How to Build an Async Remote Team That Actually Works

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Matt: All righty, everybody. This is not the web news, but I wanted to hit you with an "all righty" because normally this is where the hook is. And, uh, you know what? I'll, I'll grace you with a brief just synopsis of what this episode is, and then I'm gonna get right into a story that I've been anxious to tell you about.

It's a developing story. on CNN. No, it's not at all. It's just in my in- in- email inbox. But anyway, this episode is gonna be all about what does successful async remote work look like. We're taking a, a break from the whole AI yada, yada, and we're gonna be talking about how this, how this works. So what successful async work requires, such as be- like good communication, good autonomy, strong documentation, things like that, and how you can hire for that, so hiring and leading the right people when you're in an async team or in an async company or in some sort of async environment. And we're gonna be, you know, kinda diving into all that kind of thing But now I have a story for you all. this [00:01:00] morning I received many mo- many automated emails from various systems that tell me what's going on on various client websites. very standard. I received them just fine all morning.

Everything seemed to be fine. And then the system only notifies me if there's a certain amount of notifications, so I didn't receive one, and that's not a red flag. I tried to do someone's WordPress updates, and thankfully, I did not press update. The reason why I did not press update is because I noticed that my Elementor license needed to be refreshed. No big deal. It was just some sort of connection issue I th- I figured, and I'd just log into Elementor, click refresh, and it's happened before. Again, no big deal. No problem. So I go to log into Elementor, and it's like, "We sent you a six-digit code." I wait. I don't, I don't receive it, so I think, "Okay, no big deal.

I'm going to use an in private tab." So I use an in private tab, go incognito, try that. Still doesn't work. Now, this has happened before, not with just Elementor, but with other places, where, okay, maybe [00:02:00] my browser's messed up and it's not sending it through correctly or something. So I'll go use another browser, boot up another browser, do the same rigmarole, don't receive anything. So I think to myself, "Maybe I should send a test email to myself," and I did that, and I did not receive it. So it's like, okay, something's gone wrong with Microsoft 365 Business. Let's go check it out. So I go take a look, and that status is up. So it's like, okay, and here's where things fall apart. So I'm like, okay, is not good.

Let me go to my website. Website's down. Not good. Okay. under the same host, I have a client. Go to their website. It's down. Okay, also not good. Fantastic. But it's one of those downs where it's not like it's down and I'm getting an error 500 or something. It's, it's like the DNS is so broken that it's not resolving properly at all.

So, okay, fair enough. I go in and I log into my host, and I go and I check everything. I check, have we used too much space? No. Perfect. We got tons of room. [00:03:00] we, uh, beyond any of our other performance metrics, using too much memory or things? No, well beneath those. Okay, great. Is the server running at all? Yeah, it's working. Okay. I go and I check my host's status, the host says, well, we did all this maintenance last night, and it was rolling. It was like, you know, this ticket, this ticket, this ticket, this ticket with all these times, and one of those tickets was applicable to my area, and one of those tickets happened last night, which corresponds with everything blowing up. So, okay. Okay, fine. I look around. Just can't find anything wrong that I can touch. So I go to reach for support, and what do I find? I do not find the normal support ticket thing. I found an AI. And usually, well, actually, I don't even say, shouldn't even say usually, we pay for human support. Now, I think our price was actually reduced, so maybe that's why in the last billing cycle, but I [00:04:00] digress. I go there, and I think, "Oh, great." So I go, and I tell this thing, "My website's down. I need help." it goes, "You have this record in your DNS, and it's broken. It's, it shouldn't have this record. Go delete it." I go look, and it's just a local host record. It's localhost.mydomain, and it's 127.0.0.1, and that's correct as far as I'm concerned. And I go and I look at my clients, and he doesn't have that, and I say, "Okay, maybe, you know what? Fair enough. delete this thing. I'll take a backup of it, just take a little screenshot of it just to make sure to get the, you know, the TTL and everything else, any other details, and I'll just, just take a backup."

It's what I always do with DNS. It's always best to do that. I take this backup. I delete this record. I tell the thing I did it. "Is that what you wanted me to do?" And it's like, "Yeah, you're good." Okay, bro. Still not working, so I r- I think, "Okay, this is not good." So I go to my registrar and I check, and it's complaining that your NS servers have [00:05:00] idled. Okay, that's not good. So I look at the NS records. go pull up a terminal on Windows. I then... Which is a PowerShell, whatever. I then try to ping, and I can't do it, so my first thought is, as an IT man, "Well, it's an NS record. NS server. Maybe it's blocking ICMP traffic, which would block ping." Okay, so I have an idea. I have another client who is on a different account but on the same host that's newer. It's a newer website, just, uh, maybe about a year or so, and so... It might be longer than that, but anyway, that's details that you don't need. So anyway, much newer than my setup, so I think, "Okay, I'll go to his website."

His website works beautifully, so I go and I look, and his N- NS records are different. So I go to my control panel, to my... Well, not even my control panel, to my admin area, and it's like, "These [00:06:00] are the NS records." And I realize that the NS records over the years have changed, but there's multiple versions of it, so it's like it was NS1, then it was NS119, then it was this, then it was that, but they always resolved to the same two IP addresses.

They always resolved the same IP to. So these two domains that I am using are broken, and you can probably, if you're following along, figure out that, okay, Matt and his other client, they have older websites, they have older links, and so it's not working. So this newer person, is he using the most up-to-date?

No, he is not, but he is using a different one. So I ping those to see if ICMP traffic is indeed blocked. It is not. The ping returned successfully. So, and it resolves to the IP address of the new name server that it's telling me to do, 'cause it says, "Here's the name server and here's the IP it should be." Fantastic. Problem with name servers is it takes 24 to 48 hours to propagate. I'm losing emails. I'm supposed to be doing all this work and all this crap, and, uh, obviously my client needs to get in here, and the, uh, one big problem is my client, I don't have access to his registrar, so I can't just go [00:07:00] fix it for him. don't wanna tell him to just immediately go fix this thing, because I wanna know if the, if my host is on it. So I start asking the bot, "I need to talk to somebody. You know, this isn't what needs to happen. This is it." Can't get through. The bot's just giving me answers, you know, classic or classic AI, "Do this, try this, change your NS records." So Mike, you and I join this call to do this, do this podcast and, um- Uh, you, you give me an I- you give me a, a support email. So my email's down, so okay. I go to my personal email and I go, "Okay, no worries. No worries. Let's just... No one panic. Everyone simmer down now." Let's go and check this other email. So I go and I type in, you know, support @, you know, whomever, give them the rundown, and I get a nice friendly response in less than a minute.

