Remote Work and Distributed Organisations

I’ve been speaking at a few online conferences recently about building on remote work to create distributed organisations.

I like this distinction because many people have been calling remote work ‘distributed work’. But I don’t think it is. Or at least it doesn’t have to be.

The best well known example of equating the two terms is probably Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic (Wordpress and Tumblr) who notes: “This is not how I envisioned the distributed work revolution taking hold. Millions of people will get the chance to experience days without long commutes, or harsh inflexibility… This might be a chance for a great reset in terms of how we work.”

(That was before people started to return to the office of course, and the reset he was writing about started to fold back in on itself.)

But the main thing is that whilst people have been working at home, ie they have been geographically distributed, their work has remained largely centralised.

I wrote about this in ‘The Social Organization’, using Paul Baran’s ideas on network communications which lie behind the internet from 55 years ago, applied to human or social networks. Of course this isn’t a perfect analogy but it serves to describe the main differences between the main forms of communication, which are centralised (as seen in functions); decentralised (teams and communities) and distributed (which we / I just call networks, even though of course, all three forms of communication are networks).

Distributed communication networks are really important. They are based on weak ties, people who do not know each other well, and hence are vital to innovation and change. We need more of it, not less.

There have been some great examples of distributed networking during the pandemic. I’d point in particular to:

1. McKinsey’s network of crisis management teams
2. The success of Haier’s platform based network
3. The UK’s ventilator challenge:

And just because someone is at home makes them geographically distant, but it doesn’t make their work distributed, unless we make it so, or it emerges as such.

However, remote work using digital technology does enable distributed working, because the technology enables it more easily than having to bump into lots of different people in the corridors at the office.

Actually, it’s not just more important, it’s strategically important. Whether one organisation can distribute work better than another is a potential source of competitive advantage. That is, it’s what I describe as creating value.

Whereas whether someone works at home or not is just about efficiency, or value for money. It may make a difference to a person's wellbeing and productivity, but it doesn’t change anything fundamental about them or their work, meaning that it’s not going to change the organisation’s strategic differentiation.

Or it’s less likely to, anyway. Unless, for example, it enables the company to do something else significantly different, like recruit much better people because everyone that company is trying to recruit wants to work from home.

Just because people are communicating with each other over Zoom doesn’t do it.

So my hope at the beginning of the pandemic was that this time would see an upswing in distributed working.

It hasn’t happened. Actually, we’ve become even more centralised, or at least just more decentralised, than before. My great reset hasn’t had any more impact than Mullenweg’s.

In my presentations, I’ve referred to Swoop Analytics’ data on the adoption of Teams and Yammer during the adoption.

Microsoft 365 provides people with the opportunity of using Teams’ modality for decentralised chat around current questions within your project team, and Yammer’s for distributed knowledge sharing and re-using.

So it provides a perfect test ground for examining the changes in decentralised and distributed communication. And what Swoop has found is that Teams / decentralised communication has increased hugely (though we still need to get a lot better at using it), but that meanwhile, Yammer / distributed communication hasn’t really changed much at all. (Hopefully the new this week integration of Yammer into Teams will help with this.)

As another example, I was listening in the SimplyIC Live internal communication conference today and heard that BA have turned off their popular Yammer network on their dark mode intranet. As part of their crisis communication model they want to control the message and don’t want it to be harvester of fake news.

BA are still listening to people, just in different ways. And I hope they’re plugged into the WhatsApp group that everyone is probably using instead of Yammer now!

But are they still doing distributed communication? I doubt it. So when things start to improve, what’s the chance that people are going to be clamouring to start cooperating over Yammer again? Pretty low, I’d suggest.

And what’s the chance people are going to be able to, or want to, participate in innovating and transforming BA out of the situation it’s in right now. Almost none.

(It’s the same mentality behind the company making it so difficult to get refunds for my cancelled flights for the various keynotes I'm no longer doing. Yes, it saves them some money short-term, but will I want to fly with them ever again, even when safe to do so? Not so much.)

HR and OD need to be on top of this, and to be working with IT and Digital to make these tools work, in a distributed as well as centralised or decentralised way, and then start to align the organisation with this too.

We’ve potentially missed the opportunity of building distributed organisations during the full lockdown, but remote working isn’t going to disappear (see my next article on this). So we can still recapture the opportunity for the reset, if we're willing to do so.

For more information, see 'The Social Organization'

Jon Ingham

@joningham, https://linkedin.com/in/joningham

[email protected], +44 7904 185134

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