Should you get your team in sync, async?

Transcript

John Kim:
So when I think about the word meeting, unfortunately, what comes to mind is boredom.

Christine Liu:
The word meeting just sends chills down a lot of people's spine.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Welcome to Work Check, an original podcast from Atlassian, makers of teamwork software like Jira, Confluence, and Trello. I'm your host, Christine Dela Rosa. On this show, we take workplace practices, and separate the hype from the helpful. Each episode, two Atlassians debate how the practice should be applied.

Christine Dela Rosa:
And today we're talking – you guessed it – meetings. As in, should they be the go-to for collaboration, or should asynchronous collaboration be the new default? Joining me today are two fantastic debaters: Marshall Walker Lee, arguing for async.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Another debate that could have been an email.

Christine Dela Rosa:
And Dominique Ward, arguing for the meeting side.

Dominique Ward:
I think we need to have a meeting about Marshall's attitude.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Unfortunately, Dominique, my calendar is completely full of other meetings.

Dominique Ward:
Of course.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Before we dive in, let's do a level set with a little asynchronous work 101.

Christine Dela Rosa:
So the word asynchronous, of course, means “not occurring at the same time.” And asynchronous work is different from remote work. Within asynchronous collaboration, workers complete their tasks at their own time, and communicate with their colleagues, knowing they might not hear back right away. This means they rely on digital tools to keep everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction.

Christine Dela Rosa:
And while this term “asynchronous” is particularly buzzy today, it's not a new idea. We used to call remote work “telecommuting” – a term that was coined all the way back in 1973 by a NASA engineer. Through the '90s and early 2000s, companies like IBM implemented work-from-home policies, startup- garage-culture picked up, and distributed workforces became more popular. And according to a recent survey, the number of people working from home in America rose 400% from 2010 until early 2020. And we all know it has skyrocketed since then.

Christine Dela Rosa:
And now, we're seeing more and more workplaces opt for asynchronous practices, but are they better than the good old-fashioned meeting? Let's begin. Now, remember debaters, you get three rounds to make your case. I want a good, clean debate, no low blows, and keep each round snappy. Dominique, Marshall, tell me, should asynchronous work be the default way to collaborate, and meetings be the exception? Round one. Marshall, you are arguing that yes, async should be the new default. How do you want to start?

Marshall Walker Lee:
So let's start by testing a premise.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Okay.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Can we all agree that most sync meetings are a waste of time and money?

Dominique Ward:
Sounds like you've been working with the wrong people.

Marshall Walker Lee:
All right. Well, this is going to be a spicier debate than I expected. That's great. Well, I submit that this entire debate boils down to just one word, Christine, and that word is default.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Yes.

Marshall Walker Lee:
When we gather to share information or collaborate, are we making an intentional decision to work synchronously, or are we simply choosing the path of least resistance? When meetings are the default solution, the inevitable result is a lot of terrible meetings. It's like that old saying that gets attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Sorry for the long letter, I didn't have time to write a shorter one.”

Dominique Ward:
I don't think that was Abe, but I'll allow it.

Marshall Walker Lee:
All right. Well, regardless of who said it, the point is if you don't have the time to plan a more efficient way of working, it's very tempting to just call a meeting. On that note, I'd like to introduce my first guest, John Kim, a professor of organization and management at Emory University. And here's what he thinks when he hears the word meetings.

John Kim:
I immediately think of a large, beige conference room, with people who don't want to be there. They don't know why they're there. And they're just hostage to the person who actually called the meeting.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Now, hostage is a pretty strong word – but I think we've all been there. I'm definitely guilty of using meetings as a crutch, especially when I'm feeling overwhelmed. Rather than thinking through the problem and crafting a recommendation, I just tell myself, “Well, we'll hash it out in the meeting.”

Christine Dela Rosa:
Oh, I've done that.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Yeah. And that's bad for morale, and it's bad for the bottom line.

John Kim:
You think about the number of people, and the salary of all those people, and sometimes very expensive people. And you multiply that with the frequency and the duration of the meeting, the opportunity cost is pretty expensive.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Here at Atlassian, our Confluence team discovered that companies waste upwards of, buckle up, $399 billion every year on unnecessary meetings. They suggested that 50% or more of all the meetings they analyzed were a waste of time. And John Kim says that meetings are actually a symptom that shows you something isn't functioning at your company.