And who was replying to me? The same bot that was talking to me [00:08:00] earlier. "Hi there. I'm your AI assistant. like this is a problem, and you need to change your D- your NS records. I understand that changing the NS records may fix it. Why did you break the old NS records?" Now, I'm a, I'm a a, a, a fiery but c- calm individual.

That is hypocritical, and that's how I describe myself because I don't really get it. But anyway, so Like you make a mistake, you make a mistake. I make mistakes. I worked in IT, I get it. There's mistakes, whatever. I need to talk to a person to know whether to advise my client to change his NS records, or are you in the midst of fixing it? in order to test it for my client effectively, I change my NS records because if I lose emails and things, it's on me, it's my fault, okay? did it. My email's working. The website's still down. The email's working 'cause it's still propagating the NS record change across the pl- globe, and Mike sent me a little tracker to check that.

Thank you for that. So I'm tracking it. It's going, and Microsoft is in America, so part of America [00:09:00] has it, so that's why my emails are working. Fantastic. So now we know that that fix works. Still a big question though, if it's twenty-eight to forty-eight hours, is this guy gonna have to change his NS records? I don't know. And like to state that this is the third or fourth time that during maintenance something's gone wrong, which is... that's what it is. But here's the, here's the big thing. I didn't get mad. You go look. You say, "Oh, there was rec- there was a bit of maintenance." Guess what I did? Log in, check if all my stuff is good like I did before, click on the box that says Chat with our team.

I text them. They say, "Oh yeah, there, we did this change. Can we just... Let me just check something for you." They go, "Oh yeah, no problem. Hang on. There's just a, like, a firewall issue here. We'll just fix that. We'll just open up that firewall rule for you. Like, sorry about that. It was left by, in, in by default when we did an update." Totally understand it. I'm not gonna yell at you. Thank you very much for the service. Website works, and I walk away. When I talk to your AI, and I can't get through, and then I try to email you directly, and I still can't get through, these websites that I'm talking about are [00:10:00] small. We run a small company. If I ran a ten million dollar company, and I was trying to get through to somebody, there's my fieriness, where I now am no longer the color I am. I'm gonna turn beet red. I may have a heart attack on the telephone, and Mike's seen it. I will lose my mind, possibly to the point where we call it TR done, which is a thing that happened back in college where we were working on a TR project for so long, which is called the technical report project, for so long, something went wrong in the eleventh hour, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours invested in this thing, in college, so that's expensive, especially back then. I had a full panic attack in Mike's basement and literally didn't care about anything. And I've mentioned this on the show before. You're s- We were... For the presentation, I got it working. Everything got... Everything was fixed up by the, by the end of the day. I got it working And I was supposed to do the presentation, and I was supposed to dress up.

And you know what I showed up [00:11:00] in? What I'm wearing right now, a T-shirt and $3 shorts. And do you know why? 'Cause I was done. I didn't care. I don't care. I didn't care, and that's what this AI crap is gonna do to me, I think. This is crazy. This is crazy. What are we doing? This is a simple question. Hey, did you get rid of these two domains?

Because there's gonna be probably thousands of other people that are in this niche of having been your customer for five to six to 10 years, I think it might be eight years now at this point, where I have an old NS record. Do you know why? I don't go in every other night and change my NS record unless instructed.

And there's been maintenance periods where they've said, "Please do this action by this date," and I've always done it. I digress. That's the hook for the episode. If you wanna... If this interest- episode sounds interesting to you and you wanna support the show, you can go and check us out on that Patreon, leave a review or rating on your podcast app.

Join us in our Discord server or share this with your friends. And if you wanna help out yourself and not, not, not only us [00:12:00] as well, I'm all messed up. You can get yourself up to 20% off a Scrimba Pro plan. So if you wanna learn how to code using their interactive media player code editor, you can find that link to get that discount in the show notes and in the, the episode description with full details on how it works in those show notes on htmlallthethings.com That's my rant. I hope you enjoyed it Mike, please take it away

Mikhail: Yeah. No, I mean, like It's frustrating. I, I, I don't wanna get too far into it because otherwise I'm gonna go on a 10-hour rant. Um, I'm kind of-- I'll be honest, I'm kind of burnt out on AI right now. I need a little break. So that's why I did this episode, which is about async work. And I, I-- This is something I'm pretty passionate about that I've kind of forgotten I'm fash- I'm passionate about.

Um, we've had episodes on async work before. Uh, it was a while... It feels like forever ago. [00:13:00] Uh, so I figured it was a good time to kind of catch up, uh, talk a little bit more about it. Right now is a weird time for async work or, like, remote work in general, honestly. Um, there's a slight difference between async and remote, and I'll, I'll talk about that.

But, uh, the reason that I'm br-bringing it up now is that Sam Lambert, who is the CEO of Plan & Scale, which is like a database as a service company essentially, um, was kind of promoting it. He was like, "Hey, you know, remote work has worked for us," and they're, they're a pretty big company at, at this point, and they, they've attracted some really good talent over there, and like their, their service is really good.

I've, I've been using them for a long, long time, and I-- Like, I like the fact that he brought that up in the noise of all the other crap that's going on. I thought, "Hey, let's... You know what? Let's talk about it." I've been remote work- working for different startups, uh, you know, as an employee, as a tech lead, as a engineering manager, head of engineering kind of thing for I think it's close to 10 years.

It's definitely over eight years at this point. So I feel like I'm talking [00:14:00] from a position of knowledge and experience at, uh, at, right now. Um, and yeah, I think there's a lot of things that aren't as obvious about especially async work that we want, that I wanna say, and also just remote work in general.

And there's obviously reasons like, like, you know, positive and negative reasons why there's this return to office mandates that are going on. Uh, I think a lot of those reasons are because, you know, companies purchased offices or had leases that they were not able to get out of, and they, they needed to justify those things.

I think that's a big part of it. There's other parts that people talk about like control. Um, you know, when a manager is in an office, he can see everyone there, and he can... He knows what they're doing and stuff like that. Um, that's another part probably of it. Uh, but at the end of the day, we've had remote work for a long time, and we're gonna continue to have remote work for a long time.

It's not as [00:15:00] grand as it was during the peak COVID times, but I don't think it's going anywhere. Uh, it works to a certain degree for a lot of people and a lot of companies, and it has its positives and negatives just like in, in-person work does. That's what I wanted to kind of point out here is that it's not perfect.

Async work is not perfect. Remote work is not perfect. You're not in this, like, amazing bubble of happiness all the time because you don't have to drive into the office. Um, but from my perspective, I've been doing this for a while, and I have done in, in-office work for a while as well. Uh- The positives well outweigh the negatives in almost all cases, right?

