Aim for next level autonomy
Distributed work's levels of autonomy by Matt Mullenweg, Automattic
A few months after the pandemic started, all companies were scrambling to figure out “this remote work thing”. All eyes were on the trailblazers - companies that had been remote years before Covid-19 struck. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress wrote a brilliant piece about distributed work’s five levels of autonomy. I encourage you to read the original piece, though I’ll paraphrase the description of each level below.
Level 0 refers to work that requires physical presence. There will always be jobs such as these. You need a surgeon in the operating room, a pilot in the cockpit and a sports person on the playing field. Even IT firms may need some of these jobs, but I argue those should be minimum.
Level 1 is where many employers were before the pandemic. Many companies didn’t invest in the right tools and systems. “Flex work” was more a privilege than a right. And if you worked remotely, you became a second-class citizen in the organisation. Not that people needed to be in the office to do their work. It’s just that companies preferred the status quo of office-bound work instead.
Many companies landed at Level 2 during the pandemic and find themselves there even today. Think of it as a state where you layer new tools on an old mindset. I recently heard the founder of a tech company marvel at how they have a perpetual zoom call to mimic the office and that people can move between breakout rooms like they would in the physical workplace. The power of remote work is in being able to do deep work asynchronously, but level 2 is all about synchronous interactions.
Some organisations are heading to Level 3 today. Even if they keep their offices, they operate in a remote-first, work from anywhere setup. They encourage their employees to invest in a better home office. This is where you see people get more sophisticated with how they use tools such as wikis, collaborative documents, task boards and recorded audio and video. While synchronous collaboration may dominate, asynchronous interactions aren’t uncommon. Many remote-first companies also realise that a brief burst of intense team bonding can be more effective than meeting every day in the anodyne confines of an office. So they sponsor team and company retreats so co-workers can build that sense of camaraderie.
This site aims to get you to Level 4 - an async-first environment. Meetings become the last resort. You can work as easily with a globally distributed team as you can with a team in the same time zone. Everyone prioritises deep, thoughtful work over off-the-cuff discussions. When you meet, you follow best practice. Your organisation can include all kinds of people and be a champion for inclusion.
Matt calls Level 5 the equivalent of “nirvana”. He admits that his own company isn’t always there. This is when your remote-first organisation consistently outperforms any in-person organisation. That comparison doesn’t mean that in-person organisations are the paragon of performance. Matt describes this level as “when everyone in the company has time for wellness and mental health, when people bring their best selves and highest levels of creativity to do the best work of their careers, and just have fun.”
The reason I explained these levels to you, is so you can set yourself up to be a level 4 organisation on most days and a level 5 company on your best days. Design your culture around this goal. And hey, don’t let your company’s culture hold you back. If you can even influence one team or one department to work this way, you’ll be a serious force for change. By the way, forced-hybrid is a bad idea, because it stops you from progressing on this pyramid. You just go back and forth between levels 2 and 3.