John Kim:
If you ever watch a cooking show, like Top Chef or Chopped, or something like that, where they're team cooking, you can really tell which teams really know what they're doing, because they don't even talk in the kitchen. And so ideally, you want to work on a team in a company where everybody knows what the direction we're headed, the process generally of how we should do it, and we should trust each other to get it done. So if you can imagine a restaurant, where you have to sit down and have a meeting with the chef every 15 minutes for every plate, nothing's going to get done.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Now, not every meeting is boring, inefficient, and poorly run, but plenty of them are. And we need to be aware that our workplace norms can accidentally incentivize wasteful behavior, when we make synchronous meetings the default.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Yikes. Wasted time and wasted dollars. You packed a bunch in there, Marshall. Now, in defense of meetings as the go-to collaboration practice, what are you bringing to the table, Dominique?

Dominique Ward:
Wow, Marshall. Who knew you were so frugal? To be clear, I am not, will not, and refuse to defend poorly-run meetings. We're on the same page about loaded, Tetris-like calendars. But I believe a well-run meeting is essential for faster alignment and smoother collaborations. And I know we've all had seemingly endless back-and-forths over Slack, that really should have been a 10-minute meeting, right?

Christine Dela Rosa:
Yep.

Dominique Ward:
I'm head of design operations at Atlassian. And from a design perspective, synchronous collaboration is the lifeblood of design teams. Many of our practices, like design critique or design sprints, are hinged on real-time ideation and collaboration. My first guest feels the same way. Meet Christine Liu. She's the innovation editor at Harvard Business Review, and host of HBR's video series, Christine vs. Work.

Christine Liu:
The best meetings are magical. You really feel like, wow, we really powered through. We made this work together. There was no other way to do this. And you actually look forward to those kinds of meetings.

Dominique Ward:
And her team relies on that live collaboration.

Christine Liu:
It's really important, because we bounce ideas around. We have discussions. We get really divergent ideas and build on them, where everybody is just really trying to open their brains, and go further and try to innovate. And it's really tough to do it alone, and I think it's really tough to do it async.

Dominique Ward:
Doing this work in real time is just faster. Doing it async often takes way more time, and requires more preparation to make it successful. Now, I'm not saying there's no role for focused heads-down time, but that can be done with dedicated chunks of time. For example, we have GSDs, or Get Stuff Done days, where we don't have any meetings.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Wait, wait, wait. GSD can stand for Get Stuff Done?

Christine Dela Rosa:
Yeah.

Dominique Ward:
But to your earlier point, Marshall, meetings are expensive. You just need to make sure you're making the best use of your time. Here's Christine.

Christine Liu:
Sometimes you just need to have an expensive meeting, because it's a big deal. There's something very sizable that you need to figure out during that time.

Dominique Ward:
If async were the default, building trust, gaining buy-in, and creating alignment would take forever. And my team would likely not be able to work as effectively as we do. It is often more efficient to have the meeting.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Oh, I hear that. And that ends round one. So are meetings a waste of time and money, or a crucial expense for deep collaboration? Let's be real – it's a case-by-case situation. But I do think for those ideation moments, sync meetings can be vital. And...you brought in a guest with my name! So point goes to Dominique on the meeting side!

Dominique Ward:
Whoop, whoop.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Marshall, how are you going to come back in round two?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Well, I'm going to start by renaming all of my guests Christine.

Christine Dela Rosa:
I'll allow it.

Marshall Walker Lee:
I'm glad that Dominique brought up GSD days. I want you both to think about how you feel when you wake up on a GSD day. You're empowered. You're in control of your own destiny. If you need to walk your dog, or take your kiddo to the pediatrician, you can pause your work at any point. Suddenly, your work and your life are in harmony. Well, I am telling you: you can feel that way every single day.

Christine Dela Rosa:
I'm sorry, Marshall. Did I just walk into your Ted Talk?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Well, defaulting to async collaboration empowers individual team members to structure their work, to meet their own unique needs and challenges. That's what's important. And during COVID, I think we all learned how essential it is to give our teammates more flexibility and more autonomy.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Absolutely.

Marshall Walker Lee:
But you don't have to take my word for it, because here is Jessica Reeder, a leader of the Remote Work Initiative at GitLab, the world's largest all-remote company. And when she started there, she was used to working remotely, but she was not accustomed to async.

Jessica Reeder:
And then fast forward to my first day at GitLab. So I had done my paperwork. The company had sent me a laptop, and that was it.

Marshall Walker Lee:
That's right. At GitLab, they even onboard without meetings. So Jessica opened up her laptop, and she found a bunch of documents to start off her journey.

