Amir Salihefendić: Asynchronous Communication Means Better Work

The switch to remote work in 2020 was an opportunity to re-evaluate the company OS and make changes for the better. However, many employees spent more time in Zoom meetings than office meetings, with significant impacts on well-being and productivity.

Amir discusses why he believes the future of work, whether remote, hybrid, or back to the office, requires a new way of asynchronous communication. Imagine the end of being constantly on and sitting in pointless meetings.

Asynchronous work is the freedom to collaborate on our timelines, not everyone else’s. It’s the power to protect our best hours for focus and flow. It’s the peace of unplugging, knowing we can pick up where we left off. It’s a world where work can happen anywhere, anytime (but not all the time), where we measure productivity not by hours but by outcomes.

He shares some key benefits of this approach and how companies can use async communication for a team of 10, 100, 1,000, and beyond. He also considers the limits and why synchronous communication, whether online or in-person, is essential in building a solid culture and a motivated team.

Slides

Transcript

Okay. Well, hello, guys, I’m Amir. I’m the founder and CEO of todoist, and I’m really happy to be here. It’s actually the first event I’ve done after the COVID disaster. And it’s just like, amazing to see people again, and you know, connect. Yeah, so, you know, we are remote first and asynchronous first. But I think, you know, the human connection and actually being with people and talking with people, it’s like, super critical as well.

Yeah. So, I will tell you a bit about asynchronous communication, and why I think it’s kind of at the frontier of actually working and living better. So first, let me tell you a bit about my company. You know, like, we have been one of the crazy people that started remote first in 2010. And when we actually did this, like, especially investors were like, very, very sceptical. Because they didn’t really believe you could work without having an office. And without like, being in one of these, like tech hubs. You know, and we kind of like proved that you could, and especially during the COVID, this has kind of accelerated, so remote first moved from like a niche of being like a handful of companies in the world doing this, to kind of being like millions of companies doing this. A bit about our company, you have people from 40 different countries, like most regions in the world, spread around 10 time zones, and we also have about 100 people.

Yeah, so just like a bit of the context. We are also creators of some products, we operate mostly in the productivity space. So we are creators of todoist, which is like one of the most popular task management apps in the world. And we also, we also created a twist, which is like a team, asynchronous communication app. And honestly, like, this talk isn’t about twist, because twist is just a tool. But I think like asynchronous communication as the default, because like asynchronous first, it’s more like a philosophy and a way like to communicate inside companies. And I think as well, you know, and this is kind of, like very strange, even for me, because when I actually started to do remote first, I actually worked from a co working space, or just like office spaces. And actually inside this, like we do, provide people a perk to work from our office space. But most people actually prefer to work from home, including myself, I actually switched my presence for this, which is very strange. This is actually actual photos from our team of their, like home setups, the baby’s kind of fake, I don’t think you can work if you haven’t a baby, but you know, yeah. But, you know, I mean, I think this kind of reflects something. And it’s kind of a preference for people, like this will maybe not make a lot of sense that people actually will prefer to work from home. But they do. Like, even if you pay them to kind of get an office space, they don’t really want to do that.

Again, so let’s actually define what asynchronous communication is, you know, it’s a really simple concept. And, you know, it can sound complicated, and it’s actually from computer science. So the concept is basically that you send a message, and you don’t expect an immediate response. So a lot of the world actually runs on asynchronous communication, which is email, that’s kind of like the old school protocol. While some of the other like synchronous communication is like this, talk, our meetings and etc. So honestly, like, the concept is really, really simple. But if you make it kind of like the default way that you communicate inside a company, then you have like, huge amounts of implications. And in this talk, I will actually talk a bit about like, the problems with the current way that we are working, and why it’s a problem. And also, you know, like, why asynchronous first is better, and also how you can implement it and then in the end, we actually go into like some more advanced like side effects of asynchronous first, which are actually not very apparent at the beginning. Yeah.

So first of all, you know, it’s like synchronous and asynchronous is kind of like a spectrum. So in the one spectrum, you have like office work, which is mostly like synchronised work, you know, it’s like, you usually synchronise both on like days and time. So you know, Monday to Friday, nine to five, you have everybody inside that office, then something that more companies are doing right now, it’s kind of hybrid, where you have like some people remotely some people in office, but you still kind of prefer, like the office environment. And, you know, maybe the decision makers are inside an office environment and cetera. And usually in the hybrid environments, you also tried to synchronise time. So this means like, you work from nine to five, Monday to Friday, etc, then you have like remote first, which is basically like, maybe you’re like more extreme that you hire from different time zones, you maybe don’t require people to be online or specific times, and etc. And maybe you also like, take some of the approaches, such as like, handbook, like you write more, you communicate more asynchronously. And then the extreme version is kind of asynchronous first, where, you know, most communication inside the company is done in an asynchronous way. This means, you know, you send a message, you don’t really know when you will get a response. Of course, you know, there are some guardrails that you need to implement to make this work. And we’ll talk about that. And also, like some stuff, like you still need sometimes, like synchronous communication, for instance, like I do one on one calls synchronously if we have like an emergency, you know, you do want to have ability to call people and etc.

