Name: 【TED】Matt Mullenweg: Why working from home is good for business (Why working from home is good for business | The Way We Work, a TED series)
Uploaded: 2019-02-09T15:27:42.000Z
Duration: 4 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

The basic problem with working in an office

is you're just not in control of your work environment.

Howdy, my name is Matt, and I'm the CEO of Automattic,

the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack and WooCommerce.

We're coming up on over 800 employees, and they live everywhere,

from California to Alabama, Mississippi, to where I live in Texas.

Some of them choose not even to have a home base, they're nomads.

Whether they are in RVs or traveling through Airbnbs,

they are in new places every day, week or month.

As long as they can find good Wi-Fi, we don't care where they are.

Our focus on distributed work wasn't something that happen accidentally.

It was a conscious choice from the very beginning.

In fact, you probably notice I don't use the word "remote,"

that some people are essential and some aren't.

I use the word "distributed" to describe what we do,

where everyone is on an equal playing field.

is the most effective way to build a company.

The key is you have to approach it consciously.

many of the first 20 hires were people who I'd never met in person.

But we'd collaborated online, sometimes for years.

I wanted to continue that for one simple reason.

are equally distributed throughout the world.

In Silicon Valley, the big tech companies fish

from essentially the same small pond or bay.

A distributed company can fish from the entire ocean.

Instead of hiring someone who grew up in Japan but lives in California,

wakes up and goes to sleep wherever they are in the world.

They bring a different understanding of that culture

At the base of the decision to go distributed,

there's a desire to give people autonomy over how they do their work.

Unless you're in a role where specific hours are important,

Everyone can have a corner office, their windows, the food they want to eat,

you can choose when there's music and when there's silence.

You can choose what temperature the room should be.

You can save the time you'd spend commuting

and put it into things that are important to you.

A distributed workforce is ideal for a technology company.

"This works great for y'all, but what about everyone else?"

you can do a few things to build distributed capability.

In an office, it's easy to make decisions in the moment,

and some members of the team are having those conversations

they'll see these decisions being made without understanding the why.

Always leave a trail of where you were and what you were thinking about.

This allows others to pick up where you left off.

It allows people in different time zones to interact,

it's also great to think about as an organization evolves,

Try to have as much communication as possible online.

When everything's shared and public, it allows new people to catch up quickly.

There are so many apps and services that help with day-to-day communication,

The things that changed how you work probably aren't objects anymore.

They're things you access through your computer.

So experiment with different tools that enable collaboration,

you're in the same place 48 weeks out of the year

and you might have three or four weeks apart.

We try to flip that: we come together for short, intense bursts.

where the entire company comes together for a week.

We want to make sure everyone's aligned and on the same page,

and they have a deeper connection with their colleagues.

When they work together the rest of the year,

they can bring together that understanding and empathy.

give people the flexibility to make their own work environment.

Every person at Automattic has a co-working stipend

that they can put towards a co-working space

or just to buy coffee, so they don't get kicked out of the coffee shop.

One group in Seattle decided to pool their stipends together

and rented a workspace on a fishing pier.

Each person who joins the company gets a home-office stipend.

This is money they can invest in getting the right chair, monitor,

the right desk setup, so they can have the most productive environment for them.

Today, there are just a few companies that are distributed first.

In a decade or two, I predict that 90 percent of companies

that are going to be changing the course of the world