Jessica Reeder:
Those first few days were honestly disorienting for me. I would wake up every morning, and I didn't know what my schedule was going to be. So I was like, "Well, I guess I'll go to work now." I slowly came to realize over those first few weeks that I'd been thrown into the deep end of asynchronous work. GitLab was showing me, effectively from the very first day, that they trusted me to get my work done, without micromanagement and without unnecessary meetings.

Marshall Walker Lee:
To me, this sounds pretty ideal. If you trust your team, you don't have to babysit them in meetings to make sure that they're doing their job. I'll quickly add – documentation is another huge benefit of async work. It means that all the institutional knowledge is accessible and searchable. And there's also a record of your conversations that you can reference later, which means fewer chances for details to get missed, when people casually mention something really important in a meeting. On top of all of this, the async work model creates more work-life balance, and you can work when you're inspired to, and you can stop when you need to stop.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Hey, I'll admit, this is how I work. It's like eating when I'm hungry, instead of adhering to three fixed meals at predetermined times.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Exactly. Yeah, I'm the same way. And just to counter Dominique's point about collaboration in meetings – Jessica's found that she can collaborate async just as well.

Jessica Reeder:
You end up working transparently, so other people can see what you're doing. So all of this, you have to have a very low level of shame about your work.

Marshall Walker Lee:
There you go. Open schedules, and still collaborating. I'm not seeing a lot of downsides here.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Dominique – counters or additional points?

Dominique Ward:
To be honest, the work-life you're describing, Marshall, while enticing in spurts, doesn't really appeal to me. Don't misunderstand, I love a GSD day. But if it were every day, I'd feel less connected to my team, and frankly, a bit lonely.

Dominique Ward:
It's one of the lessons we learned in 2020. We can't discount the social aspect of meetings, especially as more teams are working remotely. And while I love the idea of streamlining onboarding, starting a new job with a stack of paperwork feels a lot like being invited to a house party, and instead of being introduced around, you get a pamphlet.

Dominique Ward:
My next guest knows a lot about creating social and emotional safety in high-stakes work environments. Meet Carmen Medina. She's now retired, but she spent 32 years as a manager at the CIA, and has since co-authored a book called Rebels at Work. Here's Carmen.

Carmen Medina:
We are social beings. And we use face-to-face, same room interaction to develop assessments of each other and establish trust. And without that, when you have a crisis or a difficult situation, you will end up having not enough trust in the team to handle it well.

Dominique Ward:
The CIA might be dealing with different types of crises than the average business, but trust is always important. And the synchronous nature of meetings means you don't lose all the little cues you get from people's faces and body language. It's just not possible to develop trust asynchronously in the same way.

Carmen Medina:
A meeting allows the astute leader to read body language in the room, for example. And you see someone shuffle in their chair or laugh weakly, I would go, "What are you concerned about, Joe?" Because you can read that when you're in the same room.

Dominique Ward:
So much of how we communicate is non-verbal, and the weight of our words is communicated through our intonation and body language. And it's so easy for miscommunications to arise when you can't gather that information.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Yeah. I felt that difference before, Dominique, because tone can be hard to translate to text. I get it. And that brings round two to a close. But I'm torn, y’all. Meetings do provide social value, but they don't necessarily have to be the default way to collaborate, to still get those benefits. Plus, the async learning life caters to what each worker needs. This time, I'm going with Marshall on the pro side.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Awesome.

Christine Dela Rosa:
All right. Time for round three. Marshall, hit us with your last point.

Marshall Walker Lee:
All right. Well, first I want to say, who wants to go to a house party? I mean, come on. Don't we all want to stay home and read books? Christine, I saved my most important point for last. And here it is. Async collaboration is more inclusive and more humane. Full-stop.

Dominique Ward:
Oh, wow.

Marshall Walker Lee:
First, async work makes it easier for teammates to collaborate across time zones. Jessica from GitLab mentioned that this was one of the big perks of async work for her.

Jessica Reeder:
So in the course of my work week, I'm likely to interact with people based in the Americas, in Europe, in Africa, Asia, Oceania, everywhere, right. There's no way we'll all show up to a meeting at the same time.

Marshall Walker Lee:
But they can collaborate asynchronously, and nobody has to get up at 4:00 AM, or stay at work until 10 at night. Other than the time zone issue though, meetings are not inclusive for lots of different kinds of personality types. Meetings tend to reward the loudest, the most confident, the most extroverted, and critically – the most senior.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Totally.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Not necessarily the people with the best ideas. As they say, the person talking the least probably has the most interesting thing to say, and meetings make it pretty hard to extract that information from those folks. Here's Jessica again.