So asynchronous first is not asynchronous only, you know, so it’s just like changing the default way that the company communicates. So, you know, what is kind of the core belief of asynchronous first, and I believe, actually, it’s kind of the way that we can, look better, like create better work, live better lives, like more free lives. And honestly, I think, you know, I have been in this particular space for like, 15 years, I’ve created like, taskmanager, maps, you know, read a lot of studies about productivity. And I think like, the current ways that we actually work is kind of broken. And if you look at like, some studies, like it’s very, very inefficient, so just like one random number is kind of like 60% of workers time is spent on like, work coordination. So you know, if you have like a developer, maybe they’re spending like 30% or 40% of their core time, like coding – what you’ve actually picked them for – and the rest is basically spent on like, coordination, and communication. You know, and I think actually, there’s a better way to do this. And it’s asynchronous first. But, you know, most companies are not really run like this right now. Yeah.

Another thing as well is like, while we are kind of crazy, and like Outliner, there’s like some really successful companies that have kind of scaled this model, like much bigger than we have. So for instance, like Zapier, I think they are like, at 500, people asynchronous first, they are valued at 5 billion or something like that. It’s a really, really great business, and, you know, they scale it really well. HelpScout may be aspiring to be asynchronous first. So, so like, it’s a really a spectrum. So like, you don’t need to implement everything, you know, you can implement elements of it, and just like move more into asynchronous communication, and GitLab, which is like a public company with 1000s of people, they will also use signals first. And they have like, some crazy aspects, such as, like a public handbook that you can go and read this, like 1000s of pages with a document everything. And they can like, yeah, run from a handbook first perspective. Yeah.

The Drawbacks of Current Remote Work Setup

So first, you know, let’s go into, like, just looking into what are the current problems off, like, the current ways that we are working? And why is it like a big problem? You know? So first of all, like, actually, when we saw COVID, and we, when we saw like, the transformation to remote work, we actually were very excited because we thought, you know, yes, this is amazing. You know, a lot of people will actually experience the remote first liberation. But this didn’t play out as imagined because most companies, what they actually did is they basically moved their office environment into the cloud, and made things much worse. So that means like, you know, a lot of people were just like in video calls all day long. There was like this zoom fatigue. You know, like, in the office you could be interrupted all the time, but like shoulder taps, in, like, this online environment is so basic, like Slack notifications. People would also just like work long hours by being always connected like you could, it’s very hard to actually disconnect from these real time systems, either because you know, you need to be a meeting, it’s a synchronous, or like, people expect you to respond right away, or like, look at the messages. And even, you know, some of these, like, design patterns that were chosen, for instance, in Slack. Like, they really want to promote like this FOMO, like fear of missing out. So, you know, if you disconnect for a few hours, like the discussion may like, just go without you. And so critical decisions could be made, and etc.

Yeah, I noticed like, something we felt as well, like, we didn’t operate all this asynchronous first, in the beginning, we were asked to actually also like really based on like meetings, and like chat, and stuff, but we quickly figured out like that this was actually very, very bad. And also, if you look at some other companies, like, you know, Zapier or GitLab, like, they also discovered this, like, as you scale, you kind of figure out, okay, this is actually quite toxic, and you’re not really getting great work done, people are busy being burned out. And you can see this in the stats. So this is actually stats from Microsoft, they have like, analyse their app suite, their products. And from 2020 to 2022 people spent 250% more time in meetings, you know, this is quite bad and quite shocking as well. And as well, you know, like, people work more the message more. So I really think like, we kind of made a very bad environment. And I think that’s maybe also why like, this kind of like a backlash against like, remote work.

Another aspect as well, you know, my my background is kind of development. And something you may not be aware of, if you’re not a maker is like, meetings are really like toxic for like the maker schedule. And Paul Graham has this like, amazing piece, that’s called Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. So like, actually, if you don’t understand why meetings are toxic, I really recommend reading this. So this is a quote, when you’re operating on a maker schedule, meetings are disaster, a single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, but breaking into two pieces, it’s too small to do anything. So basically, you know, you’re paying people a lot to solve hard problems and think deeply about stuff. And meetings can prevent that. So like if you have your whole day split up in like smaller chunks, we only can do deep work in small sessions, you can really tackle really hard problems. And I think like we really need that, you know, because a lot of the stuff that we need to do is super hot.

