During my recent summer from hell, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a lovely chronic illness that involves my immune system trying to destroy my colon. This resulted in three months away from work, time in the hospital, and a lot of being stuck in the nearest bathroom. I missed major events, projects, and plenty of the everyday flow that normally keeps me plugged in. Luckily, I didn’t dread my return to work because of how my workplace, Automattic, handles day-to-day communication.
Automattic is a fully distributed company. Long before the pandemic made remote work fashionable, we had people working from their kitchens, co-working spaces, and neighborhood coffee shops across time zones. The way we make that possible is primarily through asynchronous communication. Synchronous, or near-synchronous, Slack and video calls exist, but our center of gravity is our internal blogs powered by P2. Every team has one, they’re created by default, and anyone can subscribe, receive digests, or skim AI-generated summaries. The principle is simple: if it matters, it gets put in P2. It’s so embedded in our culture that Slack threads or calls will often end with an enthusiastic, “P2 it!”
When I came back from medical leave, that system was everything. Instead of scrambling to reconstruct weeks of missed conversations through back-channel DMs or hallway chats I wasn’t present for, I opened my inbox. My setup is straightforward: I use Airmail to funnel P2 notifications, in real time for some blogs and daily or weekly digests for others. Anything that mentions me by name gets tagged with a bright red “to-do.” That meant I could clear the noise, focus on what directly involved me, and then dig into posts from my team and other divisions at my own pace. It still took a few days to get caught up, but I wasn’t guessing at what was important or relying on someone else’s memory of a meeting. The record was all written down.
That may sound like a convenience, but for people with chronic illness, disabilities, or caregiving responsibilities, it’s something closer to a lifeline. Without systems like this, being out (fully or partially) means being left behind. You return as a second-class citizen, basically catching up from the sidelines while decisions have already moved on without you. In companies that default to synchronous communication, presence equals power. If you’re not on the call, you’re not in the conversation, and if you’re not in the conversation, your input doesn’t count. At Automattic, that’s not the case.
I won’t pretend that a communication system alone can fix every inequity in the workplace, but it’s a strong first step. This async-first approach to communication is a very real way to ensure accessibility in the workplace. It isn’t a benefits page touting “unlimited time off” while intrinsically penalizing anyone who dares to use it. It isn’t a statement about flexibility with no structure to back it up. Accessibility needs to be built into the day-to-day, from the design of how information moves to how decisions are recorded. This allows anyone to step in or out, whatever the reason, without losing their voice.
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