Jessica Reeder:
Async gives people more options to communicate in ways that they're comfortable with. Personally, I'm not good at speaking up in meetings. I'm more introverted. I like to process, go back and think about something, and then come up with an answer. And so by then, the meeting is over, right?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Or for parents or caregivers, async work can be a lifesaver. I know this firsthand. When my kid has to stay home sick from daycare, I know that my life is better and my child's life is easier, because I can move my schedule around.

Marshall Walker Lee:
And finally, async work is more inclusive for people with some disabilities and chronic conditions, who need to work when they can, when they want to, where they want to. Jessica and the GitLab team did a survey last year, and they found that 14% of the respondents working remotely had a disability or a chronic illness. And 83% of those folks said that remote work made it possible for them to continue in their jobs. Asynchronous work allows people anywhere in the world, with any schedule, to get an equal say in decision-making and to help move their team's work forward.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Great points, Marshall. I feel like in the last year, I definitely learned how valuable it is to have a bit of softness in my schedule. You know?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Mm-hmm.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Dominique, over to you, to close out the final round.

Dominique Ward:
Thanks. Before I begin, about one in four people in the US is disabled in some way. And most, if not all of us, will at some point in our lives be disabled, whether it be by injury, illness or old age. All of this is to say disability is not a monolith. So while your point stands for some people, Marshall, async life certainly doesn't work for all. And let's not assume that the 83% who prefer remote work, prefer asynchronous work.

Dominique Ward:
There's this whole no meetings culture that's popping up lately, and I'm not buying that that's a way forward. It leaves many people behind. Not everyone can take in text-heavy asynchronous updates all day.

Christine Dela Rosa:
True.

Dominique Ward:
Many people who are neurodivergent don't collaborate well asynchronously. My girlfriend has ADHD. She finds synchronous meetings often to be the most productive for her, because having a sounding board allows her to iterate as rapidly as her brain is moving, and align on next steps. And if async is the default, people who might need meetings to clarify issues or smooth out miscommunications won't feel as free to call one.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Yeah. I've definitely seen that happen.

Dominique Ward:
Right? And if we're talking about which is more inclusive broadly, I want to bring back Carmen Medina, my guest from the CIA. She found that meetings allowed her to see and call out bias more effectively than she could asynchronously. She shared a story about chairing a meeting, where leaders were deciding between candidates for a promotion.

Carmen Medina:
And somebody goes, "Well, I don't know about this person. She's got sharp elbows." As soon as I heard that phrase, sharp elbows, I could look around the room and I could see people nodding. And I thought, "I don't like this." So I said, "Well, what do you mean? What is a sharp elbow?"

Dominique Ward:
Ugh. Someone with sharp elbows is someone who's considered aggressive or pushy. It's one of a long list of euphemisms and descriptions used against women and femme-presenting folks, particularly when we're in positions of leadership or seniority, or frankly, just living our lives and doing our jobs.

Dominique Ward:
Anyway, that meeting allowed Carmen to read the room, and call out bias in real time. If that work was done async, that comment about sharp elbows might've gone by without questioning. Sometimes meetings aren't comfortable, but it's a lot more effective to have uncomfortable conversations in sync.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Totally. That's an important point. The live meeting is essential to pick up those moments that might fly under the radar, or have those hard conversations. Nice.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Now, that ends our final round. You both gave me a lot to think about there. Dominique, you said before that disability is not a monolith, but that's true for any team of people. No communication style will ever 100% suit everyone. But I have seen asynchronous work be a great tool for democratizing collaboration, which tips this round and this whole debate to Marshall!

Marshall Walker Lee:
I am very pleased, but I will Slack you my celebration later on my own time.

Dominique Ward:
Wow.

Christine Dela Rosa:
All right. Let's be real, y’all. You're both right. Meeting bloat is a real issue that slows down work and wastes time, money, and morale. But a good meeting is still essential in lots of circumstances. Here are some considerations to get the balance right.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Now, it's become a clicheé but “could this meeting have been an email?” is a really great question to ask yourself, before you hit “invite.” Meetings shouldn't be a tool to remind your colleagues to do their leg of the work-relay.

When we default to async collaboration, we have to intentionally sync up with our colleagues. Set rhythms with your team, for example: when can people expect feedback? When is it time for sparring? When does the team celebrate, or share lessons learned?

Async work means we're responsible for understanding our roles in the overall workflow, so it's on everyone to be accountable to the big picture.

Christine Dela Rosa:
And that's all for this week's debate on the new default for collaboration! A huge thank you to our debaters, Marshall and Dominique.

Dominique Ward:
Always a pleasure.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Thanks for having us.