Asynchronous teams are fantastic when the work itself can be cleanly divided up into fully isolated individual responsibilities and the team is great about respecting each other.
Beyond that, going fully asynchronous becomes a huge disadvantage to anyone trying to accomplish something that requires cross-team or even multi-person collaboration on a reasonable timeframe. The amount of round-trip back and forth communication that slows everything down can become staggering in no time.
On small, tight-knit teams this is largely mitigated by everyone's willingness to jump in and help synchronously when necessary. Once you grow to the point of a big remote organization where people don't really know each other, it just becomes a game of dodging questions and delaying responses until the other person solves their own problems. The more engaged you are, the more work you end up taking on. Some (sadly, many) people see this as an opening to make themselves as scarce as possible and only do the neatly packaged work that comes directly from their managers. As a manager, you end up mediating all sorts of communication issues that would simply disappear if the team had some core working hours.
Given what you say stands, this would give small, tight-knit teams and truly agile big remote organizations a competitive advantage. This sits well with me.
Very true. bBddy of mine got rejected at dropbox two months before the pandemic because they didn't do remote and he didn't want to move to SF. Now they brag on linkedin how they support remote work.
Before the pandemic I was in talks with a company and I requested three days of remote work per week. They wouldn't budge from their 0 remote work policy. Pandemic hits. Boom, posters all over LinkedIN with their remote friendly culture, their generous $200 grant to cover for home-office equipment.
This article is about a company that has been 100% fully remote since 2005. It has nothing to do with retention and the CEO did not change anything.
The second and third sentences of the article:
> During the pandemic, many white-collar workers grew accustomed to working unusual hours, scrambling their traditional 9-5 schedules to adjust for childcare or other responsibilities. Since Automattic’s 2005 founding, such flexibility has been the norm.
The polar extremes of fully asynchronous and fully synchronous work are unlikely to work in all circumstances and with all possible team compositions. Design work requires more collaboration than executing well defined tasks. Introverts and extroverts have different preferences.
The development of Linux is an example of large scale work that is successfully performed mostly asynchronously.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] threadBeyond that, going fully asynchronous becomes a huge disadvantage to anyone trying to accomplish something that requires cross-team or even multi-person collaboration on a reasonable timeframe. The amount of round-trip back and forth communication that slows everything down can become staggering in no time.
On small, tight-knit teams this is largely mitigated by everyone's willingness to jump in and help synchronously when necessary. Once you grow to the point of a big remote organization where people don't really know each other, it just becomes a game of dodging questions and delaying responses until the other person solves their own problems. The more engaged you are, the more work you end up taking on. Some (sadly, many) people see this as an opening to make themselves as scarce as possible and only do the neatly packaged work that comes directly from their managers. As a manager, you end up mediating all sorts of communication issues that would simply disappear if the team had some core working hours.
CEO realised the game has changed, offers flexible working in order to retain talent.
The second and third sentences of the article:
> During the pandemic, many white-collar workers grew accustomed to working unusual hours, scrambling their traditional 9-5 schedules to adjust for childcare or other responsibilities. Since Automattic’s 2005 founding, such flexibility has been the norm.
The development of Linux is an example of large scale work that is successfully performed mostly asynchronously.
In Support you are given set scheduled hours.