CHAPTER FIVE

Your Digital House

DID YOU KNOW that there is an organized competition every year for—wait for it—memory? Since 1991, mental athletes worldwide have gathered to see who can memorize the most in a set amount of time—from shuffled decks of cards to unpublished poems to strings of binary numbers.¹

While we won’t be asking you to memorize anything in this book (you can always refer back at any time, we promise), there’s a hack that most memory champions rely on: the memory palace. Essentially, you visualize a familiar place, such as your house or neighborhood, and then you place the object you’re trying to remember in the order of the rooms. If you’re trying to remember a simple grocery list with milk, bread, and bananas, you might mentally place spilled milk in your hallway, a lounging loaf of bread on your couch, and a monkey eating bananas on your kitchen counter. The more outrageous, the better, says the memory champions.

This memory hack works because of a little thing called schemas: you’ve already recorded the layout of your house in your long-term memory. It’s much easier to recall new information, like a grocery list, when connected to a schema that already exists in your longterm memory.

THE DIGITAL HOUSE METAPHOR

Now, let’s apply this schema concept to work. We’re sure you’ve heard about the importance of documentation in remote work, but what is documentation exactly? It is not just notes scribbled in your notebook or a record of meeting notes with action items. In remote, documentation is so much more. It’s how people work together. It’s how complex processes work. It’s subtle work preferences. All of these add up to the point that documentation itself becomes a living, breathing member of the team.

But what type of documentation should be included? Where should it live? How is it created? These questions leave remote work managers stunned when starting their journeys—overwhelmed by trails of the information left every which way (or lack thereof).

It can all seem vague. That is until we sat down with Sara Robertson. She introduced us to the “Digital House” concept, and then it all clicked.

Once upon a time, when you worked in an office (and might still be today), you had a schema for what happens where, reinforced by physical cues. Meetings happened in the conference room. Emails were sent from your desk. Impromptu socialization occurred at the water cooler. And the receptionist at the front desk answered your questions, same as your direct report, three cubicles away.

As work transitioned away from the office and onto a screen, you probably noticed an information gap. Where is all the intel you would have picked up informally in the office? How can you keep track of everything now that it’s spread across so many tools, documents, and new communication channels, like Slack? When a calendar invite shows both Google Hangout and Zoom links, which should you click?

With remote work, you need to find a way to navigate your virtual world—both for yourself and for your team—similar to how you would in an office. To do that, you need a new schema to orient your digital work life. We call it “your Digital House.”

A Digital House, according to Sara, is where you work and where you get the information to do your work. It has “rooms” that hold specific types of information or documentation, like project management or team policies. “House Rules” promote behavioral norms within the Digital House.

The Benefits

While there is a lot of hype around cool tools for remote work, we believe it’s essential to understand the why before deciding on the how. We promise that doing this work up front will save a lot of confusion down the road!

According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Report 2021, 60 percent of workers’ time is spent on “work about work,” such as communication, coordination, searching for information, switching between apps, chasing status updates, duplicating efforts, and changing priorities. Work about work eats into your time to do skilled work. Workers report spending only 26 percent of their time on work they were hired to do.²

Let’s pause to make sure that sunk in: only a quarter of workers’ time is spent on the job they were hired to do! Not only is work about work wasted effort, but it increases fatigue and reduces motivation.

A Digital House will cut you out as the go-between, a prime work-about-work role. We promise that’s a good thing! It allows you and your team to do the work that matters most and use your skills.

Benefit #1: A Digital House Removes Dependencies

Although we’ve been working in a digital-first world for a while, sending emails and clacking away on computers, we still have not fully harnessed its power. What would it look like if we played to technology’s strengths? What if we let technology do what it’s best at: processing information? And let humans do what they’re great at: making meaning of that information?

In remote, information should never be the gatekeeper. Anyone anytime should be able to access the information necessary to do their job. It’s the key to unlocking the magic of remote work—remember those Five Levels of Autonomy?

