Aug 17, 2021

Async: The Remote Unlock 🔧 - Issue #3

By How Remote Works • Issue #3 • View online

Hi everyone,

welcome to the third issue of our bi-weekly newsletter about remote work.

This time we dive into asynchronous workflows and why they can solve communication problems in your remote team.

Physical Distance: The Fog of Remote Work 😶‍🌫️

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic more and more people started working remotely 👇

(source: https://econ.st/3xPyR6T)

This particular figure shows that a majority of developers is permanently remote.

But many other functions like sales, customer service, marketing, finance, etc. are also moving out of the office space.

This can cause problems 👇

Philip Herrmann

@PhilipHerrmann3

@artlapinsch @andreasklinger @darrenmurph i think distributed is the most complicated because it can be such a wide spectrum.
- majority is co-located and a few are remote
- the remote ones are close to location or not
- etc.

10:48 AM - 12 Aug 2021

To understand the root cause of many problems it helps to look at “remote” in more fidelity.

One dimension we can unpack is physical distance 👇

Michael Taylor

@hammer_mt

Yes, 100% this! Way before remote work was popular (or even allowed) I worked with companies where the majority of my colleagues weren't on the same floor or in the same building - it felt exactly like remote feels now. From https://t.co/yF1tIspwFF by @artlapinsch https://t.co/z0ZxeWMzaJ

11:23 PM - 11 Aug 2021

⚠️** The screenshot above is an excerpt from my in-depth email-based course about remote team leadership.

Sign up via this link and you will receive the first email for free.

…

Bottomline: Physical distance can cloud communication.

There’s a best practice at the world’s best-run remote companies to solve for this 👇

Asynchronous Work: "The Remote Unlock" 🔧

This tweet hits the nail on its head:

Tiago Forte

@fortelabs

Making work remote without also making it asynchronous only makes it worse. You get the isolation of working alone without the benefit of control over your schedule

6:55 AM - 12 Nov 2020

Let’s talk through three practical examples for a team of 5 people:

#1: Update Meeting

Teams should be on the same page:

[Sync] Meeting: Meet via video call for 30 minutes to give spoken updates.
[Async] Written Note: Written update into team chat tool. Every individual contributor writes an update in a standardized format. Team members reply via 👀 when they have read it.

#2: Brainstorming

Creative work benefits from the brain trust:

[Sync] Meeting: Meet via video call for 120 minutes to discuss and brainstorm.
[Async] Collaborative Document: Create a shared document (Google Doc; Google Sheet; Miro Board; etc.) and individual contributors collaborate at their own schedule.

#3: Candidate Interview

Hiring processes are needed to evaluate candidate quality:

[Sync] Real-time Case Study: Recruiter and candidate spend 30-60 minutes to go through case study questions together.
[Async] Self-paced Test: Candidate goes through an automated recruitment flow and receives a realistic case study to complete at their own schedule. My friend Mike wrote a fantastic blog post outlining Ladder’s recruitment process.

…

Synchronous work locks in time of all participants.

Asynchronous work unlocks time for all participants.

Art Lapinsch

@artlapinsch

@PhilipHerrmann3 @andreasklinger @darrenmurph agreed.

that's why async is a true unlock.

physical distribution matters less once async is in place.

once that genie is out of the bottle it's tough to go back 🧞‍♂️

4:51 PM - 12 Aug 2021

You can rethink workflows for your team via this sequence:

📝 Create a list of all meetings and workflows
⛳️ Write the desired outcome of those meetings and workflows
❌ Cancel all meetings and workflows where there is no clear outcome to unlock time
🔎 Audit all meetings and workflows with a clear outcome to see how you can re-design it into an asynchronous workflow

Here’s another example of how GitLab uses asynchronous communication 👇