The Future of Work is Asynchronous and The Death of a Meeting
Last year proved that working remotely isn’t just a fad for some other hip companies that definitely don't work for us. Or something that you did once or twice a month and felt slightly guilty the whole day (“I’m working, I promise”).
“If an employee is working at home and no one is around to witness it, does she really work?” — is a philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding work and leadership.
During the last 12 months, I have been to the office for maybe a week’s worth of days in total. Metrics still move in the right direction, the organization has not imploded.
While there are some concerns regarding maintaining corporate culture in remote work and some still refuse to give up the office. Remote work has been a success! The majority of organizations will probably never return to the 100% office work.
There are still many issues yet to be solved regarding remote work. Working conditions at home, psychological issues etc. Most of the problems associated with remote work (in my opinion) are caused by doing office activities remotely. Zoom lunches and online team building events are fun but awkward, especially for generations not grown up with chat, discord and online gaming. This extends also to other work-related activities that just moved online without much change. The jury is still out there whether or how we will solve these remote related issues but the upside is immense.
What this means to organizations is that their potential talent pool is no longer limited by reasonable commute times to and fro office. The same applies for individuals, the potential job market is now your timezone +/- few hours. This is a huge difference!
Having an office is also a major cost component and similarly to insect exoskeletons physical offices are rigid, they present some limits to growth. The cramped office must be shed and replaced like an exoskeleton in order to grow.
The timezone requirement is important because it enables real-time meetings or customer interactions (support, sales, etc) during office hours.
Asynchronous work
If transitioning from the office to remote provides a larger pool of talent limited only by timezones and assuming the gains from that outweigh the cons. Then the next logical step would be to think about how might we go even further and eliminate the limits of timezone requirement altogether? The benefit would be that there would be very few limitations (e.g. language barrier) looking for talent. There would also be lots of advantages for employees. You live somewhere with nasty winters and want to work from somewhere warm on the opposite side of the globe? Sure, why not. Or your dream job is on another continent but you have a life and support network here.
This is just one aspect. Working asynchronously needs an organization to have processes and agreements in place to document and work differently. All important information must be written down. This needs constant fine-tuning to get it right, and will, in turn actually improve the quality of communication, alignment and transparency in the organization.
Companies that have started up with members around the globe work this way natively, it's already in their blood from birth. Incumbents need to change and change is always hard, especially one concerning culture and norms.
Instead, a move toward this type of working means a more core transformation within the company — changing its “culture and norms”
The first thing organizations need to reduce or replace (to enable async work) are real-time meetings.
The death of a meeting
As a product manager, my role is providing clarity, gathering input, communicating product roadmap and so on. All these activities require a quick meeting, but they shouldn’t. Moving my mouth is the least effective means of sharing information and in many cases, the same information must be communicated multiple times with a different set of stakeholders. This is probably true for other similar product or project roles in any organization. Good product management also requires lots of hands-on work — working with metrics, analyzing the data, talking to customers, sketching mockups and deep thinking time. The quality of this work depends on the quality of undisturbed work time.
It's common in nordic corporate culture, that meetings are the way of reaching consensus and decision making. Abnormal excessive amounts of meetings with no end.
“förankringsprocessen” — the consensus process in Sweden
For these types of organizations, the change towards fewer meetings will be hard or even impossible without a major shakeup. This cannot be achieved with incremental improvement but by implementing completely different rules of working. Everything that is important must be written down in a way that is usable for others. Consensus and decision-making process must happen differently. If the discussion moves from a real-time meeting to an endless chain of e-mails or corporate chat rooms then this is even worse than the meeting. Going meetingless and async means that you need to rethink the whole working process and roles around it.
This is not a dream
There are already success stories. I recommend following Marek Sotak, the CEO of InlineManual who has gone 100% async and meeting free with his company.
And there are many others who are already there or going!
Remote work has been the norm at Buffer for many years now; we ditched our office in 2015 and have been hiring remote teammates since 2011. We now have over 85 teammates spread across 10 different time zones.
If this gives organizations a competitive edge in the terms of talent, quality of work and efficiency then natural selection will take care of the rest.
