remote work: asynchronous communication

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere

by Tsedal Neeley  · 14 Oct 2021  · 223pp  · 60,936 words

Teams, Google Chat, and Slack went from useful supplements to the primary enablers for daily interactions with coworkers. These rapid changes were unprecedented, but the remote work format is not new. Domestic and global companies have had virtual work arrangements for nearly thirty years. Unsurprisingly, technology companies were the first to see

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of these trends or predictions, however, accounted for a global pandemic that would require the wholesale migration of nearly entire companies to remote work in a matter of weeks. The remote work revolution, long in coming, was accelerated by the sudden and severe coronavirus outbreak. Chances are you are part of the massive transition

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a permanent basis. Groupe PSA, Europe’s second-largest car manufacturer, announced a “new era of agility,” in which its nonproduction staff will shift to remote work. The internet company Box expects more than 15 percent of its workforce to work remotely full-time after the pandemic. Similarly, Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange

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of creating opportunities to create a novel “homeless” nomadic culture. More are bound to follow. As you may have discovered, there is no doubt that remote work has benefits. Commute times disappear. Operational costs get slashed. Bloated travel budgets are no longer imperative. Hiring and retaining employees without asking them to relocate

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their remote capacities for maternity leave. Gas emissions can decline, having measurable impact on environmental sustainability. For workers and leaders around the world, however, untrained remote work isn’t a panacea. In fact, you may have experienced some or all of the many challenges that are inherent with virtual arrangements. You are

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because of the interconnected nature of the world; thus, inquiry about preparing for—or rapidly responding to—global events is part and parcel of a remote work revolution. Remote Work Revolution provides evidence-based answers to those pressing concerns as well as practical guidance for how you can, together with team members, internalize and

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A launch session (and periodic relaunches or reappraisals), which puts in place a clear group plan to meet the demands at hand, is crucial in remote work. Precisely because virtual workers are often distributed across many different geographical locations, work requires explicit planning. Like James and his team, those who are out

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inclusion and psychological safety, the remote format is an inherently solitary experience for many. While research has provided ample evidence for the many benefits of remote work—wider geographical reach into different markets, more autonomy over one’s office setup, and the list goes on—studies also make very clear that

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simple act of managers recognizing and thanking employees (and other peer-to-peer expressions of appreciation) served as an empowering force to boost engagement. In remote work especially, managers don’t always witness the positive contributions that people make. Peers do. Recognitions that capture teammates’ positive contributions create a culture of gratitude

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definition conveys a lack of trust between employers and employees—especially if these tools are an attempt to establish control after a sudden shift into remote work. When you signal mistrust in employees, you are eradicating the bedrock of effective teamwork. What good are “awareness technologies”—or any attempt to enhance

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to increase productivity when working remotely. Let’s first briefly review our understanding of productivity. Companies and scholars have been studying the efficacy of modern remote work for nearly three decades. By modern, I mean virtual professional engagements that are enabled by digital tools (not the distributed work of the late 1600s

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, just for clarification). As mentioned in the Introduction, makers of technology products were first to experiment with modern remote teams. When Cisco launched a remote work program in the Silicon Valley area in 1993, more than 90 percent of their employees participated in the grand experiment to work from anywhere. People

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desire for more flexible work arrangements. That’s why, starting in 1995, Sun’s top management began brainstorming possible options, ultimately designing and launching a remote work program that they called “Open Work.” The leaders concluded that they needed to enable employees to work from anywhere, anytime, using any technology. At the

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commuting colleagues. Was this a U.S. phenomenon, or would the same productivity gains emerge in a different cultural context? How might an experiment in remote work unfold in a Chinese company, where different cultural norms exist to define distinctions between individual and collective needs in organizations? A group of economists teamed

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its inherent time- and money-saving advantages—has the capacity to be even more productive than its brick-and-mortar counterpart. WHEN REMOTE WORK FAILS Are some jobs better suited to remote work than others? When this question was posed to 273 employees who worked from home in sales, marketing, accounting, and engineering, the

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researchers found that highly complex jobs that did not require social support were more conducive to remote work than collocated work. This study also found that low-complexity jobs that did not require much interactive collaboration, such as call centers, were more productive