Um, and I wanna give some indic- some indicators for everyone out there about what makes a good remote, a- async remote worker. Before I do that, let's define async remote work, right? Remote work we understand, that's easy. That means not going into the office. But in a traditional remo- remote work sense, [00:16:00] it's still office hours.

So you have 9:00 to 5:00, your company's usually in the same time zone, or if it's not in the same time zone, they have to adjust to that time zone, and everyone is available from a traditional, you know, 9 to 5, uh, or whatever hours are set by the company. Um, a lot of times stuff is done synchronously, uh, so you have many meetings that you- you're a part of.

Uh, your communication flows really fast. You know, you, you book off deep work hours just like you would in the out-- in the office. Um, but overall, the timeline of your day is very similar to a regular office job, and the timeline of a company's day, like all the employees are there during this time. And there's some advantages of that, like if you need constant collaboration, right?

If you need live collaboration, that's kind of a requirement of it. Uh, you need to have a lot of synchronous work hours. But that's where the differences kind of stop, uh, or, or, or start, right? So async work [00:17:00] means there's fewer real-time dependencies. If your company doesn't require constant synchronous work together as a team, you can start to look at async as an option.

Um, it's not just fewer meetings, it's fewer touch points, and there's a lot more to it to create a, a really successful async work. The biggest advantage, honestly, of, of an async work environment is that your-- you get your really smart people to be in an area where they can actually focus for longer periods of time.

If you're doing some really difficult work, some, some, like, work that requires deep focus, like, you know, heavy engineering work is, is a very good example because that's kind of what I'm mostly a part of. Async work can hugely benefit those, uh, those environments, like the productivity of those teams.

Because in a traditional office environment, a lot of times your best employees will be constantly, [00:18:00] uh, you know, distracted, whether it be because it's an open office environment and there's, you know, Joe, Joe beside them constantly in meetings 'cause he's a sales guy or, you know, th- you know, they're sitting beside a team lead that con- constantly has to be in meetings, or someone just constantly needs their help because they're the most experienced person in the team, so they keep getting people coming to their desk and asking them for help.

There, there's a million good reasons and bad reasons for being distracted, but in an office it's inevitable that you're gonna be distracted more. Same thing with a synchronous work environment. It-- you can have situations where you can lock yourself in, but a lot of times because everyone's working at the same time, you'll just notice that your chat is constantly on fire.

Um, so you're, you know, managing between like working in chat, working in chat, working in meetings, working in meetings With async work, the good thing is, is that you can set up your environment where there's usually an overlap. So that's one thing that I really wanna point out, is that you-- even with async work, you do want synchronous work hours to a certain degree, whether it [00:19:00] be two hours a day, s- you know, three hours a day.

It probably shouldn't be six hours a day 'cause then you're approaching synchronous work. But if you can set up a ti- a time period for each employee that they can, you know, communicate with their team or with their leader for a couple hours a day, that leads to really good points of communication. But then that also means that after that two hours, they're on their own.

If you have a small team, which is a lot what I work with, and you're spread out ar- across the world, there's certain times of day where I know I'm not gonna be distracted because people are sleeping, right? Like I have late... The later parts of my day are usually dedicated to pure deep work because I know that half of the team is, you know, already clocked off.

They already did their stuff. So I put all my deep work there and it's great because now I'm not worried that there's something I'm missing. I'm not worried that there's, uh, you know, a fire I have to put out or I need to help someone because they've already been helped. They-- Like that, that part of my day is usually the mornings, the early mornings.

I wake up, because some, some people start earlier, I [00:20:00] usually have some messages to answer. I answer those messages based on the day, and then I move on with my life

Matt: Well, I, I'd like to quickly jump in here, um, because concern I have with async work being sold to someone who's considering it, an office manager, uh, whatever, a startup boss or whomever, CEO of, of some big company even, I think that it's good to discuss these little intricacies like we're discussing here, I think that what needs to to sell them on it is something simpler, i- if that makes sense.

And, and correct me if I'm wrong, Mike, but they may look for metrics. Like let's say you're a CEO, you're, you may look for metrics like how many, how many less meetings are we gonna have? How many this, how many that? I think that that conversation can kind of happen in the second conversation. I think that the first conversation should actually be, we're gonna let people do, do work when they are best suited for it.

Mikhail: [00:21:00] Yep

Matt: We're gonna let our team have the focus time it needs, and we're not gonna worry about a rigid outside of the team schedule. Meaning we are not going to worry if Matt clocks in 9:00 to 5:00, but Matt will still have the team schedule in that ticket one must be solved by July 1, for example, and there's the team schedule.

Whether I solve it at 9:00 at night or 4:00 in the morning, it really doesn't matter to you, and it allows for that. It allows for all the, the g- the good things that come with that, which is people are likely to be more relaxed. Obviously everyone's different, but people are likely to be more relaxed. People are gonna work on their own schedules. People are going to only collaborate when they need to. People are going to to get better at communication, which is a good or a bad thing depending on how you measure it, but you're gonna have to figure out how to communicate better so that those messages, for example, Mike, that you got [00:22:00] in the morning, those better be some good messages, meaning all the details are in them. They need minimal follow-up. Again, obviously heavily dependent on the situation But those better be good messages, communications, so that that way you get them an hour or two later or whatever it is, you answer them, and so there's not a constant back and forth unless there needs to be. There's not a needless back and forth. need to kind of like almost it, I think, to these CEOs and stuff as this is sort of like work freedom in a way, which may turn some people off and whatever. But I just think that... And again, correct me if I'm wrong. I think that if you, if you immediately throw metrics into it, at least for my persona type, if you immediately start getting into, "We're gonna have less meetings, we're gonna have more of this, we're gonna have less of that," if you do that in the very first meeting, that's all I'm thinking about.

My first impression of, of async work is going to be all about the numbers, and then I'm gonna be worried about [00:23:00] it. We had five meetings last, this week, and last week we only had four, and we were, this is our first week of async work. What does that mean? Oh my God, you know. And I can see some CEOs not caring, but some people are gonna get obsessed with the numbers, and I could potentially see myself get sucked down that hole

Mikhail: It, it's a very, very good point, honestly, because the problem with that sort of thinking of like, "Hey, let's look at the metrics and make sure that we're actually l- like, you know, having less meetings," is that leads you to hesitate when you actually do need a meeting.

Matt: Right

Mikhail: the, the really important part about async work in my eyes is that it's not purely async.