But not only that, like context switching is also super expensive. So like if you do any studies or like, look at any studies about like multitasking and context switching, you’re figuring out like it’s a really productivity killer. So this this study from like University of California that says on Upon returning to a task after distraction, it can take up to 23 minutes to refocus. Even brief mental blocks as a result of switching can take as much as 40% of a person’s appropriate time. Again, you know, this is, this is quite bad. And this is basically the environment we have created is like lots of meetings, lots of context switching, lots of interruptions. And then another study from King’s College London University, is that it actually makes you dumber. And people who try to juggle messages and work see an IQ decline of 10 points, this is equivalent of missing a night of sleep, and more than twice the drop after smoking pot. So you know, and yeah, so maybe like, people are not really aware of this, but like, this is really, really a big problem.

So, you know, like, that’s our core belief is kind of like the current environment is actually leading to burnout and at Doist we were actually in 2014 very close to this. Like we of course, we lived in this environment, and we could see like, this is not very productive. It’s not great for our lives. Like personally for myself, like I couldn’t, given that we work and operate in so many different time zones. I couldn’t really like sleep, because I knew you know, like somebody would message me they will expect a response from me. So you know, I would wake up at like 4am, and look at messages. So that is why we kind of got smarter. And I think there’s a better way to do this.

So let me just tell you about like, the new, like communication pyramid that we have. So basically, at the bottom, like most of their communications should be a synchronous. So actually, for this, like, we use our own app twist at the bottom, where we have like, added, I don’t think over 2 million like messages. And then use also like asynchronous to such as, like, get GitHub for like development, or, you know, docs or notion or whatever, like, you know, and then you sprinkle in meetings when they are needed. So for instance, for myself, I do like one on ones with my direct reports, we do some team meetings, but it’s like, very, very limited. And then you do some, like retreats as well, because like meeting people is also critical. And in the top, you actually have, we have like a telegram group, where you can basically like, if shit goes down, and you really need to get hold on something, you use Telegram, and then you call them or message them, or, you know, message the whole group. You know, the problem with most companies is kind of like that, at the bottom, you have like meetings and real time communication. And then you have like, some asynchronous sprinkle on top, but it’s kind of like an afterthought. And then maybe also, like, you see most communication as like, urgent. Yeah. So that is basically the core principle is, you know, just like try to do as much communication asynchronously as possible.

Benefits of Asynchronous First

Fewer Meetings

So what kind of benefits does this actually have? So let’s look at some of those. So this is actually my typical calendar in in a week. Like, I have very few meetings. And that means, you know, I have like, more time to just like, think strategically, or like, write, you know, or just like plan my day. So for instance, like, you know, yeah, I mean, even if something comes up, I can easily schedule time for it, and etc. And this is actually typical, when you see like an asynchronous first organization, it is not only for me, because like I’m the CEO, everybody has a schedule like this. And even like, like ICs, their schedule is almost like empty. So that means, you know, they can do a lot of like, the core things that we actually pay them for, which like, could be like design, development, writing, marketing, whatever.

Handbook-first

Another approach, and this is like, really, our friends at GitLab, that has kind of made this very critical, it’s kind of like having a handbook that kind of documents, everything inside the company. So for us, like, I think we started this some years ago, and it’s like, amazing addition. You know, just like, having great documentation about the core processes, the core culture, you know, company values, product specs, anything you do, you can put it in the handbook. And there’s like some tools that you can use for this. Yeah, we have, like our own little GitHub wiki that we use, and we have like a front end for it. But you know, it’s really just about like, documenting stuff. And honestly, like, this makes a huge difference. Also, when you onboard new people, because they can kind of go in and read about how the company operates, you know, and did not need, like, search through like, a lot of like, stuff to get, like the core gist of the company. And we’ve been beyond what people like some of the feedback, we have got this, like, we have some of the best onboarding. Because like, everything is kind of documented and structured and maintained as well.

Default Communication Becomes Deep

Another aspect as well is like, given that you don’t communicate in real time, it means that really, like most communication becomes very deep and very thoughtful. And this kind of changes the whole like structure of the company. Yeah, and especially now, in the problems that we are solving, it’s usually very hard and like, you need to think a lot before you can kind of give a good response. So you know, in our company, the rule we have is kind of like 24 hours response time. So this means like people can think for 24 hours before they give a response. Yeah, and I think actually, this creates like a better you know, just like, for instance, like knee jerk reactions where somebody gets to a red zone and like, you know, goes on like, it usually happens much less often. I think, at least that’s my experience, of course, like it’s hard to compare this.

Timezones aren’t a Problem. Hire the Best.

Another thing that we’ve like taken huge advantages off is like time zones and time zones in asynchronous first environment isn’t a problem we know because, you know, you just have a delay, you’re not trying to synchronise time, it means they can hire anywhere in the world, you can hire the best people. And this really like opens up, like huge talent pools. And also, you know, salary and etc. Like there’s a lot of stuff that is good about this.

