Author Archives: Jeremy Anderberg

Yes, Remote Work Can Hamper Creativity. That Doesn’t Mean It Has To. 

The RTO debate has a new point of contention, it seems. At CNBC’s recent Workforce Executive Council Summit, Ellevest CEO Sallie Krawcheck said that her team has been more successful overall and even better at hitting deadlines since moving to a fully distributed model. But that came at a price, she added: “We are less creative.” 

That’s not an uncommon opinion among executives, especially those whose companies went remote for a long period of time during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a shareholder letter in 2020, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon wrote that remote work “virtually eliminates spontaneous learning and creativity because you don’t run into people at the coffee machine.” A somewhat narrow example, maybe, but the sentiment holds true. 

It’s also not necessarily wrong. Automattic’s head of design, Pablo Honey, acknowledges that the social aspect of creativity is almost impossible to replicate in a distributed setting. “It is true that there’s some magic that happens in a shared physical space that is hard to replicate remotely, and even more so when you’re working asynchronously,” he says. “The proximity to someone while discussing a design or a creative endeavor, the more natural back and forth and bouncing of ideas between peers, the body language and nuance . . . I don’t know of a good replacement for all of those.” 

Virtual watercoolers on Slack or other remote work software can help, but admittedly don’t have the same potency as face-to-face interactions. However, Honey also points out that the social aspect is just a single piece of the creativity puzzle—and a distributed workforce actively fosters many of the other pieces. “Creativity doesn’t only depend on social interaction,” he says. “Many of the creative minds and hands in history collaborated over distance. Remote work actually provides a different kind of magic: confidence and control over your environment, a better and more respectful work-life balance, and more inclusivity of many kinds. Happiness—both our own and that of the people around us—can also facilitate creativity.” 

Besides, there are other ways to foster those connections. As we’ve mentioned before, in-person meetups are a crucial part of a healthy and productive distributed workforce—and they’re deeply ingrained in Automattic’s culture. Each year, Automatticians can expect 2-3 weeks of face time: a week with everyone in their division, and then another week or two with their specific teams. That may not seem like much time, but once you’ve experienced those meetups, it quickly becomes clear that it’s enough time together to form close bonds, tackle projects that depend on physical proximity, and re-establish the deep trust that enables creativity the rest of the year. 

The perfect corporate philosophy simply doesn’t exist. Every approach has its tradeoffs. For a distributed workforce, serendipitous run-ins can indeed be harder to come by. But nurturing the many other ingredients of creativity, and prioritizing  in-person connections at a regular cadence, makes those tradeoffs all but disappear.  

Atlassian Doubles Down on Distributed Work

In a recent interview with Fast Company, Annie Dean, Atlassian’s VP of Team Anywhere, made it clear that the Australia-based software company’s future is distributed. 

Dean was a proponent of flexible work long before she came to the company known for collaboration tools like Trello and Jira, but in the years before the pandemic, her point of view just wasn’t catching on. Even in the early weeks of 2020, Dean was doubting whether remote work would ever catch on:

“You have to think about where we were. CIOs did not have Zoom links in calendars as a matter of default. People were still largely working shoulder to shoulder at that time.”

The COVID pandemic and its subsequent periodic spikes changed everything, obviously. After a stint at Deloitte and then becoming Meta’s first Head of Remote Work, Dean moved to Atlassian, where she’s working to help the company transition to what she calls a “distributed-first model.” Interestingly, that work includes a team of researchers who are investigating “distributed work pain points and solutions—and how we might solve that for ourselves and for the industry at large.” (We’ll certainly be paying attention to their findings!) 

As with every company wrestling through the pros and cons of having a distributed workforce, Atlassian and Dean are trying to understand productivity. The ultimate question for them is simple: do employees get more done in the office or out of it?

Of the countless answers I’ve seen in response to this question, Dean’s is the most cogent: 

“What I can say is that when we look at the challenges at work today, I think it’s pretty well accepted that our greatest challenges have to do with distraction, the lack of ability to focus, the fact that we can’t prioritize important work fast enough because we’re letting our calendars dictate on time. And when you look at those as the key problems and impediments to productivity, fixing where we work is not the answer to any of them.”

