Distributed culture will win

Distributed companies will win. Surprisingly, part of the reason they will win is because of company culture. They will beat office-based companies full of social lunches, hugs, pats on the back, serendipitous coffee queue chats for this reason:

Remote work forces us to deliberately design our company culture.

Let me explain how creative constraints like remote work empower better design through an analogy of how mobile phones with their tiny screens ended up improving user experiences across all websites.

Back in 2007, I was part of designing Android for Google, while digital designers were concerned about replicating the desktop web experience on a small screen. Designers still sat with massive screens, used thin and gracious fonts, and subtle and beautiful color schemes. They designed buttons for ants, unreadable texts, and low-contrast, unreadable designs — essentially cramming too many things into one screen.

There were three steps in the process:

1. Mobile user interface design did not only win the limited screens, but the methodology of the constrained design forced us to be more deliberate. As part of the ‘re-design for mobile’ we learned that menus inside of menus shouldn’t exist anywhere — so they disappeared for desktops.
2. Mobile experiences taught us technologies and processes like responsive web design, graceful degradation, and progressive enhancement that are now used on all modern websites designed for desktops.
3. Mobile also had unique advantages; location, always on, always with you. These enabled new behaviors, that weren’t possible on desktops.

This creative constraint of small screens made mobile experiences leapfrog desktop design. The same will happen to distributed work.

Remote work will win, by forcing deliberateness.

In an office, everyone says “communication is important”. But most behavior is ‘emergent’ rather than ‘deliberate’. In an office, you might do a quick meeting because you’ve been tapped on the shoulder by someone who wants your attention. This works. In a distributed office, this doesn’t work. So you’re forced to think: “What kinds of communication should be immediate? Which should be asynchronous? What protocols work here?”.

In an office, everyone says “a social culture is important”. On Fridays when people get tired, someone asks: “Should we grab a drink?” So you grab a drink. It works. In a distributed office, this doesn’t work. You’re forced to think: “How do actually foster the kinds of meaningful relationships that make working together a joy?” Out with drunken Fridays that leads to exclusive social behaviour, leaves those who don’t drink feeling left out, etc — and in with small conversations amongst people who don’t get to work together day to day with a little nudge to talk about others things than “So, where did you go to school?”

In an office, people say “inclusivity is important”. We might all agree that we should hear everyone’s opinion, but the body language of the Highest Paid Person In the Office signals “I go first”. When we are all commenting on a shared Google Document that behavior doesn’t emerge naturally. In writing, the playing field is more level by design (though never completely level, by any means).

A new version of the adage would be: On the Internet, anyone can be slightly more comfortable being a dog.

Just as mobile design, this will not be easy. It will be a gradual change until it will be sudden. Remote work is frankly early on the adoption curve, but I believe we are going to look back at our centralized office culture and shake our heads in disbelief.

I plan to explore this, together with amazing Rune Kvist in a series of posts. To be continued.