Companies can design themselves for distributed work.

The pandemic forced new models of work, like work-at-home and distributed work, onto companies in the US and in the world at large. In 2019, only six percent of workers in the US worked from home, and 75 percent had never done so. By fall 2020, around 54 percent of employed Americans were remote at least some of the time, and by the end of this year, that number could be over 70 percent.

This increase in remote work has enabled movement towards a distributed workforce, in which the office is simply one among multiple dispersed sites of labor.

Equipped with nearly three years of pandemic learning, we’re now able to see what a business can look like when it’s built for distributed work from the ground up. The aim is to enable new ways of working that take the specific properties of the internet as their starting point.

Understanding the distributed work model

“Remote” and “hybrid” are terms that primarily refer to the site of work. “Distributed” is more of a radical shift, reconceptualizing the company as a decentralized network of employees, each located in the physical place of their choosing.

While its details are yet to be fully defined, they’re forming around a basic fact: the default headquarters of the distributed company is cyberspace – what we call “Internet HQ.”

Internet HQ decouples economic opportunity from physical location so that geography ceases to be a barrier to entrepreneurship and companies can recruit the best talent for their needs even across borders. This enables companies to grow and thrive, even in geographic places previously considered to be on the margins.

Designing for distributed work

The adoption of distributed work struggled initially due to concerns about its overall feasibility. Separating work from a shared, centralized site seemed to put collaboration and productivity at risk. The COVID-19 crisis debunked these beliefs, demonstrating that workers can be just as productive, if not more so, when remote.

The first part of preparing for distributed work was to replace old ways of doing things with new functionality enabled by the internet. Businesses retrofitted their workflows with a patchwork of technologies, including team chat, internal forums, and video calls. The goal was to reconstruct the benefits of in-person work in an online environment.

Next, building an Internet HQ required leaders to think carefully about both the advantages and disadvantages of the internet, and then design workflows deliberately to utilize the benefits and mitigate the liabilities. These organizations view remote work not as an add-on, but as a fundamental design principle.

The distributed work stack

The business restrictions brought about by the pandemic have actually served at least one positive function, and that was forcing companies around the world to quickly discover how they were going to stay viable and productive with a virtual workforce. Over the years of the pandemic, a set of best practices has emerged, focusing around the essential functions that need to be in place for a distributed workplace to thrive.

Hiring

Distributed companies can assemble higher-quality teams at lower costs than their office-first peers and answer some of the top challenges in hiring. For example, how can companies create talent pipelines in new and unfamiliar markets? How can they assess both hard and soft skills with high fidelity at scale while avoiding bias?

An AI model can do the heavy lifting to address these challenges, searching across large databases of rigorously vetted candidates and ensuring that their skills and seniority match the needs of the role. AI ensures that the evaluation of all prospects is objective and standardized. Better still, the data gained during each step of the hiring process helps improve the model’s sourcing, scoring, and matching algorithms.

Such continuous, data-driven improvement is difficult, if not impossible, for legacy applicant-tracking systems, which often rely on clunky, resume-based keyword searches. By contrast, AI-powered platforms that are tailor-made for the globalized workforce can prove extremely powerful and greatly improve the quality of the candidates.

Enabling

“Enabling” refers to bringing the nuts and bolts of working life into the digital realm: communicating, connecting, and collaborating with colleagues, improving efficiency, etc. Recent years have seen an explosion of software-based tools that bundle these tasks for the digital workforce.

Yet these tools often struggle on multiple fronts. Chat applications, for example, have a major drawback, which is the impersonal nature of chat interactions. Text is often a thin substitute for in-person conversation, which includes the added signals of tone, body language, and eye contact.

This is where virtual event coordinators can come in to provide a more personal alternative to text communication. More than just video calls, these virtual events allow companies to encourage engagement with professional-grade online events, along with options for a combination of in-person and hybrid attendance when the occasion calls for it.

Managing

Though Internet HQ may be borderless, managing the teams of people becomes a challenge when each country has its own currency and constantly changing labor regulations. As a result, managing a distributed team can be very complex. While some companies are already stepping up to solve the challenges, there is still plenty of room for new startups and software that can smooth over this complexity by providing convenient, compliant HR, payroll, accounting, and tax operations.

Further challenges arise in managing the logistics of a distributed workforce, particularly regarding sending physical materials or equipment to an international team or arranging for in-person team get-togethers. That’s where startups that offer centralized management systems come in. These systems help companies manage access to and usage of whatever physical locations the company maintains for in-person events and collaboration.

While companies use these centralized management systems, the data on usage and employee satisfaction feeds back into the system, allowing businesses to identify what works and what doesn’t so they can optimize accordingly. Similarly, entrepreneurs can take advantage of a growing pool of products and services intended to personalize distributed work and promote cohesion among far-flung teams.

The work of the future

From established enterprises to new tech startups, the very concept of what a workplace can look like is shifting. Workplaces are just beginning to redesign themselves for distributed work and to utilize the technologies that can help enable more productivity from a global workforce. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for tech companies to align themselves to an Internet HQ model in the future.

Jonathan Siddharth is the CEO and Co-founder at Turing based in the San Francisco Bay area, California, US.