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when working from home. Even for workers whose jobs were more interactive, the researchers found no negative correlations between remote work and job performance. In other words, remote work doesn’t significantly hurt job performance in any type of work. For some job features, performance is better with more extensive virtual

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deliberate use. I will describe the key problems—mutual knowledge and social presence—and solutions that are important to understand when making technology decisions for remote work. Rather than listing a limited, one-to-one correspondence, this chapter will give you a vocabulary and framework to inform your choices about which

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delivering results requires alignment. However, that’s easier said than done. Failing to share common ground or misinterpreting assumptions can compromise project outcomes. Why do remote work goals fall prey to the mutual knowledge problem? One of the most influential investigations into this issue looked at people who collaborated remotely across the

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call to immediate action. Don’t forget to ask. Cross-national teams need to take into account cultural and language differences. Preferences for synchronous or asynchronous communication differ by culture and common language competence. Close social distances. Social tools help far-flung coworkers connect, share knowledge, collaborate, and innovate more effectively,

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many people may opt for a hybrid version of working remotely from home and commuting into the office. As AppFolio’s transition into remote work illustrates, agile methods and remote work are not incompatible despite what the original doctrine may assert. In many ways, agile teams can maintain the spirit of the Manifesto while

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’ve found that teams that had previously established individual norms for communication or other ways of working together were well-primed for the transition to remote work. For example, the members of one agile team were accustomed to vocalizing individual preferences about what to do when wearing headphones. One team member

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from home. Teams that may have incorporated digital platforms into meetings where some members are collocated while others are virtual are also primed for extensive remote work. For example, a multinational company headquartered in the United States had long relied on scheduling specific conference rooms in their building for the larger sprint

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dial in remotely to a specific number rather than to a specific physical location, eliminating previous technical snafus. Once the team moved to full-time remote work, the norms for scheduling meetings were already established, making the transition that much easier. Team members had already made the mental shift from scheduling a

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a transition from constant collaboration into practices that combine self-directed solo tasks on one’s own schedule with real-time collaboration efforts. That is, remote work requires team members to each work asynchronously in order to lubricate the agile process of spontaneous face-to-face collaboration. Spending individual time in pre

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time hashing them out in the first place. Brainstorm in Shared Documents Interestingly, in conversations with agile teams that have gone from in-person to remote work, members express that virtual arrangements have brought the team closer to the agile ideal than collocation did. Using asynchronous collaboration tools, such as Google Docs

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disband, and regroup. For this reason, the discipline of inclusive communication and mutual adaptation is crucial for teams to first become and then remain aligned. Remote work makes the alignment efforts that much more imperative. INCLUSIVE CONVERSATIONS IN GLOBAL TEAM MEETINGS Global teams have to ensure that the fluent English speakers learn

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within a given company or across the corporate landscape. A closer look traces the problems to leadership. That is where the solution must come. DEFINING REMOTE WORK LEADERSHIP As a longtime faculty member and head of Harvard Business School’s Leadership and Organizational Behavior course (LEAD, as we affectionately call it), I

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more reactive approach. If these challenges are left unattended, they will swell into fissures that splinter your remote team. LOCATION CHALLENGE The mass migration to remote work in the months immediately following the onset of the pandemic was unique in that everyone was similarly located—at home. Despite differences in home office

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deeper into the chapter content to enable reflection, learning, and application. Your remote team and leader will be asked to answer questions to sharpen your remote work acumen so that you can launch, trust, enhance productivity, use digital tools effectively, become more agile, work across differences, lead virtually, and prepare for

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spots, and increase your team’s cohesion. On the individual level, the exercises will help you elevate the contributions of teammates while enhancing your own remote work performance as well. 1. Assess your team’s output to date. (See Sample Response) Results Met Expectations? (Yes or No) Exceeded Expectations (Yes or

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conditions as a remote worker, and evaluate how each attribute impacts your job satisfaction and productivity. CHAPTER 4 How Should I Use Digital Tools in Remote Work? Digital tools lay the infrastructure for remote teamwork. Without them, communication would not just be more difficult—it would be impossible. But as this

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for decades, I never imagined that a cataclysmic pandemic would force their proliferation to this extent and at such speed. The scale and scope of remote work worldwide has made it imperative for countless employees and managers to collaborate across boundaries. Over the years, I have been blessed with many intellectual