You can do your job at night or during the day. You can do your assignment from Austin, Texas, or Melbourne, Australia. If you’re sick, the engine keeps running. If someone leaves your team, you may miss them, but they will not become the “single source of failure” for a project.

As Mike McNair aptly said about the phenomenon of a single source of failure, “People don’t leave their brains behind. All that’s left is what they’ve documented.”

We agree but acknowledge that it’s not always practiced. Tam still remembers a colleague emailing her about how to use a spreadsheet model that she made a year after she left the company. Tam wonders how much smoother off-boarding and knowledge sharing would have been if they’d had a company-wide Digital House in place.

A good rule of thumb is to build your Digital House so that your team could still function if someone left or if you never had a synchronous meeting again. (Though we still encourage synchronous meetings and interactions, especially for trust building and brainstorming; more on that later.)

Benefit #2: A Digital House Increases Visibility and Transparency

When Tam joined Automattic in 2017, she was astounded by the visibility and transparency across the organization. Never before in her career had she had this level of access. Besides confidential HR information, nearly everything was made public internally—whether that be a top-secret product release or investment conversations.

Automattic was able to do this because it had reimagined the concept of the meeting to fit a fully distributed company. All conversations were held on internal blog posts and in the comments sections rather than in real-time video meetings on Zoom or chatting in Slack.

This information added up, and Tam felt like she had a superpower. She no longer had to ask a ton of questions or search around through rushed documentation and poorly kept tracking spreadsheets to decipher partnership history. Instead, Tam could simply search for the partner’s name, such as Microsoft, and every post written since 2005 would pop up. She could even set alerts to see anytime a partner was mentioned—which was incredibly helpful in an organization with functional partnerships across product, ads, marketing, and design.

Tam remembers writing a presentation for their semiannual partnership meeting between executives at Automattic and Google and easily being able to detail every technical integration between the two companies over the previous decade. Through documentation, she could decipher what worked and what could have been better, which gave her ideas for improving the partnership going forward.

She could do this because Automattic’s culture encouraged making decisions out in the open and reinforced behavioral norms of regular documentation to make the invisible visible. Tam can remember, now fondly, the time that Matt Mullenweg, the CEO, scolded her for keeping a separate Google Doc with working notes. Within minutes, she copied and pasted everything onto an internal blog. (She assumes all is OK, given that he wrote the foreword.)

Remote powerhouses like Doist, Oyster, Zapier, Basecamp, DuckDuckGo, GitLab, and Human Made follow the same school of thought.

For example, Siobhan McKeown, the COO of Human Made, said, “We share everything that’s not HR. It’s important in remote work because it plays into accountability. If you can see the company’s numbers, you’re a part of creating the profit margins. . . . It helps people feel connected. It stops people from feeling like they’re isolated. People can see into the business. It makes them feel like a part of it, rather than itemized people.”

Not only is documentation hygiene a great practice for knowledge management, but it can foster trust and inclusion. Rachel Korb of Uizard honed in on the need for everything to be “remote-first” (even if hybrid) to create a truly inclusive organization. “This means defaulting to async first, documenting everything, keeping real-time meetings to a minimum (scheduled to include the majority of time zones and recorded for those who can’t make it). Key decisions are made online, so everyone is included. Performance is measured by results rather than hours worked. Processes and tools are designed to include all team members regardless of location. And people and information are equally accessible to all people.”

SPOTLIGHT STORY: Making a Mental Map

Tam was known for a few things at Automattic. Besides being one of the few females in their annual “Tall-matticians” photos at their company offsite, she had a knack for connecting dots across the organization and never dropping the ball.

Words like speed, responsiveness, diligence, and reliability dominated her performance reviews, which would seem normal if Tam were organized by nature. But if you ask her parents, organized is the last word they would have used to describe her. Her room was always a mess when she was a kid (and to be honest, it still is), and half-finished art projects were scattered across the game room. You could find her in the house by the trail of items, like her backpack or water bottles, all left in her wake.

