person
they use the same tools as when working apart. This helps ensure no one
feels left out or misses conversations, regardless of their time zone.
There are many 100% distributed companies. Dozens of real business
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thrive with remote workers. Before abandoning the idea managers should
study how so many successful companies not only allow remote workers,
but also make it an advantage.
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Scott Berkun’s is the author of The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com
and the Future of Work. He is also the bestselling author of Making
Things Happen and Confessions of a Public Speaker. His popular blog is
at www.scottberkun.com and he tweets at @berkun.
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This document is authorized for educator review use only by MANJU SHREE PRADHAN, Royal University of Bhutan until Jan 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
