Over the next few weeks, Ars Technica will be running a series of articles on the future of work. They’ve started off with a long and detailed article on working remotely at Ars Technica. Actually, working at Ars Technica means working remotely because they have an all digital newsroom. The entire editorial staff works remotely—there is no physical editorial office. Ars Technica is owned by Condé Nast, which does, of course, have offices and which takes care of the business side of things—things like sales, marketing, legal, and HR. That leaves the editorial staff free to concentrate on finding and writing stories. The folks at Ars Technica are used to the arrangement; They’ve been operating that way for 20 years.
The editorial staff at Ars Technica enjoys remarkable autonomy. Each member chooses his own technology and is not forced into using a company standard. Their choices do, of course, have to support the common applications that the staff uses but there aren’t very many of those. They use WordPress as their CMS so writers can use whatever tool they choose to write their copy and then upload it to WordPress.
Oddly, rather than use one of the shiny new communication apps, Ars Technica depends on email for most of its day-to-day communication. That has the advantage of providing a permanent record of “conversations” as well as not ripping a writer out of flow by demanding their immediate attention. They use Gmail because it works with all of the systems that the staff uses.
They also use Slack and spreadsheets to keep track of who’s doing what and stories in progress. The article has a long section on their workflow, which I found very interesting. There’s a lot more in the article so be sure to take a look if you’re interested in remote work.
The Ars Technica example is particularly interesting to me because they’re an edge case: they’re not an “also-remote workplace” or a “remote-first workplace”, they’re a “remote-only workplace.” My take is that all-in-all that makes things easier. There’s no “office people are more tuned in” problems or the other difficulties of that sort. It’s really matter of having some agreed upon technology for communication and some simple procedures to make everyone work for the common goal.