So how can both of these things be true? Well, Tam took a tip from the London Black Cab drivers. To become a cabbie, drivers need to pass the “Knowledge of London” test, which requires memorizing thousands of streets, landmarks, and routes in central London. It generally takes three to four years to study, and guess what—their brains change. The hippocampus enlarges, due to the vast amount of navigational knowledge.

Likewise, Tam made a mental map of Automattic so that she could visualize the company’s inner workings. P2 (internal blogs) served as teams’ knowledge bases (often with fun names, like Hogwarts), and each individual had an avatar or profile image. She formed a mental map with roads between teams that cross-posted within each other’s knowledge bases. Landmarks became certain issues or topics that kept surfacing across the company, with familiar avatars attached.

This mental map came in handy while leading complicated cross-functional partnerships between Automattic (and its subsidiaries, like WooCommerce and Jetpack) and behemoths like Google and Amazon. It helped her keep track of dozens of integrations and touchpoints between the companies and the relevant stakeholders, from ad managers to developers to cloud specialists. All she needed was her mental map and internet access to remember who owned what and who needed to connect with whom.

Benefit #3: A Digital House Archives Team Identity

We love museums. There’s something magical about walking through curated histories of our world, whether that’s Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in the Tate Modern (truly terrifying) or the fashion collection in the V&A and the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum across the Thames.

According to anthropologists, there are five tenets of culture: symbols, language, beliefs, values, and artifacts. And as a team, you’ll be creating a subculture of your own that you’ll want to archive and preserve.

As Sara Robertson, who initially coined “Digital House,” told us, “The problem with digital is it’s imaginary. There’s nothing solid. There’s nothing fixed. It’s an idea in our heads, and it’s pixels showing up on the screen. As humans, we crave having home and identity.”

In digital, that place to belong can feel amiss. Likewise, there are no social cues. How are we expected to behave? Sara used the University of Edinburgh as an example. It’s clear what students do where: they listen in lecture halls, have free-form conversations in the hallways, and socialize over a pint or two. This isn’t by accident; it’s quite intentional. When new students arrive, the university puts a lot of thought into Welcome Week, introducing students to shared history and behavioral norms.

At Hotjar, they dedicate the first few weeks for new employees to onboarding. According to Ken Weary, “Dropping someone straight into their work might be what they’re hungry for, but it does not set them up for long-term success.” Instead, the company uses a self-guided process in Trello boards to orient new hires to “the company, our history, core values, culture, org structure and other foundational aspects of the company.”

With this in mind, as a manager, you’ll want to think about your team’s Digital House, not only as a way to share information but also as a cultural archive of all that your team was, is, and hopes to become. You can do this by creating artifacts, such as the RW Team Charter discussed in the last chapter, and discussing as a team which behaviors are acceptable. For example, casual conversations should happen in the #wtrclr (water cooler) Slack channel, and project management templates should be stored in the Library section of Notion.

MOVING IN: WHAT TO BRING

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of a Digital House, it’s time to discuss the big moment: Move-In Day. We assume you’re not coming empty-handed. Most likely, you already have software, documents, and systems that you’ve been using (or were assigned by your IT team).

Taking Inventory

We recommend auditing where all of these activities happen today—both within your team and cross-functionally across the organization.

You’ll want to note all the tools you are using. Think of these as the “rooms” within your Digital House, such as the following:

• Synchronous communication (examples: Zoom, Slack, conference calls, retreats)

• Asynchronous communication (examples: Slack, Loom, email, Google Docs)

• Project management (examples: Google Docs, Asana, Monday, Notion, Doist, Trello)

• Knowledge base (examples: Coda, Notion, intranet, field guides)

• Collaboration (examples: MURAL, Miro, Google Docs, Figma)

• Function-specific tools (examples: Canva, GitHub, Photoshop)

You should also include tool-agnostic templates that support your work. Think of these items as the furniture, and determine which rooms they belong in:

• Project management information (examples: templates, README guides, trainings)

• Team norms and policies (examples: RW Team Charter, HR policies)

• People management (examples: RW User Guides, directories, trainings)

• Culture (examples: glossaries, FAQs)

Think through all the rooms and pieces of furniture you have and want to keep.