Optimize for Energy

Another aspect as well, and this is something that I use personally, a lot is kind of like, optimising for energy and optimising for time. You know, the problem with like, these are data structures. So it’s like working from nine to five or Monday to Friday is, you know, you can, like, a lot of the stuff that we do is like, super creative, you actually need to have high energy or like, be inspired to actually do the work. And you can’t just do it like, Okay, I’m going, at least like, I can do that. So I think it’s really like, it opens up people to just, like, optimise for the energy. And also, like, if you look, I still like some stats of a table like of like, geniuses, how they work, like, there wasn’t like a nine to five schedule, you know, a lot of people have just like, different preferences, when they’re like, most creative, although, you know, when they low energy in, etc. And there’s also like, a lot of biology that actually backs this up, like, you know, not everybody’s a morning person, you know. So asynchronous. First, really, also optimises, and lets people actually work when, you know, they are most creative. And even, you know, something as well as, like, a lot of stuff that we do. I mean, for instance, development or writing, you know, it doesn’t really matter, maybe how many hours you work, it’s more like, you know, having a great idea, and like, you know, getting the data. So you know, it’s really also leveraged and creative work. And I think like, really, this is optimised for that.

Employee Retention

If you look actually asynchronous, first, the current asynchronous first companies, you’ll actually see, like incredible employee retention. So inside this and Sapir and like other companies in this, like, our, for instance, retention is like 90%, over the last five years. So this means like, almost nobody leaves. And I think the reason is like, people are happier, because they don’t need to plan their life around the work. So if you have like small kids, you know, you can easily just like be with them when you need to, without thinking about, you know, that meeting or whatever. Yeah, so that’s all something I have like three small kids. So it’s like a huge superpower to actually have this ability, where, you know, there’s always something unexpected that happens with small kids.

So, here are the basic principles of asynchronous slack, if you’re going to take something out of this talk, it’s basically these maybe basic principles is like, you try to just move as much communication to asynchronous as possible. You’re sprinkling in like meetings in real time, when it’s needed, not kind of as a default. And then I think still like retreats, face to face meetings, like bonding with people is super critical. Even in asynchronous remote first environment. Inside our company, we do like yearly company retreats, Team retreats, we actually don’t do a lot of work on these, because we just use them as a bonding opportunity. Yeah, so that’s basically the core principles.

Pillar 1: Vision, Mission, and Values Driven

And now, I will go into some advanced principles, and maybe also like pillars. That actually might not be very obvious, I think you only actually experienced them once you are asynchronous first. And you see, yeah, like this is, this has actually huge implications for how the company operates, the culture that you have, the leaders that you have, you know, everything. So, you know, you may delay just complication, but actually, you’re changing the whole operating system of your company. So let’s look at the first one. And, you know, this has actually taken me a long time to do this properly. But I think like in a singles first, you really need to make your vision mission and values super clear. You need to kind of reinforcement, reinforce them everywhere. And people really need to be connected to it. And the reason is, you know, you’re operating in like, a remote environment. And people don’t really have like the same connection as like, physical space. So they need to still have a connection to what you do. And the way that you actually create a connection is kind of via the mission like you know, they need it need to feel like okay, we are doing something critical here, and I understand it, and you know, you align everybody aligned around this. And same thing like with values. You know, you don’t really have a lot of control over people in an asynchronous first environment, you know, you can’t really be give that easy, like direct feedback and stuff.

So that also means that like, your values need to be super clear, you need to be like, very explicit, like, what, what is actually important for your culture? What isn’t? And what kind of things do you want to promote? What do you want, like not to promote? Etc? Yeah, of course, maybe this is like, this is, this is clear, or like, this is obvious. Like, for me, it wasn’t really obvious, like, it took us a long time to actually define our values, iterate down on them, you know, another thing as well, I think, like, you really need to have really a lot of focus as well. And I think Chris talked about this yesterday. And that’s all something we experienced, like, in a single environment where you have, like, people spread around the world, and you don’t have like, very clear, like, focus or like, priorities. So you know, you’ll just do a lot of random stuff. And you will be very unproductive and very unsuccessful as well. Yeah, so I think really like these combined with like, very clear priorities that people are really aware of, and you kind of reinforce them all the time, super critical.

Pillar 2: Default to Trust

So I think you you as well notice, like the asynchronous first is, you really need to have a lot of trust. And like the trust needs to go both ways. You know, this, again, like may be obvious, but actually, like, I don’t think you can make asynchronous work if you don’t have trust. So like, if you don’t trust your workers, for instance, like, let’s say that, the first thing you want to do is like implement monitoring software, you know, this will be a huge, like, distrust element. And I think like, if you want to monitor them, then it’s kind of like, you kind of like have deeper issues than like, just the way that you communicate. So for instance, for us, like, we don’t track people, we don’t know, when they work. We don’t know how long they work. And that requires a lot of trust, you know, a lot of like, managers and leaders may think, okay, then they’re probably not working, or like they’re slacking off. But you know, so I will actually tell you a bit about like, how you can still have accountability in this environment. Like, even if you’re not tracking people, because you really need to evaluate people differently in asynchronous first environment.

