Create a culture for asynchronous work to thrive
As a leader you're responsible for fostering a culture that supports asynchronous agile. Here's how to go about it.
- Reflect on the benefits you want to achieve from async agile. Write down the values that'll drive these benefits.
- Take the long view of where you'd like to be on this remote work journey. I suggest aiming for level 4 on the distributed work pyramid.
- Deep work will be your competitive advantage. Think about how people will bring the four remote work super powers to the fore and how you'll create an environment for deep work.
- Recognise that culture is a myth. People's lives are real. Let your culture be a complement to those real lives.
- Use the resources, processes, values (RPV) framework to build the foundations of your culture and be sure to write these down in your handbook.
As a leader, you’re responsible for much more than the mechanics of work. Depending on the size of your company you’re a custodian of culture, or the one who defines it, or someone in between. Regardless of your position in the company, your people rely on you to create a conducive environment for work. If you’re introducing async agile on your teams, you’ll have to define a culture that accommodates this kind of working. Don’t worry if you feel you’re too small a player in your organisation. You’ll have to operate as part advocate, part guerilla. The advocacy will help you garner support from your bosses. The guerilla tactics will help you make changes in your sphere of influence, regardless of how the rest of the organisation operates.
In today’s post, I want to share with you how you can create a culture that supports async agile. This is the first in a series of posts that I hope will form one of the key chapters of my book.
Values first
Your people and your employers expect you to think beyond the most immediate problems you’re solving. As you think about the culture you want to drive, I want to remind you of something we discussed at the very start of this journey. Async agile aims to achieve six key benefits.
Better work life balance
An inclusive workplace
Improved knowledge sharing & onboarding
Communication practices that support scale
Time for deep work
A culture that defaults to action
So pause for a moment and reflect on these benefits. Think of the culture your team, department or company needs, to achieve these benefits. For example, on my teams I always advocate for an inclusion-first approach. Let me share a quote as a provocation.
“… those boardrooms, they’ve all got like big glass boxes. Now. I can tell you, whose idea is gonna get adopted, or who’s going to lead the conversation. And it’s usually the tallest male, white male in the group, and brownie points if the guy looks like Captain America, like that’s the guy who has his ideas adopted, most often.” - Liam Martin, co-founder of Time Doctor & Running Remote.
While this may be inadvertent, for too long, we’ve designed our workplaces to reward extraversion, neurotypicality and masculinity. Big plus if you’re not from a historically marginalised race or caste and if you’re straight. We stack the odds against people who’re different. I believe another world is possible - so I like to level the playing field. Most practices I’ve described on this site are an attempt to live that value. I have a few other values that I operate by and many of them overlap with those of my employers.
You’ll need to go through a similar exercise for the people you lead. Your workplace and your team differ from mine, so your reflections will admittedly be different. Take some time to write the values that are implicitly guiding the shift to async agile. As with everything else, writing things up will clarify your own thinking.
Take the long view
Organisations can still stay ahead of the curve (adapted from James Stanier)
Despite the great hybrid kerfuffle, most people agree that the world of work has changed since the pandemic. Very few people want to go back to the office full time. Of course, employers are trying to arm twist employees into coming back to the office, but I’d like to wager that this will continue only till the end of the recession. Once the economy bounces back and the war for talent starts again, top talent will demand the flexibility to work from anywhere.
“There are two kinds of companies. One is going to embrace work-from-anywhere, and the second is in denial - I feel those companies will lose their workforce. You have to make a choice, as a leader, what company you want to lead.” - Prof Raj Choudhury.
Prof Choudhury says that in a few years the distinction of remote work will cease to exist. It’ll be just “work”. The world will change, eventually. You need to take a decisive stand and make sure that you don’t end up a laggard.
The reason I mention this about culture, is that async agile works best with a remote-first approach. It’s tough, though not impossible, to be asynchronous when you’re regularly in the office with your colleagues. Instead of writing up a thoughtful document, people can just tap each other on the shoulder. Getting an immediate response seems to trigger a dopamine hit we just can’t resist. The notion of flexibility disappears and I daresay the environment undermines the need for asynchronous work.
Aim for a higher level of autonomy
Distributed work's levels of autonomy by Matt Mullenweg, Automattic.
A few months after the pandemic started, all companies were scrambling to figure out “this remote work thing”. All eyes were on the trailblazers - companies that had been remote years before Covid-19 struck. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress wrote a brilliant piece about distributed work’s five levels of autonomy. I encourage you to read the original piece, though I’ll paraphrase the description of each level below.
Level 0 refers to work that requires physical presence. There will always be jobs such as these. You need a surgeon in the operating room, a pilot in the cockpit and a sports person on the playing field. Even IT firms may need some of these jobs, but I argue those should be minimum.
Level 1 is where many employers were before the pandemic. Many companies didn’t invest in the right tools and systems. “Flex work” was more a privilege than a right. And if you worked remotely, you became a second-class citizen in the organisation. Not that people needed to be in the office to do their work. It’s just that companies preferred the status quo of office-bound work instead.