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Clive Thompson, “What If Working from Home Goes on . . . Forever?,” New York Times, June 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/09/magazine/remote-work-covid.html. millennials had intentions to leave companies: “The Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2020,” Deloitte, June 2020, https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/about

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Within-Person Examination of the Effects of Telework,” Journal of Business and Psychology 30 (2015): 319. Chapter 4: How Should I Use Digital Tools in Remote Work? Breton had been contemplating: Tsedal Neeley, J. T. Keller, and James Barnett, From Globalization to Dual Digital Transformation: CEO Thierry Breton Leading Atos Into “

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Who Shuns Email,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204452104577060103165399154. his bold plan dramatically decreased: Burkus, “Banning Email.” Why do remote work goals: Catherine Durnell Cramton, “The Mutual Knowledge Problem and Its Consequences for Dispersed Collaboration,” Organization Science 12, no. 3 (2001), 346–71. what social scientists

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, 78, 79 mutual knowledge problem and, 66–67 empathy psychological distance reduced by, 117, 127, 129 reflected knowledge and, 31–32, 38 employee performance, in remote work programs, xiii, 134, 143, 149 engagement challenge in leadership, 134, 144–48, 149 linguistic differences and, 122–23, 128–29 rules of engagement, 119,

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Morriss, Anne, 133–34 multinational companies agile remote teams of, 107 complexity of, 154 country-of-origin effect and, 159 English fluency and, 118, 119 remote work programs of, xii, xiii, 93, 100, 111 multiple team membership, 7, 8 mutual knowledge problem, 64, 65–67, 84 mutual learning, cultural differences, 125

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45, 58 autonomy of remote workers, 40, 46, 50–52, 58 behaviors and best practices for, xvi digital tools and, 64 failure of remote work format, 57–58 flexibility of remote work format, 40, 46–47, 51–52, 58 individual growth and, 45–46, 50–51 measurement of, 39 monitoring progress and, xiv, 51

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Stanford University in management science and engineering, specializing in work, technology, and organizations. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Praise for Remote Work Revolution “I often talk about the importance of trust when it comes to work: earning the trust of your employees and building trust with your

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Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author of Confidence and Think Outside the Building “Everybody—not just the business community—is wondering how remote work will affect our future and how private and public organizations should adjust. With her timely and highly documented research, Neeley provides answers to questions on

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to enhance productivity of dispersed teams, and on the psychological fundamentals of trust and emotional engagement. Today we do not know what the endgame of remote working will be, but we should definitely read Neeley’s book to ensure our organizations evolve and rapidly adopt the most virtuous models.” —Vittorio Colao,

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should read this book.” —Morten T. Hansen, professor at UC Berkeley, author of Great at Work and Collaboration, and coauthor of Great by Choice Copyright REMOTE WORK REVOLUTION. Copyright © 2021 by Tsedal Neeley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been

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. Cover design by Milan Bozic Cover illustration © Ani_Ka/Getty Images FIRST EDITION Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Neeley, Tsedal, author. Title: Remote work revolution: succeeding from anywhere / Tsedal Neeley. Description: New York: Harper Business, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020044119 (print) | LCCN 2020044120 (ebook) |

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

by Cal Newport  · 2 Mar 2021  · 350pp  · 90,898 words

large office really needed—a productivity silver bullet of sorts—was some way to combine the speed of synchronous communication with the low overhead of asynchronous communication. Which brings us back to the CIA. This is exactly what they were trying to achieve with their pneumatic tube system. Their electromechanically routed, vacuum

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adoption. We shouldn’t be surprised that this tool spread so fast. As I established, it solved a real problem—the need for high-speed asynchronous communication—and did so in a manner that was relatively inexpensive and easy to master.8 But it’s important to remember that there’s nothing

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this radical new way of working made any sense. We chose to use email because it was a rational solution to the need for practical asynchronous communication in large offices. The hyperactive hive mind, in some sense, subsequently chose us once this tool had spread, at which point we seemed to have

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: The Hidden Costs of Asynchrony As argued earlier, email helped solve a practical problem generated by the growing size of offices: the need for efficient asynchronous communication—that is, a fast way to send messages back and forth without requiring the sender and receiver to be communicating at the same time. Instead