Pillar 3: Autonomy and Clear Responsibility

Another thing as well, is that you need to have a lot of autonomy and like responsibility. Again, like, why is this critical for asynchronous first? So, it is because, for instance, let’s say that you actually do have like committees, and you do like teamwork. And you do like decision making by consensus. Like in an asynchronous environment, this is really, really slow, because there’s a huge delay, you know, in communication. One of our principles is: we call it Directly Responsible Individual, it means that like every piece of work that needs to get done, there’s only one person that is responsible for that. And that makes them like owner of that and they can kind of like make decisions on that. And you know, it’s much better than like having two people or a team because if you have that then you have consensus, they need to reach an agreement and that means like slow decision making and slow progress. Another aspect as well, why like you need to have like very clear like top priority and like vision and stuff like that, you still kind of like want to push as much as decision making to the bottom as possible. Again, because like if you need to synchronise you know, between the top and the bottom, it will take a long time in a synchronous first environment and then you will be so and again, like a committees I just said that like yeah, we have very like no committees policy, like we just want to have creative individuals that are empowered to do great work.

Pillar 4: Transparency by Default

Another aspect as well, is that if you see some of these like asynchronous furs, I think GitLab is a great example of a public company that has like their whole handbook. It’s all like available to everybody to read that’s like extreme transparency, but even like induce for instance or some other like of these issues first like you really want to have as much information as possible out in the public. So in in this like, For instance, like leadership discussions, strategic discussion, like anything that’s not like super sensitive, it’s all public. And the reason is, you know, if people are blocked, you actually want to give them information. So again, like get unblocked solo, and if you don’t have transparency, you know, then for instance, like, you don’t have access to some Google Doc, you know, you need to ask somebody and wait. And then they respond you like 24 hours, and then suddenly, you have like, last 24 hours, on waiting for like, some permission to be granted.

Pillar 5: Everyone is a Writer

And something as well; everybody needs to be a writer. And this is like, a very uncommon skill. But it’s a really, really critical skill if you want to make asynchronous work. And everybody actually needs to aspire to be a great writer. So this is like, from developers, designers, marketing people, leaders, like, you know, because there’s a lot of writing like in this, we have like written, like, like I said, like over 2 million, like pieces of content. And some of these like, very non trivial. And, you know, like this writing culture, this illustrates a lot of like, really successful companies that have this writing culture. So this is actually from a podcast with John Collison, who is like a stripe co founder. And it says: “we’re always shocked that the returns to writing well are really high. And it feels like the world hasn’t really fully internalise that. Certainly, when you have 3000 person global company stripe is you’re going to need lots of asynchronous communication.” So actually something to know as well as like, as you scale them writing an asynchronous communication actually becomes much more critical because like you can, you know, have a hands on meeting with 1000s of people to synchronise, you know, like, writing is a lot cheaper. And also, you can be much more precise, you know, it’s easily shareable and etc.

Another thing, like side effects of writing as well, it’s kind of like that, you promote clear thinking, because, you know, I’m not sure if any of you have had this, like, where you have a great idea, and you’re trying to write it down, and then you figure out like holes in it, holes in your thinking, and that actually improves your thinking. So in a singer’s environment, you actually force everybody to think better. So this is like a quote from Adam Grant, like writing is a tool for thinking. And another aspect as well is Jeff Besos. And Amazon has this like, no PowerPoints rule, where like, you can actually use PowerPoints to promote your ideas, you need to write a six page narrative. And he says, like, there’s no way to write a six page narratives structured memo and not have clear thinking. Yeah, so in in a synchronous first environment where you write a lot, you know, you need to think a lot as well. And of course, like, this is a huge problem for a lot of people, because a lot of people are not really great writers. Yeah. But of course, like, given that you have like the whole world to hire from, you can still can optimise your hiring structures.

Pillar 6: Everyone is a Reader

Another aspect as well is just like, everyone is a reader. And honestly, like, there’s so much reading as well. So like, people really need to be good with like, reading a lot. And also like, just, you know, and that’s all something like, this isn’t an environment for everybody as well, this is a huge problem for a lot of people. But you know, that’s basically the environment that we have.

