I tried sharing these studies at my ex employers in Europe hoping they'd spare me the hellish 40 minute commute in stop/start traffic and they weren't interested at all.<p>Management there only values <i>"butt time in seats"</i> and the ability to come over and interrupt you by tapping you on the shoulder whenever they need something.<p>As one of my ex CEOs put it: <i>"If I don't see my employees stressing out at thier desks I get the impression they're not working."</i><p>Until we get over this psychological attachment of management loving to visually see their slaves on the open office plantation through their private panopticon[1] offices, remote won't take off no matter how many studies get published.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon</a>
I work remotely.<p>I've noticed that one thing that make me work harder than in an office, is that I feel that I need to earn the trust that my employer gives me. In an office, sometimes I feel that just being there is enough to justify my salary, even if I'm just chatting with colleagues or browsing the web. I discipline myself better when I work remotely.<p>Another thing that makes a difference for me: I suffer from back pain when sitting in a chair for too long. At my place, I can lie down if needed.<p>On the downside, I suffer from being far from where decisions are taken, and I sometimes miss important information.
Since remote work seems to be the topic this article on async communication spawned I wanted to throw this out there for reactions.<p>First off let me acknowledge that some people prefer remote work and also say up front I do not.<p>I recent YouAreNotSoSmart podcast interviewed Laurie Santos from Yale and if I understood her research basically claims we often both individually and as a society choose things we think will make us happy but actually don't. Examples seemed to include anything that takes you away from people. One example was the ATM machine. It's more convenient than a bank teller but interacting with the teller adds to your quota of needed interaction for happiness. Things like the fact that you can order a Starbucks coffee on your phone and pick it up with no interaction as another tiny example. I'm sure those were minor examples but she was basically claiming we're often inadvertently choosing things that actually make us less happy.<p>For me I prefer in office work because I want to be around other people. I want them to interrupt me too. Not 100% of the time but I enjoy the camaraderie, the conversations, going over solutions together, etc...<p>So in that context, is it possible the push for remote work fits in that line? We think it will make us happy but it for many people it will have the unintended consequence of isolating them and actually make them less happy.<p>I'm not saying you shouldn't be given the choice. Maybe you are different. Maybe you have special needs (someone you need to take care of for example) or maybe you're remote location has family or friends around. But, if Laurie Santos is correct then maybe a large percent of people are actually making a bad choice?<p>PS: I don't know if I trust her research. I'm only passing on my interpretation what I though she said in the interview.
The issue I often have with discussions of remote work vs. on-site, is how much confirmation bias tends to be incorporated into the conclusions made.<p>After about 16 years of on-site work (at various jobs), I did almost 5 years of remote work (for a single company), having just recently returned to an in-office role (despite focusing on landing another remote position, the best opportunity wasn’t.)<p>And, frankly, I find neither inherently, categorically superior. It has far more to do with a number of unique variables, among them: culture, software tools, and the people themselves.<p>So while I do largely agree with the core argument of the linked post (roughly summarized: asynchronous communication helps facilitate productivity for knowledge workers), I also feel too much emphasis is placed on working remotely as inherent in part of the solution.<p>How about we just teach and incentivize people to, for example, not interrupt others unnecessarily, how to recognize when someone may be deeply focused on a task, how to indicate such an effort is currently underway, plus to recognize when it may be appropriate, necessary, and healthy to stop the “deep work“ and address communal, biological, and psychological needs? All regardless of the exact mode of the work.
Sometimes I wonder if the underlying issue is that there isn't enough actual work for people to do. I worry that I'm about to sound super out of touch, but hear me out; I'm not making a value judgement about anyone's job.<p>It is assumed that everyone needs to do exactly 40 hours of work per week, but ask yourself this: for every person in your company, what do their next 40 hours look like? 40 hours worth of HR policies need to be created. 40 hours worth of sales calls need to be made. 40 hours worth of snacks need to be ordered for the office. 40 hours worth of website text updates need to be made. 40 hours worth of UIs need to be designed. 40 hours worth of code needs to be typed in. Isn't it strange that all these vastly different tasks take the same number of hours to complete in a week? My guess is that chattin' is what takes up whatever time remains; people are required to pretend that they do 40 hours of work every week, so they come up with their own way of filling the time. Planning is always valued (and a good idea!), so if you report "yeah I spent the week planning for our Q3 XXX" then it sounds like the money spent on your salary was worth it, and it continues to pay.<p>As a software engineer, I've never had the problem of not having enough work to do. Tasks are always added to the backlog at a faster rate than they are removed from the backlog. But I feel like a lot of other jobs aren't like this, and the "there is infinite work forever!" thing is most prevalent in fields like engineering, design, art, fabrication, etc.<p>Meanwhile, most of the people in your average office aren't doing any of those things. To some extent, they're on retainer, waiting for their skills to be needed. And, trying to optimize this is perilous. If you get employee utilization up to 100%, people complain loudly (Amazon fulfillment center workers aren't sending 1000 Slack messages a day). If you try to not pay people for the time periods where they're not being utilized, you just get the "gig economy" which is awful.<p>I dunno, it all makes very little sense to me. Sometimes I wonder what percentage of the US economy is about doing work that doesn't need to be done, and how many people would not have jobs if we decided "we're not paying for this anymore". I think I'm scared about it, though.