Uh, there are certain work environments, and we've actually had an, a, a interview guest on the show, I believe, a little while ago, uh, Merrick, uh, who talked about pure async work. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about more of a hybrid where you do have some necessity for having synchronous chats.

And I think as a strong [00:24:00] leader, you should be able to determine when you're gonna need more of that and when you're gonna need less of that, and not look at the metrics like you're saying, Matt, uh, where, you know, you're like, "Oh, I can't have five meetings this week because that, you know, exceeds my metrics," and that's it.

Sometimes the shit's on fire, and you're gonna need to sit in a, sit in a room together like in a, uh, in a Slack channel or like a Slack huddle or like a Google Meet or whatever, uh, and fix stuff. And then sometimes you have three days where you don't contact anyone live, and that's okay. Those two situ- scenarios are determined by the person that needs to kinda lead the situation, and the team that adapts to that is the team that works best remotely and the m- works best asynchronously.

That's, that's what I've found. The team that's rigid and is like, "Oh, well, I, I signed up for async work and I can't talk to you at all at this time," is not gonna work. Like, it's just not going to work in a, in a normal environment. In a, in a corporate environment, in like a large corporate [00:25:00] environment where async isn't really a thing, like let's be serious, maybe.

But I'm talking like smaller startup async. I'm sorry, you're ... Sometimes you're gonna have situations where they're not gonna be async. Stuff's gonna be on fire. You're gonna need meetings. But to be clear, that's, that's usually a rare case. Like we have that every once in a while. Every, every, you know, every couple weeks or every few months we might have like a big deployment, and before that deployment in my, in my team, we'll have a few days of working together where we have like longer sessions where we just code together, we pair program, we hang out, and we do stuff together to, to test everything to make sure the systems work, and then we deploy together, and then we're off.

Like we're, we're monitoring systems asynchronously and if anything happens, yeah, we j- we'll jump back on. But that's rare. So that ... This is something that's really, really important, and it ... Part of my like successful async work is trust and autonomy, right? Like- When you have an employee or when you have [00:26:00] someone on your team that you inherently trust, that's when you know async will work.

When you have that, like, second-guessing nature of like, "Hmm, is- are they really gonna do this, or are they really gonna be available at this time, or are they really gonna be..." You know, like when you have that kind of line that you have to constantly question, that might not be the right person to be on an async team.

It's not for everyone. That's a really key point here is, like, async is not for everyone. If you like flexibility, if you like autonomy, it is for you. But you-- That-- With that comes the negatives of sometimes you're on, you're on it when you shouldn't be, right? Like sometimes you're, you're kind of on call, quote unquote, when you shouldn't be on call.

You don't have the, the standard nine to five. And for some people, that just doesn't work, and that's perfectly okay. Some people work better at night. For those people, it's better to have more flexibility, right? Like that's, that, that's how... That's what remote async, like, allows, is that it allows you to work when you're best suited [00:27:00] to work.

So you need to determine what's your, what your, uh, goals are as a person, like as, as an individual when you're applying for these jobs and understand the, the trade-offs that you're making here. It's not perfect. It's not, it's not something that's just gonna make your life all of a sudden better. If you're that type of person, it might.

It might if you're, if you're, if you have that flexibility

Matt: Well, there is some people that I, I know that like the office environment, and

Mikhail: Absolutely

Matt: the office environment, their work is better. And that does not mean that the office environment is directly supporting their work i- in that they're, they're working in tandem with somebody or they're constantly collaborating with random people in the office or something like that. What it means is, is they literally like the office environment for one of... one or several reasons. Maybe it's the social aspect, for example, or everyone goes out for lunch, or I like the fact that my coworker is just right behind me and I can tap them on the shoulder if we need to, [00:28:00] to collaborate, but maybe that, that collaboration is rare. And so just by being in an environment that's kind of complementing, I guess, their persona, they're able to work better, and that's, that's gonna be huge. That's, that's gonna be huge for them then. Just being in the office with other people around is a, is a huge, is gonna be a huge part of their working sort of life.

It's gonna be a huge support. But then there's gonna be people that are, I'll call them more introverted, 'cause I, I find myself this way is I'm more introverted, where I don't want somebody constantly being able to come to my desk, constantly tap me on the shoulder, because I can already get figuratively tapped on the shoulder by a DM, but I can also turn the DMs off. I can turn the notifications off of that. Hey, I need to, I need to really lock in on this, there's an issue, or, hey, I really need to figure this out, or I need to have a, a very important phone call with no, no interruptions, then, you know, that's, that's gonna be huge for me, [00:29:00] turning off the notifications.

'Cause that's a big derailment for me, and I remember back in the IT days being in the office, you're working on something, you're trying to figure something out, like specifically if you're trying to engineer a new part of the network or something, and then someone's tapping you on the shoulder 'cause their mouse doesn't work, someone's tapping you on the shoulder 'cause your keyboard doesn't work. Not complaining, because it's part of my job, but it's still a huge derailment, 'cause now my thought process goes to the keyboard, I'm thinking about drivers, I'm thinking about the hardware. And even if it's just something as simple as a mouse, I'm still derailed. If I have to go down to the supply closet and just simply get them a new mouse, easy enough.

I'm still derailed though.

Mikhail: Yep

Matt: you know, kind of, kind of gone in that way. And I think the autonomy angle, like you're saying, is great too, because there's gonna be situations that come up just in your, in your daily life. Like, for example, if you had, like, some sort of family issue where you had to drive someone to the hospital or something. Instead of you having to worry about, oh, I need to make sure I get that approved, I [00:30:00] have to get the time off, I have to, I have to tell them how long I'll be. Do I take the half day? Do I take the whole day? Do I just say it's gonna be a couple of hours? This and that. You have the autonomy to say, "Okay, you know what?

This is... If I don't drive this person to the hospital, is this really gonna bother me?" there's no one else in the family that I trust or that no one's available or whatever the reason is. So I'm gonna drive this person to the hospital, and if it takes two hours, great. If it takes three hours, great. I have the autonomy, I have the responsibility, and I'm responsible enough as a person of discipline to then do my work when I get back, or maybe wake up a bit earlier and do it when I wake up. And then you're not working with that thing on your back where, "Oh, I'll just let," you know, my son or something, I'm just making it up, "my son drive this person to the hospital," but my son's super irresponsible. So now I'm worried about it and my work is degraded I'm now this anxious, probably constantly texting, "Hey, did they get there okay?

