The Future of Work is Written

If you’re going to have an article title like that, it better be a good read.  

Fortunately software engineering leader Juan Pablo Buriticá’s piece for Stripe’s Increment magazine on this topic is as eloquent and engaging as you would hope, taking in the history of remote work via the Catholic church, NASA and IBM.  If that sounds like your type of thing, check out the full piece.

Amid the story-telling though, we can pick out some valuable advice for any team looking to evolve their culture to one where writing plays a greater part in communication.

It has taken nearly 2 years, but many companies are waking up to the fact that moving all that informal office communication into formal virtual meetings has been a disaster for people’s diaries and mental health.  The answer is shifting some of it instead into writing, and Buriticá has some thoughts.

• Dependence on proximity is a weakness: if you can’t work effectively when distributed, then your team will always be vulnerable when there isn’t a physical, temporal, and/or cultural overlap (as has been forced on many businesses in the past 18 months).  A team which can operate whilst distributed is a far more resilient one - whether to a pandemic, or just the fact that half the team want to attend a conference that afternoon. 

• Decision-making will improve: good decision-making is ‘enabled by access to relevant information, good judgment, and agency to decide.’  The right documentation structures should ensure that everyone has the information they need, when they need it. When thinking about your own writing culture, think about the decisions that need to be made and how you can most effectively get the relevant information to where it needs to be.
  

• Collaboration needs managing: it’s not as simple as creating spaces for teams to share ideas in writing and then assuming it will just ‘work’.  Documents and threads can become at best unwieldy, and at worst, areas where some participants feel unsafe contributing.  These spaces need individuals who are responsible for their management, ensuring that ideas are nurtured and shared in an effective and safe way.

• Someone has to do all the reading: the solution is not to write everything down.  As he says, ‘If reading every message and document is important, then nothing is really that important.’  Employees shouldn’t have to work out whether a document is relevant, or where to find the most up to date version.  Build documentation processes with this in mind. 

• This could be a full time job: as Buriticá notes, given the benefits of doing this well, it’s not outlandish to suggest that in future we could see full-time jobs dedicated to evolving and marshalling writing culture at companies.  He mentions ‘librarians’ of company documentation. Whilst this is unlikely to be applicable to your team at this stage, it gives an indication of both the immense gains to be realised from a written culture, but also the effort in making the change.

• It’s not about replacing human interaction: even in a piece claiming that the future of work is written, Buriticá still acknowledges that some forms of work are better in-person, and we should acknowledge those and nurture those too. 

If you’d like to start moving more of your communication to writing, you’ll find our manager’s guide to writing here.