Entrenched work cultures are hard to overcome; Dean readily admits that “the status quo is a powerful thing.” But she and her team, like many of us at Automattic, are in a unique position to push back against it. As distributed employees of distributed companies, we’re able to advocate for the tactics that have helped us find success—even if that model isn’t yet the norm. 

Check out Dean’s full interview—which is well worth your time—over at Fast Company (subscription required). 

RTOblox: Roblox Steps Away From Remote Work

In a recent post to the Roblox company blog, founder and CEO David Baszucki mandated that the large majority of Roblox’s remote employees return to a physical office in 2024. Citing concerns about “Zoom fatigue” and lack of creative collaboration, he concluded that “we aren’t there yet” when it comes to a remote work technology that works.

Roblox has been doing great work for years fostering digital connection among its users. However, this is not a technology problem. It’s a culture problem. 

As an Automattician, I couldn’t help but notice this line in particular: 

“A three-hour Group Review in person is much less exhausting than over video and brainstorming sessions are more fluid and creative.”

Of course it’s easier to do a three-hour meeting in person! But maybe the issue here is that three-hour meetings are common occurrences.

In my years at Automattic, I’ve never had a Zoom meeting last longer than an hour and a half. Most are 45-60 minutes, and those on the longer end of that spectrum are town halls and all-hands meetings rather than creative or collaborative discussions. In short, it’s not about the tool; it’s about who’s wielding the tool. 

As a recent New York Times article pointed out, studies are showing that management bears more responsibility for productivity than any other factor: 

“productivity differed among remote workplaces depending on an employer’s approach — how well trained managers are to support remote employees and whether those employees have opportunities for occasional meet-ups.”

As Automattic has shown for the last 17 years, we are there in terms of collaboration tools and distributed work strategies that get the job done. Sure, there are pros and cons to being a fully distributed team of ~2,000 employees; however, those pros and cons have helped shape our policies in instrumental ways. For example, we prioritize meetups not just so that people can enjoy time together in the same space, but so we can use that in-person time to have those long, crucial conversations about our business goals and priorities. Because distributed work can sometimes blur the lines between “work time” and “home time,” we provide unlimited time off (as well as generous sabbaticals/parental leaves) so folks can draw those lines clearly and recharge whenever they need to. And because we know remote work can feel isolating at times, we offer a coworking benefit so that folks can enjoy the social benefits of being around other people, even if it’s not their fellow Automatticians.

While we’re rooting for Roblox’s success, this feels like yet another example of a company responding to the wrong problem. With the right strategies in place, a distributed team can and will work—no matter what its tools are.

The New York Times Takes Stock of the WFH Revolution

In a recently published article, The New York Times offered a brief overview of some things society has learned (or not) about remote work. More than three years after the pandemic kicked off what reporter Emma Goldberg calls “a mass workplace experiment,” plenty of companies have yet to figure out what works—either for employees or for productivity.

For employers, productivity concerns outweigh most others—no surprise there—but the studies conducted thus far have been anything but consistent. Results range from productivity declines of 19 percent to gains as high as 24 percent. (Commence the cherry-picking!) Interestingly, though, Stanford economist Nick Bloom claims that the differentiator isn’t remote work itself, but how each company implements it:

“It all comes down to how workers are managed. If you set up fully remote with good management and incentives, and people are meeting in person, it can work. What doesn’t seem to work is sending people home with no face-time at all.”

Nick Bloom, economist and remote work scholar

One of Automattic’s core values from the start has been the importance of in-person meetups. All of our employees can expect to spend 2-4 weeks each year with their coworkers not only working on projects together, but also just spending time together, sharing meals, and generally getting to know each other. Regular meetups, both as single teams and as entire divisions, are a key ingredient to the success of our distributed workforce.

As Bloom ultimately concluded about remote work, even with seemingly mixed productivity results, “This is the new normal.” At Automattic—where we’ve been fully distributed since the company was started over 17 years ago—it’s the only normal we’ve ever known.

Read the full article here. (Subscription may be required.)