Hey, what's the status? What's going on?" It's, it's a situation where, like, really should be there, and I can be, and then I can do [00:31:00] my work it. I just need to make sure I have my work device on me and make sure that I DM the team. If they say, "Hey, can you hop on a call?" "No, I can't. I'm doing this." Fair enough

Mikhail: Exactly. Just knowing those kinds of, like, when you need to intentionally collaborate, like when you need to be the one that reaches out and when you need to be the one that checks. An async team, one thing, one really key thing is the intentional collaboration aspect of it, where you're not going to have constant communication.

So when you're... If you're expecting an immediate response from an async team outside of like, you know, a meeting that you've intentionally scheduled, uh, you're, you're, you might not get that, or you, you probably won't get that because they might have their notifications off. They might have, uh, they might be sleeping.

They might be out at that time. Like, there's many different things that you have to just trust that the person is not in a collaborative mode right now. Okay? So this is, this... If you're not able to let go of [00:32:00] that as a manager or even as a person, like, "Hey, I need..." You know, you, you get into a environment and you're onboarding and you're like, "Oh, I need constant communication.

Like, I need to be able to ask questions twenty-four seven," you're not going to be able to. It's just not going to happen in this kind of environment, and you have to accept that. It, it might take 24 hours turnaround for a question to be answered. If you can't accept that, then you're not in an async environment.

That's the problem. Like, you need to allow for a, a longer turnaround. You need to allow for like, "Hey, we're gonna be meeting this day. This is when I can ask these questions," and the rest of the time is going to be for deep work and the, the work you're actually assigned. If you need help, like, you know, there's usually...

Again, there's usually checkpoints throughout the day where you can get the help. Uh, and sometimes someone will be around and they'll answer you, but you can't rely on that. That's the problem. That's why it really comes down to ownership and the ability to kind of autonomously complete tasks, and there's some people [00:33:00] that thrive under that, and there's some people that really struggle because they've been, you know, w- whatever environment or whatever, whatever, they need a little bit more direction, and that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with that. Like, you can actually benefit from that. Again, in a, in an office environment, you would be considered... Like, that- that's an asset in an office environment because you're able to collaborate better, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not an asset in an async environment. You need to be able to autonomously work on things for long periods of time without the constant w- like immediate responses that come with synchronous work.

Matt: I think there's something I wanna mention, too, and a- at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think we need to come back to those metrics again because what we're discussing a lot right now is there's a lot of autonomy, a lot of trust, a lot of the, the human element, and the human element here is very random.

It's very chaotic, that's gonna scare a lot of places that are potentially thinking about adopting async work when [00:34:00] they're normally working synchronously because they're gonna be scared of the randomness there. How, how is my team gonna adapt? How is it gonna work? How do I get ahold of people? And then they're gonna worry about those metrics again. W- why, why are we doing this again, right? And so when I, when I was mentioning before that the initial conversation when trying to convince somebody should be more of the marketing conversation and less the metrics, I feel like we need to bring in the metrics a- at the second conversation where we bring in, "Hey, there's less meetings on average.

Hey, there's more happiness on average." Whatever the metrics are, if you're the person presenting it to your CEO as a potential new office, uh, culture, get all those metrics, cite all those sources, get all those things because there's gonna be a ton of sources and a ton of different ways to measure it. This is how much more work is done, this and that, on average. But I think you need to have a caveat there where you don't put a hard limit [00:35:00] of, like, a month on. Maybe have a, a more loose limit, a longer limit of six months to a year because, like, we're saying, like you were saying, Mike, you don't wanna hesitate to have a meeting.

"Oh, I don't want this meeting to be on the, the, the ticker for this meeting. Like, I don't know what to do here." But maybe you could measure the amount of meetings you have. Maybe you could measure the employee happiness. Maybe you could measure other, these other metrics that you're using to justify switching to async over a longer period, six to 12 months, to see what's happening 'cause maybe you have 10 meetings versus five before, but the meetings this time are two minutes and before they were 20. Still less meeting time. Get all that, get all those metrics. Get all that data over the long term and understand it just so that at the end of the year, at the end of the period, the six months or the 12 months, the person comes to you and says, "Okay, you know, we're still getting our work done. That's great, but is this better?"

You do need metrics at some point,

Mikhail: Yep

Matt: and, just saying, "Oh, the, I, I think the, the team is [00:36:00] happier. I think the team is doing better," the human element is chaotic enough to make someone hesitate in the adoption phase but also in the continued adoption, where they go, they happier? I haven't noticed them being happier.

Let's just go back to synchronous." You ne- you need to have both the mix of sort of the marketing, the chaotic human element, but then also the metrics, I think, personally

Mikhail: Y- y- yes, if you're trying to sell it, especially if you're trying to change your team to be async, I think

Matt: Yes

Mikhail: a, it's actually a very difficult battle.

Matt: Oh, no doubt

Mikhail: yeah, I, I think this is a very difficult battle, and I don't think it's successful for m- uh, for most companies for many reasons. It's not just the fact that, like, you know, someone doesn't like it or something like that.

But there, there's so many different areas of friction when you're going from synchronous to asynchronous, it's j- like I don't even, I, I don't know how [00:37:00] worth it it is for a larger company especially. Like, I'm gonna get into hiring, and hiring for async has its own challenges that make it even harder. So your, your, your talent pool actually ex- expands because you're able to hire from any time zone.

But to find the right person that has the right mentality is, is a difficult part. And just taking a team that was synchronous and moving them to asynchronous, that doesn't requ- that, that's not just like a, a mentality shift or like a, a, a change that you make and then you monitor. In my opinion, it's a whole, like, training and vetting and, and potentially restructuring that you have to do, which, uh, is unfortunate.

Like, y- you might have to lose some people to make it more successful, because there's some people that will just be friction points no matter what. Like I, I've had many people on teams where they just could not get their heads around synchronous work or asynchronous work. Like they [00:38:00] needed that constant communication, and they, they would panic if they did not get that constant communication.

And, and the unfortunate thing is if you're switching to synchron- or asynchronous, you're just not gonna get that. And if you have people that are like that, then they're gonna be the ones that go to management. They're gonna be the loudest voices, and you're just not gonna be successful. So it's much easier said than done to switch from one to the other.

It's way easier to start asynchronous. So if you're building a new company and your goal is to, A, not ha- ever have an office, and B, have, uh, you know, a, a global talent pool, which are two good goals, by the way. Like those, those are good goals. Like y- being able to hire top talent, like top intelligent talent, is a good goal for...

And, and it can be achieved with asynchronous work. Think about the AI researchers. Think about all those, uh, think about the smartest people o- out there. Offering them more money is great, and they'll take it, but if you can also offer them autonomy and being able to work from [00:39:00] home and being able to, like, you know, you know, work from any- e- anywhere they wanted and not having to, you know, be dedicated to a random office and a random team, that's going to sway some people.

