- Work Deserves a New Look
- A Better Work Environment for All of Us
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
A Better Work Environment for All of Us
Like most practices, asynchronous collaboration isn’t a silver bullet. It won’t solve all your problems. Regardless, it’s safe to assume that every team that does any creative work will benefit from embracing asynchronous practices. Figure 1.1 summarizes the benefits we’ve discussed in this chapter.
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FIGURE 1.1 Benefits of an async-first work culture.
Chapter Summary
The world of work has changed considerably since the start of the global pandemic, as many of our teams are now highly distributed and remote.
Remote and distributed teams can experience burnout if they operate in primarily a synchronous manner.
If you’re building software or doing knowledge work in today’s day and age, you limit your productivity if you depend too much on meetings and tribal knowledge. You need effective written communication and the ability to do deep work.
The ability to work asynchronously, where people don’t have to be in the same physical or virtual space simultaneously, has several benefits:
Better work–life balance
Higher inclusion
Improved knowledge sharing
Communication practices that support scale
Time for “deep work”
A culture that defaults to action
While the global pandemic of 2020 was a time of great pain for many of us, it also fast-tracked us into a new set of possibilities for how we work together in teams. How far you embrace these possibilities will depend on your appetite for change and your team’s context.
Throughout the rest of this book, I’ll help you identify asynchronous work techniques for your team. But before you try to change anything, you must enlist your team’s support. So, in the next chapter, I’ll describe how you can introduce this async-first shift to your immediate colleagues.