Shifting from a Remote to Distributed Mindset

The first part of this year will remain uncertain but as vaccinations take hold, organizations will be faced with the decision of whether, when, how, and how much to bring staff together again.  It will be time for a mindset change from thinking about working remotely to when working in distributed fashion makes sense.  Language and mindset matter as organizations make longer term choices about the best way to get work done. Thinking of how work might be done in a distributed manner is a helpful mental model in how to think about work. Remote conjures distant, having little connection with, unrelated to; distributed though brings out the ideas of work being spread or shared across relationships and networks.  For those of us that have run companies for decades where most of the work is distributed across teams in different geographies and timelines, it has been more than about zoom and slack etc. for some time.  For others where the entirety of the company began and grew fully distributed like Automattic, Matt Mullenweg has talked about the levels of autonomy of distributed teams.   

As we think of how we might work better in a permanently distributed manner, adopting a “distributed” mindset will help us make better decisions about how to measure productivity and how to improve our management of people. Distributed work demands leaders be resources rather than monitors.  As we built teams globally, at CQG we supported real time data and low latency trading globally with hundreds of developers and operations experts scattered across more than 10 countries.

It was a challenge like any way in work is done but it helped if we leveraged the balance of process, relationships  and results.  Strong relationship made process work and strong process leveraged relationships. Results don’t lie about your effectiveness. Keeping this balance in mind helped us make smart decisions about technology, when to have face to face meetups and when to have low-tech solutions like real photos of each other pasted to our work spaces.

How will you make decisions moving forward about what is the right balance and approach to distributed work?  What assumptions as a leader are you holding onto about distributed work by continuing to call it remote?