Remote Works, Async Doesn't

I essentially grew up on the Internet. I spent most of my teens playing games online, chatting in forums, or programming, or even all three at once. I hosted my own Mumble server for my friends, spent 8+ hours doing Molten Core every Saturday, and getting banned from Second Life servers because my Linden Scripting Language scripts crashed peoples’ servers. Hopping into a Mumble channel and working on a script with a friend was second nature. Working through World of Warcraft raids one excruciating weekly reset at a time with 40 people of all stripes, from teens to single moms to retirees, was old hat. It turns out that getting 40 people to work together towards a common goal is actually difficult, even when they’re being paid. But we did it. This was an era of remote “work” for me, I just didn’t know it at the time.

It turns out that corporate America was trying to do the same thing. Offshoring was in full swing. Companies were hiring on the other side of the world to save some of those almighty dollars, and it didn’t take long for them to realize that this came with some challenges. It turns out that communicating with people on the other side of the world is hard, even with email and telephone.

What made the ragtag band of gamers able to organize 40 people over months to finally knock down the final boss of Molten Core, but corporations struggle with even simple development workflows? Was it that the problems were more complex? Maybe, but after 13 years in the industry now, I don’t think so. Finishing these raids took 20-40 people executing mechanisms perfectly for hours on end, not to mention the time preparing and practicing. Different problems, certainly, but I’m not sure I’d buy an argument that they were more or less complex.

I think the biggest differentiating factor was being present at the same time, focused on the same goal, and communicating in real time.

The state of the industry

Looking at my time in the industry so far, I’ve seen this again and again. When I worked in Japan, we had offshore developers and operations staff in India. These were some incredibly talented people, and we still struggled even with that separation. Where we shined was on incident calls, when things were broken and we were all on a WebEx bridge at the same time, working on the same goal, and communicating in real time.

In 2020, when every office job went remote by force of circumstance, I saw a lot of people struggling, but my team mostly carried on almost as if nothing was happening. We had adapted quickly to the new situation despite hiding in our apartments. We had an existing culture and trust that allowed us to stay engaged and communicate in real time.

I’ve also worked on a remote team that is more than just remote, it is asynchronous. People worked when they want. Teams were split across the world. Our cycle time was slow and we had to accommodate this. Sometimes I needed PR reviews from someone when it’s 3AM their time. Sometimes, people were just not present unannounced or just didn’t answer messages for days.

All of this experience has led me to a conclusion that the industry needs to discuss more seriously: Remote work is not the same thing as asynchronous work. These are distinct modes of operating that are being conflated which muddies the discussion we desperately need to have.

What is remote and async work?

We will define remote work with a fairly simple definition: your team does not work in the same physical space. Employees are free to work from wherever, so long as they have a stable internet connection and are able to complete their work.

There are a lot of benefits to this.

Employees can choose where to live based on their needs. They may want to live near family instead of in the city. Maybe they need to be near certain medical specialists. Maybe they just like being able to sit on the beach while writing. They’re able to setup their work environment to suit them, be that ergonomics or accessibility needs. Remote workers are able to focus more without the distraction of an open office layout. Their commute involves walking to their home office, which is better for both their mental health and the environment.

The benefits extend to employers as well. You get a larger hiring pool since you can attract candidates with constraints that might otherwise keep them out. Turnover is lower since employees are happier. Perhaps the biggest advantage is facilities cost. No office leases, supplies, printers, chairs, desks, air conditioning, on-tap kombucha, etc. It’s just cheaper to run a remote business.

There are, of course, drawbacks as well. Your managers lose the direct visibility of seeing who is in the office and what they’re doing. Spontaneous collaboration is lower, since you’re not going to run into people at the water cooler or be able to pop into a conference room. Employees lose social connections, which for many are the only social connections they have. Mentoring and learning by osmosis is more difficult.

These drawbacks can be addressed, which we’ll get to later, but for now, let’s take a look at asynchronous work.

We’ll define asynchronous work as not working at the same time. For the sake of drawing this distinction, let’s imagine an office that is open 24/7 and employees are welcome to come in and work at any time they wish as it fits their schedule. Your night owls show up at 3 in the afternoon and work until midnight. The parents take off to drop the kids off and pick them up from school, then come back to the office after.

The benefits of this are clear. For employees, it allows work to fit around their schedule, which in modern adult life is often incredibly busy and complex to navigate, even more so if you have children. Employees are able to set aside time for deep work whenever they have it instead of forcing a day of shallow highly interrupted work. For employers, you can access a larger hiring pool, perhaps even global.