That's absolutely going to sway some people. So having that as a standard right from you, from the start is way easier because then the first hire you make is going to be asynchronous, and the second hire you make is gonna be asynchronous. And you might still make mistakes. Let me be clear, you might still think someone i- is ready and then they're not and they, they might make a mistake as well where, like, they think that it's okay and they're not.

So you have to be on it and sometimes make the tough decision and l- and, and, you know, go, go separate ways. But the reality is, is taking a team and just moving them to asynchronous, ooh, doggy, uh, it's probably doable. Um, I, I think, I think the success rate is pretty low. Taking a team and making them remote is much more successful and that's probably the first step[00:40:00]

Matt: Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I, I mean, I guess I haven't really studied the, the transition period, but it's a very good, very good question because, like, I've been working asynchronously for years. You and I have been working asynchronously together, and in fact, I worked at an, at an adjacent team with you that was asynchronous as well, uh, literally at the same company, uh, there for, for a contract.

And, like, you know, it's just something that I've gotten used to, but I... And I used to work synchronously, but it's, it's, it's-- I never really gave to the, to the transitionary mo- uh, to the transition period that I had. I didn't, I haven't really, haven't really even thought of that, and that is a really good point, especially for someone who really needs a lot of structure in their lives, they have to sort of get up at this time and do the work and this.

But, I mean, the autonomy there is that they can still do that. They can still just do the nine to five if they want, if that fits their schedule the best, until the one [00:41:00] day where it doesn't.

Mikhail: Yeah, as long as they're willing to adjust for that one day sometimes

Matt: Right. E-exactly. And I think that that's... But, but you, I think that that is gonna be key is like maybe e- maybe the people who are very sort of rigid in their schedule, they may just keep the rigid schedule either forever or they may shift it an hour or do, you know, they'll kind of do it their own way. But the point of the async work is, oh well, if they're just doing the nine to five, then they're just doing the nine to five.

At the end of the day, we only care about the task being done and you answering the team, which I mean attributes to the tasks being done, and that's all you really care about. But then you are gonna absolutely, like you said, it doesn't work for some people and there's gonna be friction points. There's absolutely gonna be people that travel too much they're just always on the road or something. whatever, right?

Mikhail: had that, we've had that. Like, uh, like in, in my company we've had people that kind of... I don't know if it was like a conscious taking advantage of the [00:42:00] situation, but they definitely took advantage of the situation to a point where like you're on a plane three days a week. Like this, we can't collaborate at that point.

Like it's just, it's too much.

Matt: That's wild, yeah. Like,

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: unless it's a, a freak instance where you're flying back home 'cause someone's sick or something, and you're like, "Hey, I'm gonna keep working asynchronously." But if you're... It's, it's almost like they take the book the rules, like the rule book, and they, they literally look at the async work and they go, "Oh, great.

I can just fly around the, the planet 14 times and, and... Or I can be on road trips or this and that." And I mean, that's just not the case. Like, uh, uh, 'cause you don't know what's gonna happen when you're traveling. You don't know when you're gonna have connectivity all the time. You don't know when you're gonna have the ability, uh, not only to connect, like I mentioned, but also the ability to focus.

You might be in a super crowded airport, a super crowded restaurant. W- what are you gonna do? Oh, we need to, we need to really figure out this DNS issue, and it, you know, le- requires a lot of deep thought, and we have, like, multiple servers on the line here and everything else. I'm like, "I'm in a Swiss chalet [00:43:00] frigging, you know, rocking the rotisserie chicken here."

Like, what, you know what I mean? Like, what are we doing? Like, y- there has to be a point where you're, you know, sit down and, you know, kinda get it done and, and get it going. But then, like, I mean, immediate benefits are w- with the travel, like I was talking to my girlfriend, like she was talking about visiting a, a, a family member, I mean, I don't really know this family member, so I would be very minimally involved. And I was like, "Well, if you want me to go with you..." Is, it's up in Canada. It's just, like, a little bit further away from where we're at. "If you want me to go with you, it doesn't matter." I basically just have to say, traveling this day, so I might be a bit iffy," and then I will just be, as long as I have an internet connection and a desk more or less, and my laptop of course I'm good to go.

I can just do any and all my work. I don't need to have, like, a fixed setup. So, and, and, and so, like, and, and it's like we, we've had that conversation and, like, that's great, right? We don't, you don't have the stress of, like, oh [00:44:00] great, like my girlfriend's out there alone. She wants me to, like, be supportive and this and that.

Like, it removes, like, the, the stress of life, and, like, this is something that you and I talked about when we were starting the business as well, is, like, what really sucked about working synchronously, like in a traditional office, is you have those life stresses that are not on a schedule, and you, you're like, "I'm unavailable every single day from 9:00 to 5:00."

That really sucks. I'm unavailable 9:00 to 5:00. I, I can never go to the bank to deal with a problem that come up, like a banker or something. I can never have a doctor's appointment without asking for permission, things like that. Whereas async allows you to just say, like, "I gotta go to the doctor." You go to the doctor, you're like, "All right," and then you come back and you just get your work done.

Mikhail: Yep

Matt: It's more, it's, it's so much more natural. It's so much more human really. But then again, like you said, there's gonna be some people that it is a friction point. Everyone's different

Mikhail: Yeah. But it, it's the thing, like, if, if your mindset goes straight to, "Oh, I'm gonna take advantage of that and I'm gonna go to, like, a million different places. I'm [00:45:00] gonna go to the Philippines and I'm gonna go to, like, Japan and I'm gonna go there," that... It's not gonna work. Like, it's just, it's just not going to work.

If you go, if you have to travel with your girlfriend once a year to go visit family and you have a place to work there, that's not a problem. You know, like, they, no one's gonna, no one's gonna bat an eye on that because you travel once and then a, a month later you travel again.

Matt: And you let them know

Mikhail: Uh, yeah, and you, you, you know, it's, and you let them know and that's it.

The problem comes is when your, when your mind goes to like, "Oh man, I'm gonna be able to do all this stuff." Like, no, you still have to put in your hours,

Matt: You

Mikhail: you still have to get your work done and you still have to be available. Those are all things that have to happen, like, you, for, for, for the company to be successful, and if you can't do it

Matt: Then that sucks.

Mikhail: Then that, then that's-- It's just not going to work.

So like, ju-just to kind of finish the points of like what successful async work requires, the big, the big thing here is being able to be a very good communicator. Being a good communicator in text is super important, so written [00:46:00] communication, both in like writing documentation, right? So whatever you do, a feat- Like, like let's say you're making a feature or an app or something like that, making sure that it's super easy for someone in a different time zone to be able to spin that app up or change something, that's super important, right?