Many companies landed at Level 2 during the pandemic and find themselves there even today. Think of it as a state where you layer new tools on an old mindset. I recently heard the founder of a tech company marvel at how they have a perpetual zoom call to mimic the office and that people can move between breakout rooms like they would in the physical workplace. The power of remote work is in being able to do deep work asynchronously, but level 2 is all about synchronous interactions.
Some organisations are heading to Level 3 today. Even if they keep their offices, they operate in a remote-first, work from anywhere setup. They encourage their employees to invest in a better home office. This is where you see people get more sophisticated with how they use tools such as wikis, collaborative documents, task boards and recorded audio and video. While synchronous collaboration may dominate, asynchronous interactions aren’t uncommon. Many remote-first companies also realise that a brief burst of intense team bonding can be more effective than meeting every day in the anodyne confines of an office. So they sponsor team and company retreats so co-workers can build that sense of camaraderie.
This site aims to get you to Level 4 - an async-first environment. Meetings become the last resort. You can work as easily with a globally distributed team as you can with a team in the same time zone. Everyone prioritises deep, thoughtful work over off-the-cuff discussions. When you meet, you follow best practice. Your organisation can include all kinds of people and be a champion for inclusion.
Matt calls Level 5 the equivalent of “nirvana”. He admits that his own company isn’t always there. This is when your remote-first organisation consistently outperforms any in-person organisation. That comparison doesn’t mean that in-person organisations are the paragon of performance. Matt describes this level as “when everyone in the company has time for wellness and mental health, when people bring their best selves and highest levels of creativity to do the best work of their careers, and just have fun.”
The reason I explained these levels to you, is so you can set yourself up to be a level 4 organisation on most days and a level 5 company on your best days. Design your culture around this goal. And hey, don’t let your company’s culture hold you back. If you can even influence one team or one department to work this way, you’ll be a serious force for change. By the way, forced-hybrid is a bad idea, because it stops you from progressing on this pyramid. You just go back and forth between levels 2 and 3.
Think of deep work as a competitive advantage
Cal Newport
“Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, ‘the superpower of the 21st century’.”
As you take the long view to being remote first and aim for level 4 and 5 on Matt’s pyramid, don’t lose sight of the productivity benefits; particularly, “deep work”. Most of your people should be able to enjoy being in a state of flow, every day at work. They get to do complex, but interesting work that keeps them at the edge of their capabilities. When people get to do deep work regularly, they learn from every task. They improve their skills and your organisation is richer for that experience.
Conversely, shallow work dulls your mental capacity. Too many of these undemanding, logistical tasks can mean that people don’t get to do meaningful work. Worse, Cal Newport argues that such work permanently reduces people’s ability to do deep work. Shallow work goes well with interruptions. Deep work benefits from the four superpowers of async agile.
Distraction blocking
Reading and comprehension
Working independently
Think about how your culture will value and promote deep work. How will each of your colleagues contribute to such a work environment? How will you discourage behaviours that go against the philosophy of deep work?
Culture’s a myth. People are real.
“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a mediaeval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”
This may be hard to accept, but it’s true. Culture is a myth. There’s nothing real about it. It’s an abstract concept that we use to bind people together. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just saying that you need to see it for what it is. In contrast, people are real and so are their lives.
I have a strong distaste for company cultures that impose disproportionate costs on their people. Therefore, I am sceptical about companies that say they’re “a family”. Families are permanent, employment isn’t. When companies say they’re a family, they’re in fact setting up an asymmetric relationship. It usually means that employees show as much loyalty to the company as they do to their family, while employers have no such obligation. They can fire people when they please. Even the word “tribe” makes me uncomfortable. Tribes are a two-way street and are one entity. With companies, there are two entities whether or not we see it. The collective of the employees and the employer. Most employers actually don’t want a strong collective of employees; a.k.a union; because they don’t like the balance of that relationship. They prefer the asymmetry where they can use words that show a warm, fuzzy collective when it's convenient. The rest of the time, it’s hard business speak.
Instead, I admire cultures which recognise that people’s jobs are a complement to their lives. If you want to define a culture for your team, start with the fundamentals. Clay Christensen’s resources, processes, values (RPV) framework is an effective way to define how your ways of working lead to culture.
Resources. In the tech industry, intellectual property and physical assets are important, but people matter most. They’re the most important “resource”. Think hard about the people you want in your asynchronous organisation. What skills and mindset will you hire for? How will you develop the skills of people who’re already on your teams?
Processes. How do you expect your people to work together? What are the sensible defaults for them to work together? How do you leave room for interpretation and contextual implementation?
Values. This is where it gets fuzzy. It’s tempting to define your values in grand sounding, aspirational terms. Instead, think of how your values will help your people know what to and what not do. They should be able to set priorities using these values as a guide. What would these values be for you?
When people can work autonomously and consistently using these building blocks, you’ll be on your way to building a great culture.
Before we sign off from this post let me say what may already be predictable. There’s no point having a culture that sits only in a leader’s head. You need to articulate it and articulate it in writing. Yes, culture will transform, your processes will change. Before any of that happens though, everyone needs to understand your culture. There’s no better way to do it than to write it up. The trailblazers of remote work have done this for years. Take GitLab for example - their company handbook is public! You may not change your company’s culture, but you can surely write things up for your team or department. Your team or department handbook is a great place to add this information.