This is amusing. Not long ago I was in a thread about how to do remote work well and the top complaint amongst remote workers was "not responding quickly to IM" (<i>between</i> remote workers). And the general sentiment was the expectation to respond quickly is greater in remote work. That alone made me not want to take remote jobs. At my current work place, my IM status says that whoever IM's me should not expect a response and that if their query is urgent, they should simply walk over to my cube and talk (I don't mind). If not urgent, they should email.<p>The other thing that came out of that thread was "If you're remote and don't respond quickly enough, people assume you're slacking off - while in the office people visibly slack off all the time and it's considered OK".
Except for the occasional visit to the office to give a few high fives and have some chit-chat I work remotely.<p>Until recently we used Toggl to track work time and the guidance was to have "6h of focused work daily".<p>I'm managing 5h 15min-ish, but only when working remotely. When I'm in the office that number organically drops to around 3h 40min.<p>Only person really doing those hours(and above) is one guy who's not into chit-chat.
This article hits on a lot of good points to me, because I often see people treat chat like it's a stand-in for an IRL conversation.<p>People will start conversations with just "Hello", and wait for me to respond, as if we're talking on the phone or something. This, to me, fundamentally misses out on the benefits of online communication: You don't need to wait to establish a conversation with me to ask me your question; you can just come out with it. And your question/problem can become just another item on my TODO list, which I can prioritize throughout the day:<p>- If it's something I can answer/address right away, I can do so<p>- If it's something that will take some investigation, I can start investigating it (and let you know how much time I'll need, etc)<p>- If it's something clearly low-priority, I can wait until later when I'm not as busy to address it<p>- If it's something that doesn't really make sense, or there are things I can explain to you to help point you in the right direction, I can spend a moment to help dig up some information for you.<p>If you just say "Hello" (or "Ping", etc) you're taking away my ability to prioritize your question/problem, and are asking me to agree to spend time on something before I know what it is.<p>If instead you begin the conversation with the question/problem that needs addressing, you're adding an item to my TODO queue, which can be re-sorted/re-prioritized continuously throughout the day, and allows me to be more effective. I can get to your question when it makes sense for me to do so.<p>I have my status permanently set to <a href="http://nohello.com" rel="nofollow">http://nohello.com</a> to hopefully drive this point home with people, and anecdotally I've seen a lot less drive-by "Hello" messages on Slack. Additionally I've just stopped responding to people when they say "Hello". I just hope that doesn't come off as me being a jerk, though...
20-40% of the stuff you do at work are considered "real work", this is totally normal on-prem, but not remote.<p>Where do I get the best ideas to solve a problem?<p>Not when I'm sitting in front of it for 8h a day.<p>I get them when I stand up, buy groceries, do my laundry, shower, etc.<p>Does this provide huge value to the company I work for? Totally<p>Does the people at the company think I cheat them? Many do<p>Would they feel better if I sat in their office for 8h, have worse ideas, provide lower value and generally feel worse? Somehow many do too
An important point about asynchronous vs. synchronous is that it's not just about the communication but about the work processeses. What enables people to work more effectively is removing synchronization bottlenecks in processes. Any kind of synchronization point causes people to do silly things like wait for that to happen, delay activities until after they've happened, or try to organize meetings around these points. The more synchronization points you have, the slower things get. Usually we call this bureaucracy.<p>Any kind of meeting is a synchronization bottleneck. People synchronize their workday around these. Workdays and office hours are synchronization points as well. They create bottlenecks in our traffic system even where literally everybody is trying to get to work at the same time just so they can be at a standup meeting.<p>Treat it as a technical problem and get rid of unnecessary blocking activities and things run smoother. It's true for software, it's true for logistics, and it is true for work processes. The same principles apply and you can use similar design patterns (queues, events, etc.). A side effect of non blocking processes is that people can work more effectively without waiting for people to talk to them or meetings to happen. It enables remote work but is just as effective when used on site.<p>Git was invented to support asynchronous development where independent groups of developers work on their own branches and exchange patches or pull requests when they want to synchronize. Works great for OSS but it is now also common in non remote software teams. Create a ticket, assign it, create a branch for it, do some work, create a pr, pr gets reviewed, ci builds trigger and if you figured out deployment automation, ultimately the change goes to production as well. It's all orchestrated via events that trigger somebody or something to pick up the work for the next thing. It's great. It replaced a work process where people were bottle-necked on central version repositories that required a lot of ceremony around branching and merging because it was so tedious; which in turn made commits a big deal and necessitated commit freezes and lots of communication overhead, meetings, and delays. Git got rid of most of that.
