Live Stream: Work from home and change the world

The co-founder of the open-source blogging platform WordPress and the Founder-CEO of Automattic speaks about how it is important for employers to fish from a bigger pool than be limited by geographic boundaries. He also talks about attracting talent and giving them the freedom to choose their hours and place of work, because after all, it is the quality of the work that matters and not where the employee was getting it done from.

“Some of them (his employees) choose not even to have a home base, they’re nomads. Whether they are in RVs or travelling 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,” says Mullenweg.

He also stresses on physical meetings. But infrequent ones, which he calls “productive face-to-face time.” Mullenweg organises an annual meet, where the entire company comes together for a week. “It’s half-work, half-play,” he says. The main objective is to make sure that everyone is on the same page and they have deeper connection with their colleagues,” he adds.

Mullenweg also has a word of advice for people in traditional offices and highlights ways in which employers can ensure that all the staff, both at headquarters and at home, feel connected. “First: document everything. In an office, it’s easy to make decisions in the moment, in the kitchen, in the hall. But if people work remotely and some members of the team are having those conversations they don’t have access to, they’ll see these decisions being made without understanding the why,” says Mullenweg.

Speaking about the future of “distributed first” workspace, he predicts that in about a decade or two, 90 per cent of companies “that are going to be changing the course of the word” would function this way. “They will evolve to be distributed first, or they’ll be replaced by those that are,” says Mullenweg.