Tidying Up

Now comes the fun part: tidying up your Digital House.

We expect you’ll find some room for improvements. For example, you may learn that your team uses several different platforms for videoconferencing or there’s no clear rule around when to communicate via email or Slack. You may find that information that should be contained in RW User Guides is scattered piecemeal across your Digital House (like personal calendars that show working hours and employees’ Slack bios listing their strengths and interests). As a team, harness your own inner Marie Kondo and decide what to keep and what to discard—thanking the tools, processes, and behaviors that no longer serve you.

HOW-TO: Checklist for Streamlining Your Digital House

  Audit where all the work happens today.

  Build a list of needs for your team (assuming you are starting from scratch).

  Compare what works and what doesn’t from your current tool set and the suggested rooms and furniture of your Digital House.

  Decide how to organize tasks, activities, and information in your Digital House going forward.

Of course, this might not be straightforward. In that case, we suggest prototyping a way of organizing for a set period of time and then coming back as a group and iterating.

Maintenance

Like a real house, your Digital House will need to be maintained. Therefore, develop good hygiene habits, like documenting, working in the open, and forgoing (or documenting) side conversations.

According to Ken Weary, “Our company and its culture is a living organism. There’s always change happening across the company, and when something changes, it’s very likely that the documentation also needs to change or be updated. . . . If we don’t update, then the team will begin to see the documentation as outdated and stop using it.”

You’ll also want to create a field guide or README that outlines where everything lives in your Digital House, so that team members can quickly get the information they need.

SPOTLIGHT STORY: How Tools Can Change the Way You Work

If you search stock photos for “collaboration,” you’ll find images of teams gathered around meeting room tables with colorful sticky notes lining the walls. But what’s the new mental model for collaboration in the remote world?

We spoke to Laïla von Alvensleben, the head of culture and collaboration at MURAL, to learn more about remote collaboration.

MURAL, at first glance, is a digital whiteboard with all the features you’d expect: sticky notes, diagrams, icons, digital markers, and even GIFs. But Laïla believes it’s more. The tool is changing the way people work. “I see collaboration as an exchange of ideas to create something.”

Bringing a digital whiteboard into your Digital House shifts old power dynamics. According to Laïla, “It’s changing structures within companies, and it also democratizes ideas. It’s more inclusive; as a canvas, anybody can come in and add their ideas. It’s not the loudest person in the room, or the person who’s standing by the physical whiteboard with a marker, who’s going to take control of the flip chart.”

The tools you select can reinforce (or negate) the behaviors you want to cultivate. How are your tools serving your goals? The next section will discuss how having explicit, intentional House Rules can make your tool set even more powerful.

HOUSE RULES: HOW TO ENGAGE

Now that you’ve sorted out where things live in your Digital House, it’s time to think about how to engage within the Digital House.

House Rules are agreed-upon standards that inform behavior within your working team through a series of tools, templates, processes, and norms. You can document House Rules in your RW Team Charter as a reference.

While it may be tempting to create detailed rules about everything, it’s a good rule of thumb for your House Rules to be few, easy to understand, and actionable.

Let’s explore an illustrative example: team announcements.

Imagine you’re the manager, and your team has started complaining about announcements. Announcements are being sent out willy-nilly—at all times, about all things, across all communication channels. Some people send a Slack message and tag “@all,” sending noisy notifications regardless of time zone. You have been sending announcements by email, only to discover that several of your teammates rarely check their work email unless chatting with someone outside of the company.

You sit down and note your team’s grievances. (Even the most minor things can add up!) Maybe you even observe what other teams do or read advice online. Feeling good about the direction forward, you create a list of House Rules to get this announcement problem under control ASAP and announce it, of course.

