You have to fully commit.
The whole world is going “remote”. But, it is hard to tell if imany places are finding success in a more distributed working model. It is a tough transition. Much of it is because most workplaces continue to operate with the same way they’ve always had. Somethings need to change.
First, we have to understand a small nuance. It matters whether your company is doing remote work within the same time zone or not. If your company has no location diversity, sign up for Zoom and Slack — you’re good to go.
For most places, remote is a chance to transition to more location diversity and offer flexible working conditions. Remote work can still happen “live” if everyone has a large amount of overlap. However, as more locations or flexible work hours come into play, “asynchronicity” start to be hugely important.
Asynchronous work is very different to how live work happens. Meetings don’t work anymore. Key players find themselves being needed all times of the day, which is super stressful. Answers aren’t always a call away. Traditional means for workshopping and collaboration just doesn’t work!
Leaders, especially, find asynchronous work really tough. It is a new level of trust (or lack of control). Most leaders have built their career on being charismatic talkers. They prod, steer, influence and inspire their people through words… live. Asynchronous work means these things are no longer straight forward to achieve.
Only way to transition to working remote + asynchronously is to get onboard fully and lead the change. If the commitment is lacklustre, what you will find is that remote work has low yield. It will create a class system within the organisation. Priority and decision making will reside in co-located regions (“HQ” vs “remote” workers). It will naturally lead to the conclusion that remote setups don’t work.
To make an asynchronous workplace work, start by identifying what needs to be live. Be very selective. Live activities tend to be operational aspects of maintaining a product and management tasks like 1:1s. Think deeply about how to set these up in a distributed format.
For activities that don't need live interactions, start to formulate some basics around these:
- How do you communicate effectively in an asynchronously setting? (Read part 2)
- How do people find each other to collaborate?
- How do you move fast in a distributed environment when decision makers aren't in the same place?
Hope this gets you thinking 🤔. I'll follow up with my thoughts on the above questions soon.