Remote workers are more productive than office people. That is a fact! While the reason for this is not entirely clear, the CEO of Doist makes a great point โ โthe benefits of remote work arenโt necessarily the result of location independence, but rather the byproduct of async communicationโ.
This is basically giving a team more control over when they communicate with their teammates โ you donโt need to be working remotely for that! This can be done in the office too!
We have written about finding the right balance between sync and async before based on an interview with Bufferโs VP of Engineering. Buffer brought out the pros and cons of each of these communication ways have:
Synchronous โ chatting online, really great for being connected, bonding as a team, real-time collaboration, being creative with ideas
Asynchronous โ people respond when it suits them, not a lot of meetings, no chatting going on at all times, so everyone can work with their heads down
If the nature of the work allows, itโs a good idea to move towards async communication as much as possible. This will provide deeper work time and also increases productivity.
We all know that there can be days we spend on meetings and calls and wonโt get anything important done but with async communication this can be history.
With the rise of async communication, will we now lose all these fancy chat apps and go back to the plain old email?
Stanwood is a digital agency of 40 tech enthusiasts, nerds and digital pioneers working together remotely from all over the world.
We talked about how their remote company's hiring process looks like, where do they usually work from and how they communicate in their distributed team across 9 time zones.