1. Announcements should only come from you, the manager, going forward.

2. If anyone has an announcement to make, they should create an Asana task and assign it to you by noon ET on the day of the announcement.

3. Announcements should have a descriptive title and a link to more-detailed information.

4. You will compile all the announcements and share at 1 p.m. Eastern time in a new #TeamAnnouncement channel in Slack, not tagging anyone.

5. Each announcement will have its own thread.

6. People should comment only within threads.

7. Emojis can be used to vote or take action on an announcement.

8. Announcements can be used for project updates, holidays, and company initiatives.

A week goes by, and still no improvement. The team still seems confused when you reference “House Rules” in the team meeting. Plus Slack and email are still a mess, with minor announcements throughout the day.

The problem? While the rules were actionable and specific, there were frankly too many of them and no buy-in from the rest of the team. A set of rules does not equal a behavioral change.

You decide to go back to the drawing board.

To create simple House Rules, it is crucial to clarify the intent (why is it important?) and the functionality (how will it work?).

In this scenario, you realize that it is vital to distinguish company, cross-functional, and team announcements.

You decide that company and cross-functional announcements should have the same House Rule. As a manager, you often have access to information that your team does not. Systematically sharing this information will keep employees in the loop of significant decisions and increase transparency and motivation.

Now that you’ve clarified your intent, it’s time to think through the functionality. How should you share company and cross-functional announcements with your team? You know you want to reach employees quickly and have visibility on who has read the announcement.

Let’s revise that simple House Rule:

1. For company or cross-functional announcements, I will post in our #Team-Announcements Slack channel, as needed, in written and video formats.

2. It will be pinned to the top of the channel until everyone has responded with a thumbs-up emoji that they have read the message.

3. All questions should be posted in the thread.

That’s more like it. They follow the criteria: few, easy to understand, and actionable.

You then realize that announcements coming from the team often are on a few topics (availability, personal updates, and project management). Therefore, you can create House Rules to incorporate the announcement content into existing habits. Here are some examples:

• Team availability: Share in the “Team Meeting” tasks in Asana on Mondays. Block holidays or breaks longer than four hours in your calendar.

• Personal updates: Share asynchronously in the stand-up thread kicked off by you every Tuesday and Thursday in the #Team Slack channel.

• Project management: Share status updates weekly on Fridays (at a minimum) as a comment on the project task in Asana.

These simple House Rules will help your team work in predictable ways. They reinforce standard operating behaviors of culture, build trust, and remove the mental overhead of work about work. But remember, your job as a manager is to mirror the behaviors you want to see (and gently remind those not following the House Rules as they develop new habits).

Good guidelines should help, not hinder, your team’s ability to perform. Jaclyn Rice Nelson from Tribe AI approaches guidelines with a question: “How can we make it easy for people to plug in?” Jaclyn has found that you’re not cramping their style by giving them guidelines. “You’re making it easier for them to do their best work.”

SPOTLIGHT STORY: Automattic’s Simple Rules

Remember how Tam started to create mental maps of where things lived digitally at Automattic? It wasn’t just her visualization that kept things running smoothly. The entire company kept it simple by using their own product, the blog platform P2, as the main tool for communicating, sharing knowledge, and getting the work done. Even still, there were a few House Rules, according to Tam, that helped make Automatticians feel more at home when approaching their work. For example:

1. Slack is for quick, casual conversations, either work related, personal (vacation time), or conversational (workday banter and jokes). To prevent always-on behavior, they used “AFK” in their Slack statuses to indicate that they were “away from the keyboard” and would not be responding immediately.

2. P2 (internal blogs) is for official communication. It replaces both the meeting and email. Comments and likes serve as collaboration.

3. Email is for external use only (e.g., partnerships and sales teams).

4. Zoom is the preferred video call tool. If external facing and regularly taking Zoom calls with partners, work in a time zone with at least two hours that overlap in both Pacific time and Eastern time.

