The Dimensions of Distributed Work
Work has to happen somewhere, somehow - time to spell it out.
Remote is a beautiful word - and it’s informational value in a job description is non-existant. So if you have a hard time defining your remote, here’s a handy 2x2 matrix (you can download it here) to help you think through the main ingredients:
Location & Schedule Flexibility
📍 Location, location, location
Location is the “obvious” answer to “remote”. And I put “obvious” into quotations marks because, no, remote is not equivalent to work-from-home.
Work has to happen somewhere though, and there’s a lot of options between the two extremes of co-located in an office and wherever in the world you find yourself in. The right question to ask is this: which rules apply when choosing where to work.
Maybe there’s one office.
Or maybe there are several offices, and you can choose.
Maybe there’s your desk at home, and only that.
Maybe there’s a couple of “authorized” co-workings available.
Or you can freely choose the coworking, but cafés and hotel lobbies are out of question.
Maybe the place doesn’t really matter as long as you use a privacy screen, VPN and don’t leave the national territory, or a specific time zone.
Or maybe it really doesn’t matter and as long as the work gets done, suit yourself.
So, where does your remote work happen?
🗓 Schedule expectations
In my original post I called thes “schedule flexibility” - though of course not all schedules are flexible, so I’ve renamed it to “expectations”.
After all, work definitely has to happen at some moment in time. The two extremes here are the mandatory 9-5 vs. a totally asyncronous setup. And again, the beauty is in the details. Which expectations do you have as to when your employees do their work?
Maybe there’s fixed work hours (either based on Headquarters, or the local timezone).
Maybe there are some core working hours, with flexible start and finish times.
Or some companies merely recommend those core hours, often in combination with a recommended no-meetings day.
Maybe there aren’t any fixed rules, and people need to figure out what works within their teams or peer groups.
Or, maybe communication happens entirely asynchronously, often because part of the team is in a different time zone.
Side note: neither of these two dimensions covers the the resulting company culture. Because your company culture precisely depends on how work happens - to optimize for collaboratoin (or belonging), you need to situation yourself within the matrix first. Pun intended ;)
There’s no right or wrong choice as long as you make a choice
Honestly, there’s nothing wrong in deciding you’ll focus on your national territory as the location, and core work hours between 11am and 3pm your time zone, because this aligns with your core values of supporting a social welfare state and promote family conciliation.
It’s totally fine to expect your employees to work from the office or a coworking (or from home) to make sure sensitive information isn’t accessible by passers-by, even if you don’t care when exactly work happens.
And if you have been asyncronous forever and your onboarding helps newbies to get on the “we write stuff down” wave - you can absolutely go anywhere and anytime. This does not make you a better employer though. It just makes you a better employer for a specific type of person.
So here’s my takeaway for you: it does not matter where you fall on the 2x2 location/schedule matrix as long as you have either a) decided or b) retroactively justified your position.
Be bold, be decisive, and own your decision. Be explicit about your WHY and what that means for day-to-day operations. And then - then you can start looking into whether your collaboration is on point, or whether you need to adjust how you bring people together - virtually or otherwise.
Thanks to Claire Donald, Kasia Triantafelo, Niamh McGarty, Leigh Staub, Justin Tomlin, and Tyler Sellhorn📢 for helping me shape those thoughts.
About the Empress of Remote
👑 I am Valentina Thörner, Product Leader and Remote Expert.
✨ Supporting Product and Ops leaders in engaging and retaining their teams.
✨ Now open for board positions at companies that share my values
*️⃣ Find out more on my website or connect on LinkedIn