Remote work really exploded when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Everyone had to adjust to working from home, relying on Zoom and Slack and other collaborative tools much more. But beyond tooling, there’s also process. Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, has famously been a proponent of distributed work for a while.

Paolo Belcastro peels back the curtain to share how the 1,500 or so global employees of Automattic stay connected via two core principles:

There are two ideas that define our communication culture:

Radical Transparency: we default to openness, with every conversation accessible to everyone in the company. Asynchronous by Design: we don’t expect everyone to be “on” at the same time.

Everything is written down:

Our internal platform, P2, started life as a WordPress theme (it was called Prologue, later updated to version 2 and eventually shortened to P2) that lets people post directly on the front end of a site—fast, simple, and visible to everyone. Over time it evolved into a network of thousands of P2s for teams, projects, and watercooler chats (couch surfing, classified ads, house renovations, babies, pets, music, or games, we kind of have it all).

…

Every post, every comment, every decision ever made in the history of Automattic is preserved there.

As you can imagine, it soon becomes a volume problem. There’s too much stuff.

No one can read everything.

That’s why onboarding is designed to help people adapt:

• Each newcomer is paired with a mentor from a different team, to give them a cross-company perspective.
• They receive a curated list of “milestone posts” that map the history of Automattic, along with role-specific threads relevant to their work.
• The Field Guide offers principles, templates, and advice about how to handle communication.

Somehow, they make it work.