Matt Mullenweg’s (CEO, Automattic) Five Levels Of Remote Work

Remote work is poorly understood and for good reason. What most people have experienced is merely being “allowed” to work remotely on occasion, having to stay home with someone sick in the family, logging in while traveling or waiting for the cable guy to install internet.

While I am a fan of remote working I am not sure that most companies realize that experimenting with remote work until the end of the covid-19 crisis is a free strategy option. I’ll detail more of what I mean at the end, but first its worth helping you re-frame how you think about remote work.

Over the last ten years many “remote-first” companies have been rethinking how work should get done and have discovered that to truly thrive as a distributed, remote organization there is an inevitable learning curve that one must progress.

Matt Mullenweg has been one of the biggest proponents of this way of working and is the CEO of Automattic, which employs more than 1,000 people “in 75 countries speaking 93 different language.”

In a podcast with Sam Harris he outlined his “ five levels of remote work “ which I thought was the best explanation of some of the subtle differences between different levels of remote work and I decided to break them down to help companies understand this journey.