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computer might crash.20 The details of this result are technical,21 but its impact on distributed systems was obvious. It made it clear that asynchronous communication complicates attempts to coordinate, and therefore, it’s almost always worth the extra cost required to introduce more synchrony. In the context of distributed systems

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person. They believed that eliminating this overhead using tools like email would make collaboration more efficient. Computer scientists, meanwhile, came to the opposite conclusion. Investigating asynchronous communication from the perspective of algorithm theory, they discovered that spreading out communication with unpredictable delays introduced tricky new complexities. While the business world came to

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remote employees spread out across the United States and Europe. This geographic diversity, which covers a wide range of time zones, required a dependence on asynchronous communication tools like email. Like so many other firms in similar situations, Devesh’s company soon found itself tangled up in the hyperactive hive mind workflow

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who are working on a big project are divided into smaller development teams, typically consisting of no more than ten individuals. In an era where remote work is increasingly common, XP development teams work in the same physical room, where face-to-face communication is prioritized over digital alternatives. “We rarely check

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of fielding random questions and helping with individual projects, she would work on technology strategy for whole regions. In this role, she would be entirely remote, working on a small number of long-term projects at a time. Amanda assumed her bosses would turn down her request, and she was prepared to

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Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019). 18. Blake Thorne, “Asynchronous Communication Is the Future of Work,” I Done This (blog), June 30, 2020, http://blog.idonethis.com/asynchronous-communication/. 19. Radicati Group, Inc., Email Statistics Report, 2015–2019, Palo Alto, CA, March 2015. 20. Michael J

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help during particularly busy periods, such as those surrounding book launches. This would not have been possible in an age before web-based part-time remote work platforms. 9. Cal Newport, “A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email,” Harvard Business Review, February 18, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/02/a-modest-proposal-eliminate-email

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce

by Amanda Kirby and Theo Smith  · 2 Aug 2021  · 424pp  · 114,820 words

strategy coaching, specialist support organization? How much time, on average, will interns or placements spend in the workplace and where will that be? Is this remote working or at a fixed place of work, or a mix of the two, and what is the actual structure of a working week? Is this

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(in addition to the line manager)? Introducing the person to the team and how everyone works together and communicates is helpful especially if this is remote working. We forget how much we pick up about people if we are in the same place as them. We see micro-gestures and movements that

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you don’t have any clues to go on and so rules of engagement and communication need to be more explicit for both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Synchronous communication is communication that happens in ‘real time’ – two or more parties are exchanging information in the same moment with one another. Synchronous communication

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what are the common ways for social interaction will be lost completely when working remotely. This is the micro-chatter and some of the gossip. Asynchronous communication is any type of communication that includes a lag between when the party imparting the information sends the message, and when the party receiving the

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message interprets it. Asynchronous communication is generally not in person, and it’s usually unscheduled (although there are exceptions, such as using an email marketing tool to schedule sending an

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email at a certain time). Examples of asynchronous communication methods: Email. Letters or other direct mail. Project management tools. Company wikis and workspaces. Text messaging via mobile devices. Direct messaging (via tools like WhatsApp

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is an agreed plan of what is told to peers (if anything). Regular review meetings are important but even more so if the person is remote working as they may be reticent to ask for help. What is the job and what are the rules? Clarity is important. What does a typical

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to their health and wellbeing, have been thrust into the dark depths of despair. So when we look at the explosion of working from home, remote working, working from potentially anywhere in the world, for a few that might be a beautifully furnished purpose-built office in the house or garden, or

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some that are achievable, personal, easy to adopt. The report should also have made recommendations for changes to working conditions, such as flexible hours or remote working to ensure quiet space for focusing, yet none were made. This is poor practice on the part of the psychologist; it is based on heuristics

Travel While You Work: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Business From Anywhere

by Mish Slade  · 13 Aug 2015  · 288pp  · 66,996 words

-time or full-time remote job doing something they love. A similar website in the US is Hire My Mom (www.worktravel.co/hiremymom). Specialised "remote work" job boards are currently most useful if you're looking for techie or customer-support-related employees or contractors (although there are a few other

