Effective Remote Work Requires Asynchronous Communication
Buy the rumor, sell the news
Welcome back to Buy the Rumor, Sell the News. Welcome to the five new subscribers since the last issue. Buy the Rumor, Sell the News collects my periodic thoughts on finance, technology, entrepreneurship, the intersection of those topics, and other topics that strike my fancy. If you want to connect with me, the best way to do so is to follow me on Twitter.
In this issue: quick thoughts on why asynchronous communication is so important in remote work.
Whenever the topic of remote work is raised, inevitably someone who has had a bad experience with it, or who knows someone who had a bad experience with it, objects to it being a trend. “There’s no way remote work will continue,” our skeptic says. “Whenever people do it, they end up being sidelined in their careers. No, you have to be in the office, dealing with people face to face.”
While I don’t doubt that there are some jobs for which face time is a requirement, it’s not true that all jobs require that you put face time in. Face time is a function largely of culture. If an employer’s culture is such that face time is a non-negotiable requirement, remote working probably won’t work, and the skeptics’ objections are warranted.
However those who advocate for remote work are not interested in working for employers who don’t know how to do it. If your only experience with working remotely is when doing so for a company that manages remote workers ineptly, of course you’re going to hate the idea, and be skeptical of the claim that it will become more common in the months and years ahead.
What a lot of people miss about remote working is that there is a right way to go about it, and a wrong way. And it turns out that one of the most important things to do when managing remote employees is to embrace asynchronous communication. Gitlab, one of the largest all-remote companies, has an extensive handbook about how to manage a remote workforce. It has this to say about asynchronous communication:
In an all-remote setting, where team members are empowered to live and work where they’re most fulfilled, mastering asynchronous workflows is vital to avoiding dysfunction and enjoying outsized efficiencies and lifestyle flexibility. Asynchronous communication is the art of communicating and moving projects forward without the need for additional stakeholders to be available at the same time your communique is sent.
Elsewhere, Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp, another all-remote company, writes:
Group chat as the primary method of communication across a group or organization leads to…
Mental fatigue and exhaustion. Following group chat all day feels like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda….
An ASAP culture….But chat conditions lead us to believe everything’s worth discussing quickly right now, except that hardly anything is….
Fear of missing out or not having a say. If you’re not paying attention all the time, you won’t be able to have you say when something comes up….
In short, companies that don’t let remote employees work asynchronously set themselves and their employees up for failure. If you’re looking to establish a set of remote working principles for your employees, make sure your company embraces asynchronous communication so that employees may be productive, rather than reactive. If you’re an employee looking for a remote work gig, make sure that the companies with whom you interview understand why asynchronous communication is a necessary part of any remote work set up.