Asynchronous Work is the Enemy of Project-Based Success
Why The Dream of Asynchronous Work Is Burning the Project Budget
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur, and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
When I look at different websites and professional commentary, two main topics are discussed: remote working or RTO mandates, and the possibility of working asynchronously from the rest of the team. The dream, the achievement, the pinnacle of success, would be to work on the timeframe that the person finds more suitable for their personal life.
Well, it is a very good objective to have. The only problem is that asynchronous work, or working on different schedules compared with their colleagues, doesn’t work in a project-based approach. Let me explain why
Impossible to be 100% autonomous
In order for someone to work asynchronously without negatively impacting the project, the execution cannot have dependencies on anyone else to go smoothly. For example, if a task is estimated with five days of effort, to make it happen asynchronously, the person must not need anyone to execute it.
In practice, what happens is that the more complex the project is, the more unknowns there are. Consequently, there is always a moment when we need to brainstorm or agree on solutions as a team in order to move the project forward. If people have only a few hours of overlap, they will simply “burn days in the calendar” without any significant progress.
In order for the project to be efficient, the team needs to have a significant overlap of working hours to discuss and exchange project-related topics. If the number of overlap hours is less than six, it is already entering the realm of inefficiency. Even in projects that have people in different countries, I strongly recommend that people overlap their schedules. For example, for everyone to work under CET hours, even if that means I will have a meeting at 8 A.M. Meaning, good luck to those who work with people on different continents, and by lunchtime, half the team has disappeared due to the time zone alone.
It Is Very Easy To Burn Days
One of my biggest problems with freelancers is that they are juggling multiple projects at the same time. If a project has an issue in the morning and the freelancer only sees the Teams message in the afternoon, the chances that the issue will continue for the next day are very high. Without much effort, the project is burning days on the calendar. In essence, the days are passing, and there is not much progress.
There are some fixes you could try, like setting up calls to address issues on the same day, or any type of “making bridges” to just move forward. But the reality is that a significant amount of effort is put into babysitting instead of actual work. So, we need to be especially careful with tasks or activities that are on the critical path. If these tasks are being burned through the calendar, the project overall will be delayed without much being done.
Complexity Is a Group Effort
If it were easy, it wouldn’t be a project, and you probably wouldn’t be called to save the day. Sometimes, a challenge on a project needs brainstorming and people actively looking for the best way to address the situation. Having the team together only in an online mode is already a challenge when trying to overcome and address complex problems. With time, the team learns to become efficient at working remotely with each other, at the cost of destroying each other’s calendars with meetings instead of just having a quick chat over water or coffee near a whiteboard.
Gaining momentum on a discussion is super important and is often overlooked. If a problem is being discussed, and different people are joining the conversation, but all of a sudden the conversation needs to halt because Charles (fictitious character) is offline at 3 P.M., that is a problem. This means that momentum was halted, probably only to be addressed the day after with a further confirmation, I don’t know how many days in the future. The excuse of “Xavier had a personal issue”, which by accident happens each Thursday and Friday during working hours, but “he will compensate the hours”. Yeah, whatever. The momentum was already broken, especially when a group discussion is involved. The consequence? Burning days in the calendar. Not everyone should be allowed to work in a remote setting, but that is another conversation.
Outcomes > Excuses
I understand people want to have their beauty stuff during the day. It’s convenient, I understand. But that might cost you a project. One of the wonders of remote working is that people are more accountable for the results of their work. If the days are passing but the results aren’t there, it becomes evident that a casting error occurred. Hard conversations need to happen, and decisions must be executed. If someone likes to work during night hours, well, I believe there is a team on a different continent that would love to work with him or her.
In today’s reality with remote and hybrid work, having little overlap of working hours with the rest of the people will hurt the results. One of the wonders of remote working is that results have the spotlight, and excuses not so much anymore.
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur
I think there are different layers for what we define as "asynchronous work".
On one hand, being so asynchronous as in being in completely non-overlapping time zones, as you are describing in your article, can indeed be problematic if not properly planned. (Probably, an ok approach would be having at least a few people on each time zone, so at least there's some collaboration there. But in general I agree if everybody is in completely different time zones, collaboration is tricky.)
However, in my experience, milder asynchronous/hybrid setups are more usual. And here I mean hybrid = async/sync (!= remote/RTO).
In that case, I think the situation you describe about interrupting conversation flows or people arguing they have "frequent personal stuff" becomes a people/team management problem and not so much a problem caused by asynchronicity.
Even in remote settings, I believe having a 100% async way of working is almost impossible, but I believe some of the issues you describe in the article can be worked on through establishing clear boundaries and agreements among team members. (At least, in my experience with in-house teams. I don't really have experience working with freelancers.)
I observe the same effect when people are unreachable because they're sitting in "important" meetings. The more meetings, the more important the person is, which you can tell by the fact that you can't reach them for days. It's particularly annoying when that person also happens to be your own boss. I think this problem is even harder to solve than getting people to agree on common working hours. Do you know this too?