Pillar 7: Outcomes Over Hours Worked

And there are a few others. So one of them as well is kind of like, in a single office environment, you actually need to evaluate work differently. You can’t just like, look at how, like much time people have spent, you need to look at, like the outcomes of the work. And this becomes tricky. Because, you know, how do you evaluate, like, if it’s good code, or not good code, or like, if it’s good writing or not good writing? You know, I think like in the past, and maybe that’s also like, why so many managers cling to like, the old is like, you could just like measure it much easily. You know, you measure it by like, Okay, John, comes in early to the office works late. He’s a great worker, you know, and maybe actually, John isn’t a great worker, like, maybe he’s not really doing any impacts of work. But, you know, that wasn’t really like the way that we evaluate people. And in asynchronous environment, you know, you don’t really know when people work, how much they work. You can only judge by the work that’s being produced, which is like a very big shift.

Pillar 8: Hands-on Management

And this comes to the next like side effect is, in order to actually evaluate work you need to have functional experts as managers, because you know, if your like head of design, but you don’t actually know what good design is, or how long something takes, it will be very hard to actually elevate other designers. And also, like, if you actually stopped doing hands on work, you actually lose the ability to judge this. So we are like, maybe some of the few companies that implement hands on management. So we actually require all of our managers to actually be hands on to be experts at the craft, they’re managing. Some other companies, for instance, stripe is actually also doing this. So you know, I think there’s some merit to this even in like non asynchronous environments. But in asynchronous, I think it’s really critical. Because yeah, like, you need to be able to judge the work that’s being produced. And, you know, if you’re not expert, you will not be able to do that.

Pillar 9: Not Async-only

And the last one is basically that it’s not asynchronous only. So I think, you know, we have done like, these retreats. This is from Chile in 2015. Where, you know, you still need to connect with people. And you know, we are humans. So like, we really need the social connection, you need to know the people that you’re working with. So acing this first is actually not like, you know, just like robots. Like we are just like communicating text. But you know, you still need like the human connection. Yeah. So that’s just like a brainstorm of like asynchronous. I like what I’ve learned, like in this environment, and thank you for listening to me. Yeah.

Q&A

Mark Littlewood: Questions, write them down over there. Come back tomorrow, and we will have the answers. I’m here all day, Thomas.

Audience member: So you seem to be suggesting that async equals text. And, but recording audio and video snippets, and distributing them is also very async. Right, like recording, like a download or something presentation. But then your principles of everyone is a reader writer would no longer hold as basic first principles. And so how do you think about non text acing communication?

Amir Salihefendić: I mean, honestly, we use still like, like zoom, for instance. So I think you can still use that, but maybe not as, like the default because still, like I mentioned, like we’ve had like, a zoom fatigue, where you’re basically sitting in on like, a 20 minute like, zoom video, that could have been like, a short message. Yeah, so I think it’s a valuable tool, but I will not like base it as a core way of communicating. Because I really think like, you need to have like, very clear communication inside the company. Yeah, this app, you know, it’s a, it’s a tool and maybe like, we also going to evolve this because honestly, I think like asynchronous communication, like both audio and video are still kind of like being invented, and iterated on. And maybe also like, just transcription, you know, automatic transmission, like you could also make it searchable. and stuff. Yep. So, you know, I’m definitely not against that. Yeah. But I would be like, I would be worried about like, making that the default, because I just think like, it will be inefficient. Yeah.

Audience member: Because there was saying that text forces people to be more efficient. Yeah,

Amir Salihefendić: I think like, it forces like, people to think more especially like, you know, like condensed, if you actually promote, like clear writing concise writing, I think it can convey information much better than like, you know, a 20 minute video or something like that. They said, You know, you can be anti video or like anti zooms and stuff like I don’t think you should do that. Thanks.

Audience member: People can also register then you can talk supporting what you were just saying about video versus tax. My question actually, though, is about synchronous communication that I find often that because text is lower bandwidth than then than being in person with somebody where you can see you can hear their facial, you can see their facial expression, you can hear their voice can see their body language. You come to understanding quicker in a synchronous and visual situation. So I often counsel people who are having trouble getting to alignment with other people in their company, stop emailing with this person or slacking with this person, go talk to them. One company showed me a kind of a typical set of comments on a JIRA ticket. And they went on For pages upon pages of people arguing past each other, without really communicating, and we, I managed to resolve the problem by getting the principal parties in a room for a synchronous communication, which they never did. So I’m wondering if you have some guidelines about when it’s good to have synchronous communication?

Amir Salihefendić: I mean, we do and honestly, like, that’s, again, like, it’s, it’s not like asynchronous only. So for instance, if you have like, a heated argument with somebody, like, it’s very bad idea to keep it in text, because you don’t really like, you know, get like the body language, the voice of tone, you know? Yeah. So I would definitely recommend, like, when you reach, like, for instance, like, if you’re, if you see that, okay, this is like going off rails, like, you know, just do a meeting with the person, like, discuss it, and usually resolve it. So like, at least we still use that, you know, it’s just not like the default way of doing things. But you know, I think it’s a super valuable tool. And it’s super critical. I think like, you really need to have awareness of like, the social situation, you know? Yeah. And even like something as well, like, if you’re going to provide like harsh feedback to somebody, you probably don’t want to do that in text. You know, you want to do that actually in person.

