Go async-first with your team
Use the filters below to find async-first methods that are relevant to your team. For detailed articles, check out the blog.
Take the long view
Don’t disrupt yourselves. The future of work is location and time independent. Prepare for that future.
Manage by outcomes
When you measure performance, ignore presence and focus on what people are actually achieving.
Create slack in the system
Without the space to pause and reflect, you’ll rarely improve your systems. To get better, you need slack.
Coworking budgets
Coworking spaces allow your people to work in local chapters. Fund this flexibility, if you can.
Aim for next level autonomy
Aim to keep getting better at distributed work. Matt Mullenweg’s levels of autonomy can guide you to improve as a company or team.
Don't oversubscribe yourself
Most people can’t reliably manage more than 4-5 people. Work with your HR team to streamline reporting relationships so you only have as many people to manage as you can truly care for.
Fund cross team retreats
Meeting people from different teams can be really fun. Such events are tough to organise, but incredibly valuable.
Decentralise team F2F events
Autonomous teams make their own decisions. So leave the decision of when to meet F2F, to the team itself.
Baton pass inception facilitation
Make time-zones your ally. By alternating facilitation responsibilities across locations, you can make cross timezone workshops and inceptions less stressful for everyone.
Validate. Don’t start from a blank slate.
During inceptions and workshops, it's easier to poke holes at something wrong than to write the first words on a whiteboard. So instead of starting from a blank slate, synthesise what you think you know and then validate your understanding.
Scheduled emails
Compose your thought but schedule the message to go out when you expect the recipient(s) to be at work.
Email signature
Don’t pressure people or get pressured into responding to an email the moment they/you see it.
Accountability partner
Advocate for a pair programming pattern where two developers act as each other’s accountability partners.
Go solo to take a break
Take a break by going solo on simple coding activities that won’t benefit from the intense code review of pair programming.
Baton pass pairing
Use the flexibility of remote work to work out your “pairing” hours. Get into the practice of writing good commit messages and pass on the baton.
Channels and response times
Agreeing on response times for various collaboration tools and channels that you use on the team is important.