HOW-TO: Your Digital House in Action

Now that you have completed your audit, tidied up, and created House Rules, let’s make it official! You can use the chart that follows to document your Digital House and share it as the final map with your team (table 5.1).

TABLE 5.1 RW Digital House Template

But it doesn’t end there! Make sure you follow your own House Rules and continue to refine your Digital House going forward. (Plus, this Digital House chat is excellent practice for building your documentation muscles and summarizing final decisions for future reference.)

SPOTLIGHT STORY: Cody’s Digital House at Zapier

When we asked Cody Jones of Zapier to describe their Digital House, he immediately commented on their culture. They love technology and tinkering. “Honestly, it’s changing all the time. We love SaaS [software as a service], which means, unfortunately, we have every tool you could possibly imagine. We’re getting better, though, using certain tools for certain jobs to be done.”

Let’s walk through Cody’s Digital House at Zapier together.

Communication Tools

According to Cody, “Slack is how we do business. I do not use email. Slack is the backbone of our organization.” They encourage everyone to use the public channels (cue transparency) instead of DMs (direct messages). They even set up x-company Slack channels with specific partners while working on a collaboration or integration.

Similar to Tam’s experience at Automattic, Zapier uses a form of internal blogging called Async. “Async is where company decisions, Friday updates, and everything else you need to read are shared and commented on.”

Project Management

Like all good tech companies, Zapier “dogfoods” their product called Zaps.³ “A lot of our team meetings, rituals, documents, and documentation are through Zapier.”

Cody especially likes to use Zaps to encourage organization, rituals, and norms within his team. He’ll create a Zap to automatically make a new document with a specific template for a meeting. It will then notify his team on Slack, reminding them of the upcoming meeting and prompting the team to fill out the information in their assigned sections. On the day of the meeting, the Zap sends out the Zoom link and the document with the agenda. Everything is ready to go!

According to Cody, “Half of the battle is consistency in documentation. This automates it, so you don’t have to worry about building the habit. The automated habit creates all the documented artifacts, and the artifacts save us tons of time in the future.”

House Rules

Their norms have evolved since the early days. “Everything was on Async. You had to do your Friday update, and it could never be a video. No verbal anything. It was all written.”

As for Slack, initially the rule was “Anything goes,” but over time they added “specific norms for Slack on response times, what’s appropriate versus what isn’t, and DMs versus public.”

And while this is how Cody’s Digital House at Zapier looks today, it might have an extra room or a fresh coat of paint by the time this book is published.

Table 5.2 shows how Cody and his team could document their Digital House using the chart template:

TABLE 5.2 RW Digital House—Zapier Spotlight Story

Not only will this exercise help you share the information effectively, but also it will ensure that your Digital House doesn’t have the digital equivalent of a leaky roof or broken plumbing.

We recommend that you revisit this chart quarterly to make sure the information is up-to-date and create a digital copy in your version of your team’s knowledge base.

ALI’S ADVICE

I am a big fan of “working out loud.” Don’t wait until you have a perfect rough draft before sharing publicly with your team. Create a first draft, share and ask for feedback, and then iterate within the tool.

Working in this public way is faster and prevents duplicated efforts and time wasted perfecting too early. There should be a “single source of truth”—not different copies for different people. That’s one of the benefits of the Digital House: promoting transparency and collaboration.

TAM’S TIPS

It can be a hassle to keep up with documentation. Instead, make documentation a part of your workflow.

For example, Ali and I do most of our project planning in Asana, using “tasks” to document meeting notes and “projects” to contain our projects (obviously). We write and plan workshops in Google Docs, using comments and version history to track changes.

Our work is de facto documented—which means we’re not wasting time retyping notes—part of the beauty of asynchronous communication!

I specifically like a rule of thumb that Jason Morwick mentioned in his interview: You know your documentation game is on point when you can answer a colleague’s question with a link where they can find the answer—already written.