Audience member: Hey, hello, I’m Francisco. I’m from from Evernote in Chile, actually. So I glad to see you the the company’s retreat at home, I would like to ask you about asynchronous or synchronous at scale. Some challenge we have when we started hiring globally, is to get people together if you have big teams. So for instance, what we started doing is to cluster people around time zones. So for instance, from today, our managers handled from California to Portugal, or money is in Portugal, from Chile, to Eastern Europe and so on. Have you seen other strategy to handle these kinds of growth in a synchronous work, because we cannot do whole company retreats in a single place, because we’d be super expensive. So this is the way we have been working through in order to get people together, but our teams scale and our hiring, it’s around the teams and their surrounding time zones.

Amir Salihefendić: Yeah, I mean, we do something very similar. So like, we do theme retreats as well, like on a much smaller scale, but we still think like it’s worth investment to actually collect the whole company together. Because, you know, that’s where you can kind of align and just connect on a broader base, but I don’t think I can, there’s anything wrong to kind of like, you know, do stuff in smaller teams, or even like, you know, go Jeffery, like, isolated or something like that. I think you can do that. Yeah, yeah, I you know, it’s really about like flexibility. So like, you know, whatever works for you. I think you can try it out and like evolve. Yeah.

Mark Littlewood: Whoever’s got microphone Rose.

Audience member: Hi, Amir. Yeah. I feel like you’re setup well to do presentation next year about and book first. And what I’m interested in learning about, or if you could just elaborate a little bit about because it wasn’t one of the pillars. How the asynchronous communication works together with the handbook first, for example, do you functional leaders to write parts in the hand? Do you capture some synchronous communication and incorporate it into the handbook? I mean, this is the intriguing part of your presentation to me.

Amir Salihefendić: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question and no setting like the best resource on this is actually GitLab because they’re kind of the masters of the handbook. And they have actually written some really good like pieces on like, how to have a company handbook, how to manage it, what information should go in it. You know, the way that we see this inside our company is basically that like more permanent, like knowledge should go into the handbook. So for instance, like you If you have like, just example, like core values of the product, you know, it’s probably not going to change a lot. You want to document that you make that, you know, easily accessible. While something that’s maybe more like transitional, like, you don’t want to put that in the handbook. So that’s at least how we treat that, you know, we still have like, a tonne of documents, honestly, like, I think something that’s like super broken as well, with a work environment is like how we manage knowledge. It just seems like very, very bad right now. And like, we also struggle with this, like, we have 1000s of documents, and, you know, but we do have like this handbook that’s like well maintained that has like really good cop copy and good information. So you know, and then we have like, a lot of other mess, like in Google Drive, and stuff. But you know, at least you have like one spot that’s got, like, more structured and better managed. But you know, I hope like as we go along, that we actually come become tools, that kind of help with this notion could also be an example. But also, I think, like notion has maybe also just like, a lot of structural problems that other tools have as well. Yeah, so I don’t know. I mean, there’s like some interesting startups like Almanack. They do like this, like, asynchronous like handbook documentation wiki, which could be interesting to check out. So there’s definitely some innovation happening here. And I hope, you know, somebody will kind of crack this and make it great. Yeah. Cool.

Audience member: Hi, I’m here. So this is part of the culture of the company. Right? So in the hiring process, what are specific things you do to make sure that they will fit in this part of async work?

Amir Salihefendić: Yeah, I mean, something that we really screen a lot for is kind of writing skills. So if somebody like, like, does a job application, and they can write well, like they will not be able to get a job, regardless of how good they are at other stuff. So that’s like one extreme element. Because like for us, like writing well, is really, really critical. Yeah. So that’s one example.

Audience member: That’s right. Amir. I was curious how, if like diversity, equity inclusion, if your company has priorities around that, and how you found that interplaying with asynchronous work first, if at all, like has it have have? Have those goals gone? Well together? Has it been like a barrier to building a diverse workforce and retaining diverse folks?

Amir Salihefendić: Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, it becomes much easier to hire diversity in like remote first and asynchronous first environment. I mean, you know, like, some story I have is like, we have one person in our support team, that nobody has, like, spoken to, or seen. And he has been, like, one of the first employees. So he’s been in company for 10 years working as support, you know, and we don’t actually know much about him. Yeah. But of course, I still think like, it’s kind of problematic. So like, why, you know, we are, like, global, you know, I don’t think we are diverse enough. And the problem with like, diversity is really like the pool of people that you have. You know, so like, if we do like a job opening for a developer, you know, like, 90% of people that apply will be like, white, European accent people, you know, like, we will get very little from, like other regions. I think, though, like, this has changed actually a lot via the COVID explosion. So actually, we do see a lot more people that are, you know, just from all around the world, and maybe like this, some hope for this. But yeah, like we were actually shocked. And maybe not shocked. But you know, things like remote first pre COVID is like it was a super niche. And maybe, you know, people that live in Africa or whatever, like they were not really aware that it could even be a job possibility. Yeah. I hope I answered that.