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team. I think there are some things that you have to learn to be, which is an important distinction. I wasn't a natural at remote work at first. I went a bit crazy with the lack of interpersonal interaction in the first few weeks. (We now have tons of video chats

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few sites, and that slowed me down a bit while traveling. Good lesson to learn! "How I learned to balance work, family, and life through remote work": www.worktravel.co/buffer8 The highs and lows of 11 cities in 3 months: www.worktravel.co/buffer9 *[Two-factor authentication is a simple security

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in general, etc. managed? This one constantly changes too! We have a lot of communication options and we try to choose our medium carefully. Specifically, asynchronous communication is key with timezone differences, and absolutely everything is transparent, so that everyone can stay connected. At the moment we use the following: Synchronous: HipChat

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promo stuff. That's pretty much it for the writing side. Of course, having a decent wifi connection is important but less so than most remote work. I'm not transferring large files or uploading that often. I would like to get some kind of wifi booster though. I just need to

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fashion) but you were still highly constrained by speed and reliability – e.g. 56k modems. It was flaky and unprofessional. Big consultancy companies eventually made remote working possible but then made life difficult again by having laptops with Windows Vista – so I often spent a large chunk of my day on the

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport  · 5 Mar 2024  · 233pp  · 65,893 words

’t introduce this trend so much as push its worst excesses beyond the threshold of tolerability. More than a few knowledge workers, thrust suddenly into remote work, their kids screaming in the next room as they suffered through yet another Zoom meeting, began to wonder, “What are we really doing here?” I

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didn’t drown them in new work, but it did seem to suddenly inflate the quantity of overhead tax they were paying. The shift to remote work also made collaboration somewhat less efficient, increasing the time required to satisfy the demands of this new overhead tax. If we’re working in the

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minutes. “When we work remotely, this kind of ad-hoc coordination becomes harder to organize,” I wrote in a 2020 article about the costs of remote work, “and decisions start to drag.” These increases in both the quantity and cost of overhead tax were modest. (I had to learn new technology for

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about our work during the pandemic, but also for what it tells us about our work right before these disruptions arrived. When the shift toward remote work began in the spring of 2020, many knowledge workers had already pushed their workload right up to the threshold of the overhead tax tipping point

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these conversations, the pile of actual, concrete obligations that remains might not be so forbidding. A direct strategy for reducing collaboration overhead is to replace asynchronous communication with real-time conversations. Consider my earlier example in which an ambiguous request from a colleague led to a long thread of back-and-forth

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the spring of 2021. At the time, the coronavirus pandemic was shifting beyond its acute emergency phase, and business communities were starting to wonder if remote work would become something more than just a short-term response to a health crisis. I meant my essay to serve as a warning relevant to

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literal palace. It just needs to be free of laundry baskets. In my 2021 essay, I used these observations to argue for a separation between remote work and working from home. If organizations wanted to close down central offices, I proposed, they should reinvest this savings to help employees find places to

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.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-work.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A full year after Cook’s: Jane Thier, “Tim Cook Called Remote Work ‘the Mother of All Experiments.’ Now Apple Is Cracking Down on Employees Who Don’t Come in 3 Days a Week, Report Says,” Fortune, March

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24, 2023, fortune.com/2023/03/24/remote-work-3-days-apple-discipline-terminates-tracks-tim-cook. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “They’re at the vanguard”: Cal Newport, “What Hunter-Gatherers Can

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-computer-screens. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT As I’ll elaborate later: Cal Newport, “What If Remote Work Didn’t Mean Working from Home?,” New Yorker, May 21, 2021, newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/remote-work-not-from-home. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT CHAPTER 3: DO FEWER THINGS The author’s

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, 2021, microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “and decisions start to drag”: Cal Newport, “Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed,” New Yorker, May 26, 2020, newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/can

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-remote-work-be-fixed. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Here was a problem”: Simon Singh, Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s

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the quotes in this section come from my original article on this topic: Cal Newport, “What If Remote Work Didn’t Mean Working from Home?,” New Yorker, May 21, 2021, newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/remote-work-not-from-home. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Mystery rituals developed in the sixth century BCE

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, 104–5 Q quality. See Obsess Over Quality quiet quitting, 4–5, 139–42, 151 R Raise the Titanic! (Cussler), 208 Rankin, Ian, 80–81 remote work, 54, 180 during the pandemic, 5, 36–37, 57–58 eccentric spaces for, 159–60 productivity metrics for, 20–21 pseudo-productivity and, 43 Renaissance

