5 Levels of Distributed Work. How Being Asynchronous Can Increase Productivity.

I’ve spoken to many people who assume that work is either co-located or remote. They believe that the best work-from-home experience is simply working remotely from their living room, having Zoom meetings, and being relatively productive. However, there is much more that they and their workplaces can do to significantly increase their productivity.

Key Takeaways

• Moving to a distributed and asynchronous workforce can increase a business’s productivity beyond that of any co-located workforce.
• The benefits of a distributed and asynchronous workforce include accessing the global talent pool, accessing new geographical markets, and increasing trust and transparency within the organization. These benefits are not limited to these factors alone.
• There are four things you can do to help move your workforce towards the nirvana of distributed work.

In the lead-up to 2020, many workplaces were slowly embracing remote work. Bit by bit, they were moving online. Some people were working from home, some were studying online, and some were having telehealth appointments. Then, COVID-19 hit, and suddenly, everyone was frantically trying to do everything remotely. While some were able to adapt quickly, others have had a more difficult time.

Many businesses have shifted their operations entirely online, while others have partially embraced remote work. Some companies, however, continue to operate entirely from a physical location.

Motivating employees is one of the most complex aspects of a manager’s job. With many employees now working from home, managers are understandably concerned about how to keep their employees motivated. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink identifies three factors that motivate employees: mastery, purpose, and autonomy. Let’s explore how these factors apply to a more distributed workforce.

The Four Levels of Distributed Work

Firstly, what are the levels of distributed work? According to Matt Mullenweg’s five levels of distributed work described in episode 194 of the Making Sense podcast with Sam Harris, a company’s journey towards fully embracing a distributed and asynchronous work experience can be broken down into five levels. These levels describe the journey from co-located work to what he calls “Nirvana,” the level in which a business is continuously performing better than any co-located business ever could. Mullenweg describes how a company cautiously explores the possibility of remote work and eventually fully embraces it.

Matt was a founding developer at WordPress and is now the CEO of Automattic. Both companies have over 1000 employees and completely remote workplaces. In a conversation with Sam, he said, “any company that can enable their people to be fully effective in a distributed fashion can and should do it far beyond after this current crisis has passed.” While it may not be easy and there may be chaos initially, perseverance will ultimately yield positive results for remote workplaces.

Levels of Distributed Work

Level 0 — Co-Located

Some jobs cannot be done remotely. Examples include firefighters, police officers, nurses, construction workers, and supermarket shelf stockers. However, many people overestimate the number of jobs that require physical presence. As technology advances, remote job opportunities continue to grow.

Level 1 — Not Remote Friendly

This is the level where most co-located businesses were before COVID-19. They hadn’t made any deliberate attempts to make work remote-friendly. If someone got sick, work could keep going for a couple of days, but some tasks would be put on hold until that person returned to the office. At this level, work is done on company equipment. An accountant might have access to a smartphone, email, and might occasionally Zoom into a meeting, but for the most part, they’ll wait to do work until they’re back in the office.

You’re working on company time, using company equipment, and in a company’s physical space. While this approach may work well in a factory or construction site, it isn’t necessary for the more than 1 billion knowledge workers worldwide today. Businesses at this level were unprepared for the changes required to adapt to COVID-life. However, with some technology adoption and slight workflow adjustments, many jobs can quickly move up to Level 2.

Level 2 — Remote But Still Synchronous

Essentially, “remote but still synchronous” refers to the effort to recreate the office environment while working remotely. In recent months, most companies have had to transition to remote work, at least temporarily. At this level, they use tools such as Zoom and Slack to facilitate remote work. However, they are still trying to mimic the previous office environment. As work evolves, it is natural to copy the previous generation’s practices.

At this level, work is mostly the same as what was done in the office, except that it is done remotely. People access the same information and attend the same meetings simultaneously, but from their living rooms. Businesses at this level are not taking advantage of the benefits that a distributed workforce can offer. People work on laptops in their living rooms, with regular real-time meetings that disrupt everyone’s productivity.

This creates a new problem for management, as they are increasingly concerned about maintaining the same level of productivity as in the old co-located office. Instead of installing monitoring software to track productivity, a better solution is to move to the next level and adopt a remote-first workforce.

In Level 2, businesses face all the downsides of a distributed workforce; as they move into Levels 3 and 4, the benefits of being distributed will begin to emerge.

Level 3 — Remote-First

At Level 3, businesses adapt to and benefit from being distributed. People have a workstation at home with multiple monitors, good audio equipment, and a productive desk setup. Being “remote-first” isn’t the same as being “remote-friendly” or simply having the ability to work from home. It’s a whole new way to organize companies, according to Matt. Work hours are a bit more flexible, and the workflow is becoming more asynchronous.

Businesses are moving away from real-time meetings, although teams still checkpoint sometimes. At this point, they are ready to be permanently distributed. Project management software, such as ClickUp, Asana, or Monday.com, is essential here. If you haven’t started using a program like this to manage and coordinate tasks, you are missing out. It allows the whole team to have all their tasks in one place, add dependencies and due dates, and coordinate everything.

Excellent written communication is vital for people working at this level and beyond. Work is becoming asynchronous, and not everyone can attend each meeting in real-time. There is no denying that there are drawbacks to written communication; a lot is communicated through body language and tone of voice when done face-to-face. This makes excellent, clear, and concise written communication all the more critical. During the occasional meeting, there is a shared document, and everyone contributes notes in real-time.

