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Earlier this week I shared this about how fully distributed office-less businesses hire using Slack.
The reaction from most traditional in-office teams when seeing this is “What!?”
Here is another practice that creates a “What!?” moment for most people who are used to working in an office.
In an office almost all meetings are done in-person and synchronously. During the pandemic forced remote working period most in-office teams have attempted to copy and paste this synchronous meeting habit into the online environment resulting in days filled with Zoom (or Teams) video meetings.
Raise you hand if that has been your experience!
This is exhausting and it didn’t take long for “Zoom fatigue” to become a thing. This has led most people to conclude that in-person meetings are better, becoming a major factor driving the current “hybrid working” compromise.
But here is the thing, fully distributed office-less teams, especially those distributed across multiple time zones, do not default to synchronous meetings. Almost all are asynchronous-first.
Pictured above is a great example from GitLab. If you call a meeting you are required to document the answer to this question in the agenda “Could this meeting have been handled asynchronously, and if so, how?”
They encourage sharing that insight with the broader organization.
Why?
Because successful, fully distributed work-from-anywhere teams have discovered a long time ago, that async workflows are way more efficient than synchronous working for most things including meetings!
An asynchrouns meeting? What!?
(Asynchronous working is a topic we take a deep dive into when assisting teams who want to migrate from a traditional in-office working experience to becoming a true location independent work-from-anywhere team)