In 2018, our Chief Experience Officer (CXO) John Maeda shared an insight based on a survey he ran about distributed work, also called “remote work,” with the surprising results:

As a leader in remote work in the design and technology field, having worked for three years at the largest all-distributed company in the world, Automatic, Inc., John Maeda pointed out that this remote work has been a trend that has been a long time coming, as featured in Time magazine eight years ago.

“Telecommuting, working form home, working remotely: they all essentially mean the same thing (working somewhere other than in an office). And this form of work is growing.” — 2012: TIME Magazine.

In the tech-startup world, it has become more the norm than the exception: “A growing number of startups are operating without a physical office for some or all of their workforce. It makes hiring people around the world easier, keeping costs down. But it can make employees feel disconnected.” — 2018: The Information.

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automatic, Inc., and the co-founder of the WordPress Project, has long shared the opinion that distributed work is the future.

“Facebook is never going to work like this. Google is never going to work like this. But whatever replaces them will look more like a distributed company than a centralized one.” — 2018: The Information.

Enabling a team to work in a distributed fashion, if it is accustomed to working only on premise, is not an easy task. We are available to help our companies’ Digital Business Transformation efforts when needing to facilitate the path to working distributedly across product, engineering and design. Learn more about how you can access those talents here.

John Maeda’s insights on remote work are available on his developer-centric blog, maeda.dev with a quick index here:

What’s remote work?

How videoconference works best.

How blogging can align a remote team.

How to get everyone on the same page remotely.