There are great plugins, such as Otter.ai, that create a live transcript from your Zoom meetings. If these notes are clear and concise, anyone who didn’t attend the meeting can catch up later and not get left behind. If the organization is big enough, it’s a good idea to have a once- or twice-yearly in-person meet-up to get to know each other. After all, we’re still social beings, and it still feels better to have some social connection with the people we’re working with.

Level 4 — Distributed and Asynchronous

We’re almost there; we’ve almost reached the promised land. At Level 4, the workflow is completely transformed, no longer mimicking how it was done in the office. When work is designed to be done remotely and asynchronously, people are given greater autonomy to choose when and how they work. Trust holds everything together; people’s work is evaluated by the quality of the output, not by when and how they do it. Measuring output objectively, without everyday politics, means that the workplace is more inclusive. People aren’t being promoted because they’re extroverted and get heard the most or because they played the game and impressed the right person. Playing politics won’t save them if the quality of their output isn’t up to scratch.

In a co-located office, the labour pool is limited to people who live within commuting distance. At Level 4, that pool is increased to include the rest of the world. Suddenly, it’s possible to have people working around the globe and the clock. With excellent written communication and a streamlined handover process, it’s possible to have a 24/7 operation. Imagine having people working in Australia and East Asia who hand over to people in the Middle East and West Asia. These people then hand over to people in Europe, who in turn hand over to people in America. What used to take three days can now be done overnight.

There are almost no face-to-face meetings; all communication is written because people aren’t working simultaneously. Excellent writing skills are even more important here than at lower levels. Communicating this way can be better because it isn’t the extroverted people doing most of the talking in meetings; everyone gets an equal chance to put their ideas forward. The decision-making process is slower and more deliberate this way, but, in the end, it’s better.

Employee retention increases because it is more rewarding to work autonomously, being judged on output without everyday politics. People can spend more time socializing with those they choose. Now that employee retention has gone up, investing more in training and developing already great employees further makes sense. This is what Matt Mullenweg called Nirvana. With some time and some tweaking of procedures, an organization can become consistently more productive than any still in a co-located office. Everyone has enough time to focus on other aspects of life, avoid burnout, improve mental health, and bring their best and most creative selves to work daily.

Four Steps Towards a Distributed Workforce

Working remotely is something individual workers do, but having a distributed workforce is a discipline that the entire organization must embrace. In a distributed organization, the term “remote” is meaningless because there is no headquarters from which workers are remote.

One of the biggest challenges for any organization moving to a distributed workforce is the challenge of context. Traditionally, co-located offices, face-to-face meetings, water cooler conversations, and socializing at work provided the context for work. However, when transitioning to a distributed and asynchronous model, the structure and context of work disappear.

Managers often try to address this issue by replacing these conversations with video meetings and even more emails to “touch base.” Instead, it is important to consider why people are having these conversations. For the most part, communicating information differently and more efficiently will reduce the friction of being unable to communicate face-to-face.

Here are four easy ways to start moving towards Level 4 and embracing Distributed and asynchronous work:

1. Have more transparency so that everyone knows exactly what they are doing and the context in which they are doing it.
2. Give everyone access to the information they need to do their jobs without them needing to ask for it. This can be in the form of a handbook or organisation wiki.
3. Give the people you have hired the autonomy to do what they do and trust that they will deliver.
4. Provide everyone with the tools and software to increase autonomy and align their work.

No one’s work should be disconnected. Often, people perform tasks without understanding how they fit into the bigger picture. By increasing transparency and giving them access to all the information they need, when they encounter a hurdle, it’ll be easier to overcome it and keep up with the sprint.

Some of the benefits of having a Distributed Workforce are:

• By tapping into the global talent pool, with access to over seven billion people in the world, you are much more likely to find the right person for the job.
• Documenting progress is much easier when you hire people with excellent communication skills, as written communication and transparency are built into the workflow.
• Once you have centralized information, data, and procedures into a single hub like a wiki or handbook, it becomes an invaluable resource that allows you to be more agile and productive. People are no longer dependent on the old hierarchical dissemination of information, and those lower in the hierarchy are not reliant on the higher-ups in the decision-making process.
• It is easier to expand operations to new geographical regions without increasing costs.
• It is easier to expand operations to new geographical regions without increasing costs.
• Providing employees with more autonomy and flexibility allows them to work at the times when they are most productive. This approach values the work they accomplish rather than the hours they work.
• Remote work saves time because employees do not have to commute to an office. It also reduces the costs of relocating.

HR managers reading this may have nightmares; employment contracts typically outline specific tasks and hours for which employees will be paid. In traditional work environments, employees are held accountable for their work because they are in the office or online during specific hours. However, if the workforce is asynchronous and the relationship is based on trust, managing performance becomes more challenging. To address this challenge, it’s important to include explicit and mutually agreed-upon performance indicators in employment contracts.

If you’d like to look at some examples of companies that have been successful with a remote-first, distributed, and asynchronous workforce, check out Automattic, Treehouse, Universal Mind and Lullabot.

As you can see, moving up levels increases employees’ autonomy. Moving towards Level 4 will increase workers’ mastery and purpose because they will understand how their work fits into the bigger picture, and they will have the ability to overcome obstacles themselves. There is no reason to worry about employees slacking off more when working from home unless they were already slacking off in the office. If an employee lacked motivation in the office and only did the bare minimum, they will probably slack off more at home. Fortunately, it will be even more noticeable when their output decreases while their colleagues’ output increases. And, to be honest, if they were already doing the bare minimum in the office, they were not a good fit for your organization in the first place.

An increasing number of businesses are becoming fully distributed and thriving as a result. While there may be many challenges along the way, none of them are insurmountable.