Like they, 'cause they're not gonna have the direct connection with you the whole day to be able to get you to run them through step by step what to do. So if you're able to write good documentation, or I guess nowadays get AI to write it for you, uh, great.

Matt: I'm trying to stay away from the AI word too

Mikhail: I am try, I am trying, but like

Matt: M-

Mikhail: it's like--

Matt: hook, I was talking about AI and complaining, but

Mikhail: yeah.

Mo-most of the time documentation's written by AI now, but make sure it's synced. Edit it, make sure it's good. And it's the same thing with written communication. What-- Something that's also very important is being able to get past like terse text conversations. Um, I've noticed this in some situations where people can take stuff out of context because they extrapolate their own emotions [00:47:00] onto text, uh, where someone's, you know, very concise and that can be interpreted as rude.

That happens in text. That is a very dangerous indicator of not being able to handle remote, uh, like async work to me. Your communication has to be very concise. It has to be very direct. You have to be able to take criticism directly. You have to be able to write short, uh, you know, very understanding sentences for people, and be able to handle the same back to you.

Uh, that might offend some people. I'm not sure, like I, I really don't know, um, if, if that is offensive or if that's like, you know, gatekeeping or something like that. It might be. But if you get, if you get like [00:48:00] upset about direct text communications, remote async might not be for you. That's, that's a, that's, that's a thing that I can say.

Um-

Matt: I, I, you know what though? I would agree with that, but that also happens synchronously as well. Like in the

Mikhail: It does

Matt: people that would talk very directly and, um, I mean, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't care personally, but people definitely must have spoke up or maybe the person became self-aware and they started putting like smiley faces at the end of their e-emails, even though it was an official email, sort of a, you know, corporate like, "Hey," you know, suit and tie kind of thing. But they would still put the smiley face and like, I mean, that's also a way to handle it. Like if you're being self-conscious and you're like, "Am I being too direct here?" Smiley face is just like, "Oh, okay, this person just wants me to do it." Like, "Hey man,

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: please." Or add the please or something like that.

Um, what I like to do personally is I like bullet lists. So I

Mikhail: Yep.

Matt: and it's a mess. Like it's not good. Uh, so what I do is I'll state what's happening in a friendly way, kind of like the social text, if you will. So maybe a couple, couple sentences or maybe a [00:49:00] paragraph if it's a complex situation, and then I'm direct in my bullet points.

But because they're bullet points, I'm able to say, "I'm doing this this time. You do this here, you do that there and there." So like the, the tone is set by the human comms, the human part of the email. But then it's, it's like, "Hey man, we, you know, we need to be direct right now though." You know what I mean?

Mikhail: So I'll, I'll, I'll give an example. I, I, th- that's a good point, but I'll give an example of what I mean in, in terms of terse communication that could be seen as, like, a little bit too direct. Uh, you know, something goes down, the server goes down. My communication in that situation is, "Hey guys, server's down.

Who did the last update?" That could be interpreted by the person that did the last update as me trying to blame them for something.

Matt: I'd be, I'd be scared if I

Mikhail: That's what I--

Matt: like the IT

Mikhail: Cor-

Matt: was asking me and I was the it.

Mikhail: Correct.

Matt: Oh, yeah. Yep

Mikhail: So that, in that situation, I, my intention is not [00:50:00] that, and I, I make that clear as much as possible when I'm onboarding people and when I'm communicating with people.

It's like, "Hey, sometimes we just need to solve problems, and then we'll figure everything out later." Like, I'm not trying to blame people, right? Like blame is not part of this team. Like I say that many times, like we're not looking to play the blame game. But in some cases, like I can't go around and, and write out paragraphs of like fluff to try to figure out who the, who was the person that d- made the update.

I need, I need a clear indication of who it was, and so like I can get them on a call, and we can go through it and fix it together. That's what I need. And again, if you're, if you're a, a person that might get offended by that or might get scared or whatever, like it's gonna be tough. Like there are gonna be situations like that.

That's just one example. There's other examples, uh, that, that could happen in that situation. But like in, in remote async work or in remote work in general, sometimes you have to be direct [00:51:00] and

Matt: Well, 'cause you ca- you're not gonna type a paragraph out to explain. Like, that was my big, that was one of my big problems, like I mentioned the paragraph. That what the paragraph was... What I was honestly trying to do with the paragraph is I was trying to be very explanatory,

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: and it comes to a point where I said si- six sentences

Mikhail: Mm-hmm.

Matt: to ultimately say, "Ping the server at 10."

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: know what I mean? Where, whereas, like, like, like the context around pinging the server at 10 might be like, "Oh my God, that person did an update and it messed up, so now I have to make sure that the cron job happens," and like blah, blah, blah, and we, and if the cron job doesn't happen, then the server's gonna go down.

And so this and that. And so, like, the, the team has the context, and it's not in the text. And so, like, I'm trying to go in there and say, like, "You're not in trouble. You just need to do this, and make, make sure that the server is up. And the reason why I wanna do that is because of this, and the reason why that you wanna do this, and the reason why that we wanna..."

You don't wanna keep, like, going on and on like that. Like, there comes a point, you're 100% right, Mike, where there's, like, that balance of you just can't fully explain every emotion over text, and you can't fully... You can't give [00:52:00] orders effectively that way either, 'cause people get lost in the, in the paragraph and then they lose it, right?

They just like, they're just like, "Okay, this is..." They're not saying it's boring, but I feel like their subconscious or something is saying it's boring, where it's like, "Okay, this is, this is boring."

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: I'm trying to say? Where they're just gonna, they're gonna forget. It's like if I read a chapter of a book, I understood the main plot, but I don't remember what the guy's shoes looked like unless it was a major plot point

Mikhail: Correct. Correct. And that, that, and like you have to inherently think the best of people, I think, in this situation. Uh, be a little bit more optimistic because it sometimes, like, like these kinds of things can come off as pretty aggressive, uh, especially when there's a situation ongoing. Um, but yeah, so those are the things that I, I think will make you a good async worker.

You know, clear written communications, trust and autonomy, uh, intentional collaboration, like being good with that, obviously the strong documentation. That's going to make you better. That's going to [00:53:00] ma- make it work because if you don't have those, it's probably not gonna work. It's, it's a very delicate process.

Like you can hire one person that doesn't fit those criteria, and they could crumble the entire team. Because again, they're gonna be the one that's gonna be like, "Oh, well, you can't really talk like that. I need, I need a little bit of extra fluff here. I need a little bit of extra fluff here to understand it.

