Two Companies, One Clear Lesson
Automattic (WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Jetpack) and Zapier (automation platform) are two of the most successful fully-distributed companies in the world. Combined, they employ approximately 4,000 people across 80+ countries, have built products used by hundreds of millions of people, and have never required employees to come to an office.
Their approaches differ in several ways, but their core lesson is identical: remote culture is built through deliberate design, not accident.
Automattic's Approach: Writing as the Culture
Automattic runs on P2 - an internal blog platform (built on WordPress) where employees post updates, decisions, ideas, and even personal reflections. Everything important at Automattic is written and public within the company. This creates a searchable, persistent record of organizational knowledge.
Key practices at Automattic:
- P2 for everything: Product decisions, team updates, retrospectives, and even celebrations happen in writing on P2
- Trial projects: All new hires complete a paid trial project before their first day. Reduces hiring risk and demonstrates async capability
- Grand Meetup: Once a year, all ~2,000 Automattic employees meet in person. The rest of the year: fully async
- No required hours: Employees can work whenever they're most productive, in any time zone
- Maturity with autonomy: "We're all adults" is a genuine cultural value. Micromanagement is explicitly anti-cultural
Zapier's Approach: Async as Competitive Advantage
Zapier has been fully remote since its founding in 2011. Unlike Automattic, Zapier has been more systematic in publishing its remote work practices - their "How We Work" documentation and public blog posts have been widely studied by remote work researchers.
Key Zapier practices:
- No Slack for decisions: Decisions happen in Notion or GitHub - not in Slack. This prevents critical information from disappearing in chat history
- Default to documentation: "Default to documenting it" is a core value. Everything that matters gets written down
- Async first, meetings last: Meetings require a written agenda and written outcome. No agenda = no meeting
- Benefits designed for remote life: $400/year for books and learning, $150/month health & wellness, annual retreats, and a home office stipend
- Video office hours: Managers hold open async video sessions where anyone can drop in - replaces the "pop by the desk" dynamic
Shared Success Metric
Both Automattic and Zapier consistently report employee retention above 90%, with Glassdoor ratings above 4.5. Their fully-distributed model isn't a compromise - it's a competitive advantage for attracting and retaining exceptional talent.
What Any Remote Team Can Apply Today
- Pick one written tool as your "source of truth" (Notion, Confluence, internal blog) and commit to it
- Require written agendas and outcomes for every meeting, no exceptions
- Make key decisions in the written tool, not in Slack or email
- Schedule one annual in-person event - even 3 days together dramatically improves remote team cohesion
- Hire for async communication skills, not just technical skills. The two are equally important remotely.
Bottom Line
Automattic and Zapier demonstrate that fully distributed teams can outcompete co-located peers at the highest level. Their secret isn't any single tool or policy - it's a genuine organizational commitment to writing, documentation, and async as the default mode of work. The practices above aren't complex. They just require consistent execution.