The Five Levels of Remote Work — and why you’re probably at Level 2
COVID-19 has forced companies the world over to enact — or create — remote working protocols. The likes of Box, Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all told their employees some variation of “work from home”.
But so too are more traditional organisations across fields such as real estate, accounting and local government.
Zoom team-selfies, like the one below, taken by giddy corporate executives who have been long-time remote working laggards, are polluting Twitter and LinkedIn feeds.
But like most things worth doing, there are different levels of proficiency and sophistication to scale.
Many newly-remote workers seem to conflate simply downloading Zoom, Slack, and having access to email with having this remote working thing sorted out.
But having a ball and a ring does not an NBA basketballer make.
When it comes to swimming in the deep end of the remote working pool, few companies are doing it better than Automattic — the company behind Wordpress, which powers 35% of all websites on the internet.
Automattic — at the time of writing — has 1,170 employees scattered across more 75 countries, speaking 93 languages. It boasts a company valuation of US$3 billion, and has made several significant acquisitions such as that of WooCommerce and blogging platform, Tumblr.
The company does not have an office, with its employees collaborating almost exclusively online.
Automattic’s founder, Matt Mullenweg (hence the double t in the company’s name!) recently appeared on Sam Harris’ popular Making Sense podcast (below) to talk what he calls the five levels of distributed teams (he prefers ‘distributed’ to ‘remote’ because the latter implies that there is still a central place of work).
Making Sense Podcast #194 - The New Future of Work | Sam Harris
Encouragingly (for me at least), Mullenweg’s sentiments echo what I’ve been telling many of my clients and partners —tools are only as good as how you use them. In fact, abuse of tools can actually make us less productive — as seen here.
Following is my interpretation and paraphrasing of Mullenweg’s sentiments on the five levels of remote work. Apologies to Matt if I have taken anything out of context!
Nothing deliberate has been done by the company to support remote work, but employees can still keep the ball rolling somewhat if they’re at home for a day.
They have access to their smartphone, and email. Perhaps they dial in to a few meetings.
But they’ll put off most things until they’re back in the office, and will be a shadow of their office-bound selves.
Level 1 is where the overwhelming majority of organisations were prior to the COVID19 outbreak.
This is where most organisations now reside — especially traditional ones.
It’s where your employees have access to videoconferencing software (eg. Zoom), instant messaging software (eg. Slack) and email, but instead of redesigning work to take advantage of the new medium, teams ultimately end up recreating online, how they work in the office.
This extends to many of the bad habits that permeate the modern office and suppress the ability of knowledge workers to actually think — here’s looking at you 10-person video-calls when two people would suffice, 60+ interruptions a day — now via Slack and phone calls, the sporadic checking of and responding to email more than 70 times a day throughout the day, or the hyper-responsiveness that is expected of all employees, leaving them wired to desktop dings like Pavlov’s dog.
Mullenweg equates lack of redesigning work around the medium with the radio drama of the 1930s, which was essentially the acting out of plays over the airwaves. Adapting the content to the radio medium was not fully considered or appreciated at the time.
It’s a little like many multi-million dollar digital transformation projects, whereby broken and redundant processes created in the 1980s are effectively digitised — but wait — they’re still broken, and they’re still redundant.
At Level 2, people are still expected to be online from 9 to 5, and in some cases to be subject to what essentially amounts to spyware, with employers installing screen-logging software, such as RescueTime, on their employee machines so that they can play the role of Big Brother (see the Dictator’s Guide below for more like this).
If you’re at Level 2, you still have a long way to go.
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The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.
