Motivation in the Form of a Distributed Workforce
Welcome back to Monday everyone!
It’s the day after Mother’s Day, which means I’ve been spoiled for a day by my husband and kids and now have to figure out how to bring back my productivity this morning. I started by doing simple tasks - responding to emails, meeting minutes, and checking my social media platforms for any comments I need to respond to. Just when I was lulled into a sense of “I’ve got this!” I realized something…
I forgot about my Monday Motivational blog post!
After about an hour of racking my brain for motivation, a coffee run, and about a dozen articles from my Feedly list, I was frustrated. It’s not that I’m not motivated, I just couldn’t tell what was motivating me today.
On the 15th article I browsed through, I came across an article by Entrepreneur, titled “The Top TED Talks of 2019 So Far — and What You Can Learn From Tm Them”. Exhausted from reading, listening to a TED talk sounded like a good idea.
TED Talk to the Rescue
The TED talk I chose to listen to was “Why working from home is good for your business”, by Matt Mullenweg. Matt Mullenweg is the Co-founder of WordPress and the CEO of Automattic.
In his TED talk, he discussed the idea of a distributed workforce, rather than a standard workforce or a remote workforce.
To quickly catch you up:
Standard workforce = working in a physical location together.
Remote workforce = still have a standard workforce, but a portion of them work somewhere else.
Distributed workforce = there is no standard workforce. Everyone is working from their own selected locations. There is no “headquarter” in this workforce option.
This sparked my creativity instantly. I LOVE the idea of a distributed workforce, rather than using the term remote workforce. In his video, it even talks about how some of his employees are nomads, and work from a different location each day! They live in transit-homes (like RV’s, campers, vans, etc.) or explore the world through Air B&B’s. In Matt Mullenweg’s opinion, as long as they have a strong Wi-Fi connection, he doesn’t care where they work from!
Motivation for Expansion Planning
This TED talk certainly provided on the motivational aspect for me. Lately, I’ve been questioned as to when I’m going to expand and grow my business. I’m in high demand, and have individuals who want to work for me.
Thinking about expansion so early on, especially logistically, has been a struggle for me. I’ve been avoiding it, to some extent, because I’ve had multiple people saying I should have a physical location for people to come to. While yes, I understand the benefits of a physical location, my name is AK Lean VIRTUAL Assistance. Virtual is in my business name!
This TED talk inspired me that you really don’t need any physical headquarter to work out of. Thinking logically through this… Matt Mullenweg is the Co-Founder of Wordpress AND has a 100% distributed workforce with Automattic. If it can work for large companies like this, it can certainly work for a small business like mine.