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space to your work, 155–57 rituals and, 84–85, 155, 162–63 task blocks and, 84–85 working poetically and, 153–57 See also remote work work-life balance, 23–24, 41 and doing fewer things, 64, 97–100 examples of, 115–17, 145 and pursuit of quality, 174, 181–82

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How

by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang  · 10 Mar 2020  · 257pp  · 76,785 words

dropped to “practically zero, which is unheard of in the call center world.” Clients posed no objections. Many of them have their own flexible or remote work systems and understand the need to experiment with working hours to maximize productivity while accommodating employees’ needs outside work. They also had little reason to

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flexible hours programs can build on their experience to ease the transition to a four-day workweek. “We’ve always had flexible working hours or remote working” at ELSE, Warren Hutchinson says, so by the time the entire company started its first trial of a four-day week, “we’d already sort

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scheduling that helps them redesign the workday. At the Hong Kong offices of talent development consultancy atrain, for example, “because we have flexible time and remote work,… self-managed work [is] quite the norm in the organization,” Grace Lau says. As a result, “moving to four days was not a big jump

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Europe. “Seventy-five percent of the company is on the other side of Slack or Basecamp, not across the room,” Michael says. That experience with remote work helped ease the transition to the four-day workweek: when they dropped a day they didn’t have to eliminate many meetings or dramatically change

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eliminated. Wildbit has employees in several time zones, and when the company moved to the four-day week, Natalie Nagele says, they shifted to more asynchronous communication. “A meeting at the beginning of my day is fine, but if it’s the middle of the day for somebody else, that’ll just

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Marketing “works with some of the top technology companies worldwide,” Lorraine Gray tells me. “In the technology industry, there are people who are used to remote working, and people who are working longer hours for fewer days a week.” Because of their own experience, they tend to be “very advanced culturally, and

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and parenting, but a growing proportion of fathers in developed economies complain about structural challenges to their being good parents. At Icelab, shorter hours and remote work “make it possible for a parent to be both a good parent and a good employee. There is no doubt that they are able to

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson  · 1 Oct 2018  · 117pp  · 30,538 words

-week cycles. We iterated our way to what works for us. We’ll talk all about this in the book. We didn’t just assume asynchronous communication is better than real-time communication most of the time. We figured it out after overusing chat tools for years. We discovered how the distractions

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the freedom to pick where they want to live, and there’s no penalty for relocating to a cheaper cost-of-living area. We encourage remote work and have many employees who’ve lived all over the world while continuing to work for Basecamp. We don’t pay traditional bonuses at Basecamp

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business

by Paul Jarvis  · 1 Jan 2019  · 258pp  · 74,942 words

the Traditional Way of Doing Business Broken? Traditional ways of working—in offices with strict rules and corporate hierarchies—are giving way to gig-based, remote work with more autonomy. The business world is constantly being disrupted with new automations and technologies, and this is a good thing. Changes in how we

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a common tool set. Autonomy can also be badly abused. The problem is not so much employees taking advantage of perks like flex hours or remote work, but leaders assuming that they need to give less direction. A leader’s job is to provide clear direction and then get out of the

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have changed how they run fairly recently by adopting the startup ethos of flatter hierarchies, open workspace, multiple projects for every team member, and even asynchronous communication (like Slack). In these workplaces, employees no longer feel like they have one singular task to perform in their jobs, and they have to self

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less

by Michael Hyatt  · 8 Apr 2019  · 243pp  · 59,662 words

Makes Remote Work Happen,” ToDoist Blog, May 25, 2017, https://blog.todoist.com/2017/05/25/how-doist-works-remote; Amir Salihefendic, “Why We’re Betting Against Real-Time Team Messaging,” Doist, June 13, 2017, https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-team-messaging-521804a3da09; and Aleksandra Smelianska, “Asynchronous Communication for

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Remote Teams,” YouTeam.io, https://youteam.io/blog/asynchronous-communication-for-remote-teams. 5. David Pierce, “Turn Off Your Push Notifications. All of Them,” Wired, July 23, 2017, https://www