The drawbacks, though, are high. All communication has to be done via writing, recorded videos, or through meetings awkwardly shoved into time overlaps. Immediate feedback loops are completely gone, replaced by long feedback cycles of a day or more. You lose pretty much all capacity for high bandwidth communication and coordination. Brainstorming and collaborative creative work are drawn out for weeks instead of a good afternoon session. Process gets introduced to address this, and overhead increases.

And this is the crux of the issue. The problems we are seeing in modern remote organizations have very little to do with them being remote. They have to do with them being asynchronous. Asynchronous work has been conflated with remote work.

If your work is the type where you have long feedback cycles anyway, like journalism or other forms or writing, this is probably fine. As much as we try to pretend otherwise, software is a highly collaborative endeavor. It’s the rare piece of software that can actually be built and fully owned by a single person, and that takes an exceptionally isolated use-case and an exceptionally talented engineer to pull off.

The drawbacks of asynchronous work are intrinsic and incredibly difficult to mitigate, at least for the time being. To fix these issues, we need to solve for the need to collaborate with others entirely, which we are nowhere near accomplishing. Asynchronous work is simply a nonstarter right now. People need to be working at the same time on the same problem to support the high bandwidth communication needed. Period.

The drawbacks of remote work, however, are fixable.

Addressing the drawbacks of remote work

The things we lose from not being in the same physical space can be addressed with tooling, but more importantly culture. We need to bring the spontaneity in and encourage active collaboration. There is a tendency to self-isolate and over-focus on deep work when working remotely and we need to take active steps to counter that.

In a physical office, I can walk over to someone’s desk if I need an immediate response from them. On my team, we’re co-located, so I can just ask them immediately. This needs to be supported and encouraged on a remote team. When someone messages you during working hours, treat it as if they walked up to your desk. You wouldn’t ignore someone standing next to you for an hour, so why do it when they send you a message? You’re introducing asynchronous work patterns where they don’t need to exist. Odds are, your lack of a response is blocking someone else. Conversely, treat sending a message as walking up to their desk. You’re likely interrupting their deep work, so make sure the interruption is worth it.

On the topic of deep work, it’s undeniably critical, but we shouldn’t pretend like communication, mentorship, and guidance aren’t their own form of valuable work when done correctly. When you need dedicated time for deep work, schedule it and communicate it in advance so others can plan for your absence. Otherwise, you should accept that a large part of your work is communication. I would even argue that it’s the most important part, especially as you reach senior and principal levels.

Another drawback we can address is the real-time collaboration that a simple whiteboard brings. There’s some real collaborative magic that comes from being in a room with others and a whiteboard. Being able to draw, debate, and redraw strongly supports the rapid iteration loops that are needed. Fortunately, we have plenty of tooling solutions for this as well. Tools like Figma and Miro have become the defacto whiteboarding tools anyway, even when in the same physical space. They take the whiteboard experience and enhance it. Multiple times, I’ve been in physical meetings now where we are all at the same table, working on the same Figma. The whiteboard on the wall is just decoration.

The last big drawback is in management. One of the most common concerns I hear from managers about remote work is that they can't tell if people are actually doing work without being able to see them at their desks. Here’s the thing, though. If you are relying on visually ensuring butts are in seats to manage, you aren’t really managing at all. Truly great managers do their work by setting objectives, measuring outcomes, and ensuring their teams are able to operate without your constant guidance. They focus on building and maintaining the organizational substrate on which the team operates. The best manager I’ve ever had was able to disappear for three weeks and the team barely noticed, because he made sure we were self-sufficient and motivated. He didn’t “manage” us so much as keep the road we were traveling on clean. The worst manager I’ve ever had checked that butts were in seats, and if you were so much as going to the bathroom when he did his check, you’d get an earful.

The future

Remote work is here to stay in some capacity. For those of us who strongly believe in it, we need to admit the downsides that come with it and work to fix them. By far, the biggest downside the tendency for remote work to slowly morph into asynchronous work. They are not the same, and we cannot allow the slow feedback loops and destruction of collaboration that asynchronous work brings tarnish remote work as a concept.

Remote teams should expect members to be at the keys at the same time, most of the time. Setting core hours where people have to be available is the easiest approach. Obviously, there are exceptions for the basic life stuff like doctor appointments, but in general, we should be working at the same time. We are working together on the same problem, so we need to be working at the same time. This brings back the spontaneity and high bandwidth communication that allows for rapid innovation and progress.

We cannot allow a culture of asynchronous work to take over and damage the reputation of remote work as a whole.

More importantly, though, we need to have discussions about remote work that are free of the baggage of asynchronous work. The executives and managers aren’t wrong about “remote” work being slower - it is - but only because it has come hand-in hand with asynchronous work. Remote work could be a game changer for not just the employee, but employers, and we need to interrogate it as a solution honestly and precisely, which we are currently failing at spectacularly.