If a boss needs to see you in your seat to "know" you're working, it's very likely that said boss cannot actually tell which employees are effective or talented, either.
"No expectation of immediate reply"? HA! I SO wish. Slack kills any async expectation. Specially if you install it on your cellphone. Then you're on the clock 24/7.<p>I guess the article also assumes different time zones when working remotely?<p>I filed the article under the "rubbish bin". I've worked remotely for several years, and maybe I live in a different planet, because "async" and remote work do NOT go hand in hand for me. If anything, Slack means people can reach me even when I'm taking a dump, and I'm expected to reply at that moment.
Anecdotal but I'm the opposite. I hate working from home and love having a team around me, sharing goals and ideas and hyping each other. Different strokes etc.
The article starts by simply assuming its conclusion in a complete non-sequitur: that all the listed benefits of remote working stem from asynchronous communication.<p>Sharing the space with your children or partner? Asynchronous communication. Being able to take short breaks in your own space? Asynchronous communication. Not being distracted by people chatting about their weekend? Asynchronous communication.<p>One of the major benefits of remote working, for me, is just not having other people around. It's not much a matter of communication but simply of the relax and focus I get when I don't have to be aware of others.
I work remotely for about 80% of the workweek. I am most effective at home. At work people talk to me and interrupt me quite often. You get interrupted by people walking by etc or just striking up a conversation.<p>At home this obviously never happens for me. The only distraction I have is Slack and my dog that reminds me that it's time for a walk.<p>So I can attest to this.
It is easy to make a case for either synchronous or asynchronous communication just as easily as making cases for on collocation or remote work or office landscapes or individual rooms. But what is most often missing us the context. And it is quite naive to believe one way is always better than the other.<p>I can recommend the work on Dynamic work design by Nelson P. Repenning to make a case for both in what context either is best but even more importantly, when and how to move back and forth between different work modes. Here is a good introduction: <a href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-new-approach-to-designing-work/" rel="nofollow">https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-new-approach-to-design...</a>
I think I am not really well-adapted for async communication.<p>I can't really do "fire and forget" messaging. When I ask something I want the reply to arrive as quickly as possible because I don't want to lose the context that I have in my mind right now and load it again later when I receive a reply. On an async channel this results in compulsive checking for replies which of course kills productivity. Almost-sync channels like Slack are the worst - who didn't experience the frustration of their chat partner suddenly disappearing without a word in the middle of a discussion?<p>On a related note I very much prefer a focused half-hour meeting to a whole day of async back-and-forths.<p>Inbound messages are problematic too because they provide the same kind of addictive random gratification that social media is infamous for.<p>Any tips for dealing with these problems?
The benefits you get from implementing asynchronous communication with your organization are huge. This is exactly why I felt the need to resign from my job last year to go build a platform that is designed from the ground up to support this.<p>As a remote team, implementing the async communication style will allow you to never have to depend on fixed calendar meetings. No need to have to organize everybody together in a room, at a specific time, to just make a decision.<p>I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for a remote team. Hope you find it helpful:<p><a href="https://standups.io/blog/a-basic-guideline-for-async-communication/" rel="nofollow">https://standups.io/blog/a-basic-guideline-for-async-communi...</a>
A thing to consider is that these remote methods are not bound to remote workers. I had a job were I had two choices when a certain situation occured that stopped me from finishing work:<p>1. Find the person involved, talk to them and try to resolve it right away<p>2. Write a mail to them, print it out, clamp it to the related paper and hang it on the wall.<p>We were a very tiny 7-person company with rooms in the same building and still the approach outlined in point 1 rarely was more productive than just waiting for them to reply. For situations that happened more often I created email templates so there was even less work.<p>Another advantage of method 2 is that unresolved work in the end of the day is already taken care of and if you are working in shifts the handover is easier then.
I think an asynchronous workplace (remote or not) is mostly a good one as people tend to be more effective without interruption.<p>Anyways, I think a big barrier to this dream are the tools that can promote and sustain asynchronicity.<p>It's really hard to keep communication open and job responsibilities/deliverables clear without being mircomanage-y. Lots of leaders will have to give up control - which is going to be really hard, to say the least. Software tools will need to be security-blankets for managers as much as performance trackers for employees. Give them a little pat on the head that "it's all ok". That's going to be hard to accomplish.
