Here's a short animated summary of The Year Without Pants / Future of Work @automattic @wordpressdotcom #wordpress https://t.co/273Lzaw56K
— Scott Berkun (@berkun) June 13, 2016
When Scott Berkun accepted the job offer to become the 58th employee at Automattic, he did so under the proviso that he could write this book about his experience working there. This unusual request was only eclipsed by the even more unusual way people worked at the company.
The company runs wordpress.com, the 15th most popular site on the web and is also behind the software WordPress that powers 20% of all the websites in the world.
Before he joined in 2010, all staff reported directly to the company founder, Matt Mullenweg, but a new structure with five teams was put in place and Berkun was to be the lead of one of those teams, the social team. His team had three other members, based all around the world (Vancouver, Canada, Perth, Australia and Los Angeles, USA).
His interview consisted of working on a real-world trial project. There were none of the formal interview questions, if you did well on the project, you were in. The first three days’ work involved training in customer support; something all staff had to do initially, before moving onto their main job. All support was via email and both the interview and training were carried out remotely.
The employees tended to use Skype for one to one chats and IRC software for large group discussions. As everyone worked remotely, everyone needed (and had) excellent communication skills. Jargon was kept to a minimum. Every person working on support was monitored for support tickets resolved, forum posts made and time spent on support but the focus was on training to learn rather than meeting a quota.
WordPress had humble beginnings. Matt Mullenweg was using open source software that was no longer being worked on, so he copied (or forked) the software, started working on it himself and WordPress was born in 2003.
Its speed and simplicity led to its popularity increasingly rapidly and continued to do so for the next five years. WordPress culture is heavily influenced by the open source philosophy.
- It’s transparent. All discussions on WordPress are public.
- There’s a meritocracy. The more time and effort people put into the project, the more respect and authority they earn.
- There’s longevity. Its open source licence means it could live on forever if people wanted it to.
Mullenweg started the company Automattic and a few months later produced wordpress.com, a website where users could use WordPress and have it hosted on the web, all for free.
After the customer support training, Berkun held his first meeting with his team. Naturally it was online over IRC. Every conversation over IRC in the company was logged and searchable via an internal website. The other main way the team communicated was via their team social blog. Overall company communication was broken down as follows:
- Blogs 75%
- IRC 14%
- Skype 5%
- Email 1%.
There were many reasons why blogs were preferred to email for communication.
With Email
The sender can send whatever they like as often as they like
The reader, not the sender chooses what to read
You can’t see an email if you’re not on the To: list
With a Blog
The reader chooses the format and how often to read
Great information in an email just sits in an inbox unless something is done with it
Information is available to all forever and easily searchable
Every month Mullenweg would conduct a town hall meeting via his webcam and IRC for everyone to attend. These meetings allowed him to share news and open himself up to questions and answers.
Automattic had a culture were results was the main thing that was cared about. Traditions were not adhered to. You didn’t have to work 9-5. You didn’t have to wear a tie. In fact, thanks to remote working you didn’t even have to wear pants! Output was all that mattered. To achieve great output the company hired great staff. Then they set good priorities, removed distractions for them and got out of the way leaving the colleagues largely autonomous.
The employees are what are described as T-shaped: masters at one skill but moderate at many others. This skill diversity makes them self-sufficient and unafraid of learning new skills which in turn means they don’t need to be heavily managed.
WordPress.com used continuous deployment to make lots of small, incremental changes. Something went live every day whether an improvement or bug fix. Programmers and designers could push their changes live whenever they wanted. There was no scheduling or deadlines, worst case scenario they could revert the changes but this rarely happened. No schedule meant no fear of falling behind.
The lack of specific quality assurance people meant that every employee was accountable for quality. A big project at Automattic was viewed as just a series of small ones. No grand plan meant no worrying about the grand plan going wrong.
Whilst working remotely may not work in every company, it’s success ultimately comes down to whether employees abuse the benefit of working from home or elsewhere. By letting someone who wants to work remotely try it out, you show you’re willing to experiment which encourages employees to look for other ways to improve performance. Depending on whether the remote workers productivity goes up or down will decide whether the experiment continues or not.
Matt Mullenweg and his CEO never worried about what competitors were doing. They kept an eye out on them but it rarely made them change any of their plans for WordPress.
Automattic also didn’t spend any money on traditional marketing either. It does however invest in the WordPress community from helping organise it, to funding large conventions and meetups for its users.
By now you might be wondering how this company made any money. Wordpress.com made money four ways:
- Through upgrades. The core product is free but various extras are available at a cost.
- Advertising. Less than 1% of the pages have adverts. These generate income.
- VIP. Large companies get dedicated support and better server infrastructure.
- Partnerships. Deals with other services.
In terms of payment for employees, Automattic paid at or above market salaries but raises and bonuses were rarely spoken about. For many, working on something they loved, with the extra free time remote working offered was more than sufficient. In the year and a half Berkun was at the company, only six people left.
Six months into his job at Automattic, Berkun wrote to Mullenweg with his findings:
- Broken windows. Things are fixed immediately which is good but people respond to the most recent thing rather than the most important, which is bad.
- Big projects avoided. There are certain projects no one wants to take on due to messy code or otherwise.
- Internal blogs have side effects. Some posts generate responses; others are ignored, despite being important.
- Conservative – not many people promote big ideas or significant changes. More tactical thinking is needed.
- Talent and morale are high. This compensates for other faults.
- Transparency in the company is high but some things are opaque. No one knows the process for hiring apart from the founder and CEO.
- Lack of usability. No one is talking about evaluating the User Interface despite tools out there to do it.
In the summer of 2011, Team Social increased in size to a team of seven, still spread throughout the world. As the lead, Berkun organised occasional face to face meetups with the whole team. After previous meetings in Greece and the USA, the next one was in Portugal where one of the team lived. The aim of these meetups was partly to have fun and bond as a team. Many of the jokes became recurring themes long after everyone went back home to their remote working location, keeping team morale high.
At the following meetup in Hawaii, Berkun announced he was leaving Automattic to write this book. He’d been there well beyond the year he originally planned to work there.
His time at Automattic has shown that work doesn’t have to be meaningless and it doesn’t have to be serious. By making the culture result first orientated, people are empowered to choose when and where to work.
While Berkun was there, Automattic increased in size to over 100 employees. A blog is now created on wordpress.com every half a second.