Audience member: So, my question is about the agile and sprint development, because we are promoting the independence and minimum meetings. With the Agile development. We have two meetings per week, poor planning and review and then daily sprint, Scrum. Stand up for 5-10 minutes. That’s At least seven meetings a week. So how does it go with the a synchronous or like minimum meetings that we are promoting here?

Amir Salihefendić: Yeah, I think like if you, you know, interview or ask your developers, they will probably hate those meetings a lot. Yeah. And honestly, like, so what do we do inside our company we have done like, for many years is basically we have like, weekly snippets, which is basically people, they said, like, what have I done last week? What are we gonna do this week, and you have just like, as a text, and then you do have like, a team meeting, but it’s more like problem solving. You know, if you have an issue, you discuss that it’s not like, you know, status update with your basic like, you know, spend time just like, reciting like stuff that could actually be just a status update. Yeah. So honestly, I think like these, like, checking meetings are really, really bad. You know? And I think most of us hate them. Yeah. So moving that to text would actually be a huge relief, I think for people. Yeah, that’s at least my point of view.

Mark Littlewood: Thank you probably last one dominant. Right.

Audience member: So I, sorry, I think many companies may discover a remote first as a cost cutting exercise, because great all the people are at their homes. Now. We don’t have to pay rent for my fancy office anymore. Of course, they forget to retreat part of the equation. So if you’re if you’re comfortable sharing, can you tell? Like, from purely financial point of view, how much money do we actually spend that you on the on the retreat side? How and how that would compare if all the people would actually be in fancy offices? And you?

Amir Salihefendić: Yeah, I mean, honestly, like the way that we do like remote first. And asynchronous is like, it’s not a cost spending, you know, we spend a tonne of money, like we actually pay like, almost like us salaries, like top CEO salaries, like globally. So like, we are not like, we are not saving a lot of money doing that. And the same thing with retreats is kind of like they are super expensive, because like you need to fly in people from all around the world. And you know, you need to have a hotel that can host a lot of people and stuff like that. So I think it’s quite expensive actually to do this. Like, I would not see this as like cost costing, I think it’s just like, for me personally, it’s just a way a better way to work. Like it’s not a cheaper way to work. Yeah. So I hope that answered it.

Mark Littlewood: So I said, Dominic had the last question. And then another Dominic’s raised his hand, so technically, it’s like the programmer that goes, Hey, sure. Oh, sorry. After you. I just had a crash. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I think you speak for all of us.

Audience member: So my question would be, whether you do besides the retreats, anything special to fight the loneliness in the people, because that’s typical problem, even in just like, synchronous remote first companies. But in this a synchronous, it must be even harder. So like, what else do you do to make people to be, you know, part of the team and collaborate well with each other? And don’t really don’t feel lonely?

Amir Salihefendić: Yeah. I mean, that’s an excellent question. And honestly, I think like, you know, I have actually written a blog post about this, like, the mental health issues in a remote first environment. And I think, actually, it’s a huge problem, because you can, like build some really, really bad habits. You know, you don’t go out, you’re basically working overworking. You know, and it’s just basic circle, and you can kind of spiral it out of control, and maybe end up like with a huge depression or like a huge burnout. So I think this is a big problem. And, you know, the way that we do this is kind of like, I think people really need to have a social life outside of work. Like you actually in asynchronous first remote first, you actually forced to do that. Because like, you’re not going to have any, any co workers close by. And then also, like, some stuff like that we do as well is like vacation is super critical for people, you know, and really also, like, reinforced like, the mental health aspects of this. Yeah. So I’m not sure I get that. Yeah, I don’t, I’m not sure if that answered the question. But I think it’s a big problem. And I think as a company, as a leader, you really need to be mindful of that and kind of like try to help people like recognise that they actually need to have healthy habits that need to have like, you know, like a social life. And like a life outside of work. Yeah.

Mark Littlewood: Great. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.

Amir Salihefendic

Amir is the CEO and founder of remote-first company Doist, the company behind Todoist, and Twist.

Born in Bosnia, he grew up in Denmark, started the business in South America and now lives in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. Doist was founded in 2007, has received $0 of outside investment, employs over 120 people in 30 different countries.

He believes a product stands a better chance of resonating with a global workforce when people around the world create it. For him, working remotely is the way of the future. He does not know what the next decade will bring, but it won’t include selling out or getting acquired. Amir doesn’t have an exit strategy – he has a mission to help shape the future of work for decades to come

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