“This meeting could have been an email” is a common workplace complaint. For some companies, it is now a guiding principle.
“It’s just about ensuring that when I sit down to work, I have the information I need to start,” says Kyle Daigle, chief operating officer of GitHub, a Microsoft-owned developer platform. Many of the company’s approximately 3,000 employees work asynchronously.
So far, tech firms have led the way in adopting asynchronous working patterns. That is partly because writing code lends itself to long periods of solitary focus, but also because asynchronous work depends heavily on online processes tech workers are familiar with already. About 1,500 companies use Slite, a Paris-based document management platform that enables workers to create documents and quickly find information, says chief executive Christophe Pasquier. “For the vast majority of our users, it becomes an asynchronous work tool.”
“Essentially, managers are just transmissions of information ... all of that is accessible by everyone in the organisation all at the same time,” explains Liam Martin, co-founder of employee monitoring company Time Doctor. He estimates that asynchronous companies tend to have about half as many managers. “A lot of the classic things that managers were doing are essentially redundant inside of async .
Even the most strident advocates of asynchronous work acknowledge that some situations need a quick discussion. Working to different schedules “doesn’t mean you don’t ever hop on a Zoom call”, says Daigle, adding that innovation is still “much easier” when it involves personal communication or live meetings.