Originally presented at Camp UX, May 2022
In January 2020, most of us were still commuting. By May 2022, when I presented this at Camp UX, we had collectively spent two years pretending that remote work was a temporary inconvenience that would eventually resolve itself back into an open floor plan with a foosball table.
It is not going to do that. There has been an irreversible shift in where and how we work, and the organizations still treating distributed work as a workaround are going to keep struggling with the same problems on a loop.
Here is what I actually mean by distributed versus remote. Remote implies you are somewhere other than where the work happens. Distributed means the work happens wherever your people are. The first framing treats location as a problem to solve. The second treats it as a fact to design around. That distinction changes everything about how you structure communication, how you run meetings, and how you make decisions.
The Five Levels, and Why Most Teams Are Stuck at Level Two
In March 2020, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg appeared on Sam Harris’s Making Sense podcast and described what he called the five levels of distributed teams. I think about this framework constantly, because it gives language to something most teams feel but cannot articulate.
Level One: Non-Deliberate Action. Nothing has been done to support distributed work. People have a phone and email and can technically function for a day, but they will put everything off until they are back in the office. This is not a distributed team. This is a co-located team with an emergency plan.
Level Two: Recreating the Office Online. This is where most teams landed in 2020 and, honestly, where a lot of them still are. You have video conferencing and chat and email, but you have essentially dragged your in-person working habits into a digital environment. The result is a calendar full of meetings that should have been documents, a Slack that never turns off, and people who are technically remote but never actually get any focused work done.
Level Three: Adapting to the Medium. Organizations at this level start taking advantage of what distributed work actually offers. Shared documents that are visible and updated in real time. Written communication that creates a record of what was decided and why. The shift from verbal agreements to written ones. This sounds minor. It is not. Effective written communication is one of the highest-leverage skills a distributed team can develop.
Level Four: Asynchronous Communication. Most things do not require an immediate response. Most things. An async-first approach does not mean you never meet. It means writing is the default, meetings are purposeful, and people can work on a schedule that matches how they actually think. The research on this is consistent: giving knowledge workers uninterrupted time to think produces better decisions, better work, and less burnout.
Level Five: Nirvana. Mullenweg describes this as a distributed team that works better than any in-person team ever could, with an organizational culture and physical environment designed intentionally around how people do their best work. Very few organizations are here. It is worth pointing toward anyway.
The Honest Cons
I am not going to tell you async-first is perfect, because it is not.
Complex discussions are harder in writing. Sometimes you need to get on a call and work through a problem in real time because the back-and-forth of text is too slow and too prone to misunderstanding. Video is a legitimate tool. The problem is that most teams use it as the default rather than the exception.
Socializing is harder. The quick banter of a shared office, the hallway conversations, the ambient sense of what your colleagues are like as humans — all of that requires deliberate effort in a distributed environment. If you are a leader, this is your problem to solve. It does not solve itself.
Emergencies are real. When something is actually on fire, synchronous communication is the right tool. The key word is actually. Most things that feel like emergencies are not.
What You Can Actually Do
For managers and leads, the levers are: set norms, build documentation habits, and stop scheduling meetings that could be a document. Establish upfront that your team values focused work and that writing is how you communicate by default. Reinforce it consistently.
For individual contributors, the single highest-leverage thing you can do is think before you send. Ask yourself whether you can find the answer yourself before pinging a colleague. When you do ask, write in a way that is easy to read — concise, specific, and not requiring a synchronous response to understand.
When you do meet, meet well. Plan in advance. Have an agenda. Set a time limit. Rotate the inconvenient time zones rather than making the same person take the 7am call every week. Record anything that matters so the person who had to miss it can get up to speed without scheduling yet another meeting.
The Step Worth Taking
You do not have to get from Level Two to Level Five today. You just have to get to Level Three.
Take one thing from this post and try it. Add a decision log to your next project. Default to a document instead of a meeting once this week. Turn off Slack notifications for two hours and see what happens to your ability to think.
The shift to distributed work was not a temporary inconvenience. It was a chance to build something better. Most organizations are still deciding whether to take it.
Amber Hansford is a Director of UX based in Atlanta. She has led distributed design organizations at Logility, Paychex, and Deluxe, and has been organizing programming at Dragon Con for over 20 years. She writes about design leadership, DesignOps, and building teams that actually work.