The reason people don't like remote workers by instinct isn't because they don't realize that they people COULD be more productive at home.<p>Its because they worry that it creates incentives that could lead to a decrease in productivity over time.<p>I think the root of it really is the first line Management. These guys need to be really good at their job in order for WFH FT to be more productive. If these aren't all that efficient to begin with, that will make it much more visible in a WFH situation. I think all parties intuitively feel this.
my office is hell to work in. everyone simply shows up next to your screen and starts talking.
that is why async comms from remote locations has been a blessing for me. i can simply queue the non important messages for later.
once they've realised that i won't answer for a couple of hours they started being a lot more aware of what messages they're sending. thus comms improved greatly once everyone started working from home. the occasion call takes care of any face2face situations.
overall major win
Their tool Twist is the result of their own problems while developing their app (Todoist) , and they use it internally.
Usual tools made by companies that use it (dogfooding) use to be better.
Personally I think flexibility is the future. Allow employees to decide or work inhouse or remotely. I work in a very large financial services technology company. I value to closeness to colleges and the quick, sharp interactions that can happen with that - but - there are times when I am wokring on something larger I would be more effective at home or a remote location where sales etc can physically come to my desk and suck my time.
This article conveniently overlooks problems when remote workers need supervision to keep them in line with expectations. I’ve had both good and bad experiences managing remote teams. The difference seems to be the quality of the remote workers. The quality of a remote persons work is inversely proportional to the supervision they require.
> It leads to lower quality discussions and suboptimal solutions. When you have to respond immediately, people don’t have time to think through key issues thoroughly and provide thoughtful responses. Your first response to any given situation is often not your best response.<p>I feel like this is the main benefit.
Management here doesn't like remote employees because they cant order them around like they do us. Also they don't like the fact that those employees don't stay in the office longer and are not bonding with other people here.
Oh it's quite simple, I don't get interrupted. At work I might get 15 minutes of work done before there is someone at my desk, and headphones are the international sign of "hey lets bother that guy".
It works very well when you need a clear documented interface for communication. It will not work on a culture which demands more facetime.<p>And more often, the answer is somewhere in between, and it's hard to generalize.
Productivity depends on the phase of work. Simplisticly put there are two phases of mental work such as programming: i/o bound and brain bound.<p>If you're in the i/o bound phase remoting is often hard. You need to talk to people, pull answers from them, communicate, coordinate, reach agreements and nail down development plans. You can't do anything anyway unless you agree on the next steps first.<p>Conversely if you're brain bound all you want is a laptop and being alone at home because it's way more efficient to focus on a problem when you can forget about everything else. You can't plan ahead anyway unless you dig down in the code and see for yourself first what will work and what needs to change.<p>These phases alternate in worklife, maybe based on projects, time of the month, the whatever happenstances take place in the progress of development. Usually when you're stuck in one phase you really need to spend time in the other phase for a while. This is normal.<p>This has consequences. People working remotely tend to maximise their time on what they're efficient at, i.e. brain bound programming. At the office it's easier to invite people to meetings through the week to get work done that way because you can't really be brain bound at the office anyway. Thus remote types and office types tend to inflate their favourite phase as much as possible.<p>This inflation happens because these two phases are inherently incompatible with each other, and crossing the gap to switch phases is tedious.<p>But if you only ever work i/o bound you begin to wonder how could people work remotely at all. After all, everything happens in the office anyway so maybe working from home could work if only we add enough meetings to keep the remote people more tightly in the loop... And people working steadily from home begin to fathom, in time, whether it's possible at all to work at the office as all you have is constant breaks, meetings, people coming to ask about stuff and you can't ultimately get any <i>real</i> work done.<p>Different things begin to become important for people who don't alternate. So there's a slight confirmation bias in how people flock to the position and environment that maximises the kind of work they're really good at. But the caveat is that in doing this that you could be comfort-siloing yourself. So natural and healthy alternating between phases is what keeps you open and able to adjust to changes in work life and work projects.<p>On the other hand, people who alternate too often begin to get nothing done. You need to allocate batches of time for both phases in some moderate proportion. How to balance that is more of an art than anything else.<p>Sounds familiar, anyone? This is a dynamic I've observed in my own work life over and over again.
I wonder where they get productivity data.<p>An owner of a company I'm close with found her employee was abusing work from home. This same employee was formerly a Superstar or so we thought.<p>Maybe bad management, but I found myself calling a 7 hour work from home day 8 hours too.
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I don't get it why the workplace is viewed as only a place to work. We spend 8h of the day there. That would be a sad life if you only worked in those 8h. The workplace is actually a place to socialize, to do the things that you love, chat with your friends, have fun.<p>I bet most people from those 8h work a maximum 4. The rest is chatting and socializing. I like it.