Um, you know, you can't really... W- we have to meet here and here and here. You have to fit my, my criteria for meetings and stuff." Like as soon as you have someone like that on the team that management isn't willing to push back on, then async just crumbles, and then everyone has to work at the same times, and everyone has to colla- like collaborate in the same ways, and then you're back to it, the synchronous work.

I've seen that happen too

Matt: Yeah, it, it's, it's basically like the team has to put the, the work in to

Mikhail: Absolutely

Matt: work is working, 'cause if you are going to that CEO and that pr- that CEO or that, that office manager had to be convinced, I mean, you don't wanna have them have the metrics, the data, the complaints, the whatever [00:54:00] to then say, "We're switching back." You want them to be enthusiastic about the async work with the team

Mikhail: That's exactly it. And so with that, like, I think hiring the right people is one of the most important parts of async work. So if you're ever in a position where you're either, like, helping hire or you are doing the hiring, it's important to have an i- idea of what you're looking for. So the first thing I have here is you're looking really for a self-direction person, like a person that can own something, can make decisions themselves, you know, has proven that.

So a lot of times in interviews I'll ask like, "Hey, when did you last lead a project? When did you... Like, how much, you know, help did you need for this? Uh, show-- like, talk to me about a project that, like, talk to me about a time when it was very difficult to not have the right communication," and stuff like, like...

I, I ask directed questions to try to get people to explain how they would handle isolated in s- situations and how they handle, like, [00:55:00] a, a loose scoped project without h- hand-holding. Like, do they get all the requirements themselves? Do they rely on having to be hand- handheld and, and, you know, fed those requirements?

Stuff like that to, to get the idea of how self-directed the person is. Um, next thing here is I usually like-- I'll, I'll send, like I'll-- I like take-home exams or take-home assignments, and a lot of times in a take-home assignment, I won't give every requirement that is required for that assignment. I'll, I'll make it so that they have to make assumptions, and they have to power through stuff, or they have to ask questions, right?

Like, and I'll see how they handle those situations. If they're constantly bugging me, or if they're like, "Hey, I couldn't do this because this wasn't there in the docs," then I'll know that, you know, they, they need a little bit more hand-holding and stuff like that. It's unfor-- Again, some of this stuff is kind of unfortunate because they could still be a really good worker, and this is kind of weeding them out.

But that's the problem with [00:56:00] async work is, like, we're not looking for just a good worker. We're looking for someone that is able to do this themselves, like be able to be, not thrown into the dark. Like obviously there's still onboarding 100%, and there's still a lot of documentation, like I was saying above.

But there's going to be times when you are in the dark because everyone is offline, and you have to solve this problem. So it's important.

Matt: thing there really is, like ev- every, every job position, every position has something that would weed out a good candidate.

Mikhail: Yeah, absolutely

Matt: the person might be amazing at their job, but if they're a 10X engineer that's super antisocial and is angry all the time, and your workplace is, you know, happy-go-lucky, kind of bubbly, and it's working for you guys, unfortunately that person, which would pump out some great code, AI or not,

Mikhail: Mm-hmm.

Matt: out. That person's out, unfortunately. They're, they're gone

Mikhail: Yep, absolutely So the other thing is, [00:57:00] uh, this is something you do usually post-hiring, so it's not, not something I usually can fully understand in an interview process. But co- like watch for the common challenges. How, how do they handle isolation? Are they super slow at responding? Like, is it like, you know, someone that's embraced async too much, uh, where they like respond once a week, um, even though you have clear, you know, expectations of when to respond?

Uh, they don't understand accountability, like they continually shift blame. Those things are... I mean, I think shifting blame isn't really an async thing. That's more of like any one thing. Like if you-- if I have a situation where everyone's, where someone's shifting blame, that's something that I'll tackle pretty much right away, and I'm like, "This really requires ownership."

Like you really have to own your mistakes in this team, um, regardless of synchronous or asynchronous at that point. But anyway, it's important. Um, or if they're overloading communication, like if they're constantly, constantly in Slack, and you just see that one person [00:58:00] just go like walls of text, walls of text.

Those are the indicators for me that it might not be working, and I'm not gonna give up on a person right away. I'll definitely direct them and be like, "Hey, for this team, we do this. For this team..." Like, you know, we don't talk, you know, if, if you, if you need this help, maybe DM someone one-on-one and just wait for their answer and stuff like that.

Like I'll give direction, but if that doesn't fix it quickly, it's a good indicator that they're not async ready.

Matt: The other thing too with that is like they could just be new to office culture. Like I, like I said, like it took me a little

Mikhail: The,

Matt: to get away from the paragraphs, and I wasn't instructed that. I just started seeing the results of like, oh my God, they missed, you know, point six of my 18th paragraph. Ridiculous. So then I

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: adjust myself. Obviously, like, know, it could be an async thing totally, especially if they're like, "Where are you guys? Hello? Hello? Hello?" Like, absolutely. Um, but yeah, like some direction will help. Like, I mean, just, just for me personally, I still have a tendency to do the paragraphs, but you don't see them because what I do is I write them in a

Mikhail: Themselves.

Matt: or I write them in [00:59:00] the, the little DM myself thing in Slack, and then I literally like write it all, and then I style it all, and I'm like, "Ah, that's...

Cut that. Get that out of here. Get this. Move that." For a big message, not everyday messages, but like a big message if I'm like doing a deployment or if I'm like, "Hey, I finished this," like to a client, "Hey, I finished this. I, I need you to check these six areas because you told me that you wanted me to keep them behind a password until you approve them." And so instead of me being like, "Well, the password's there just in case. Like you don't need to..." And that's what I'll write the first time, but then I'll correct it

Mikhail: Yeah, e-exactly. And like, that's another kind of like good point there, Matt. Like a junior person, um, needs to be vetted a little bit more carefully because you're right, they don't have the knowhow of how an office works. Sometimes that can be a, like in favor, in their favor because they're not gonna have the habits

Matt: Async pilled

Mikhail: Exactly, like they're not gonna be sync, sync pilled where they constantly need the communication and all that. So [01:00:00] th-there could be some advantages to that, but there also could be some disadvantages where they just don't know. But with that, like it's on you as the manager or the team to guide them. So if you're willing to take a bet on a really good employee that matches, you know, 80% or 60 or 70% of what you were looking for, sometimes we do do that because we just need someone that's, that has their particular skill set.

Um, you need to have a really good early support network. So when you're, when they join the team, it might not be asynchronous for them for the first little while, and that's okay. You need to have an a- the ability to have that kind of onboarding and I'll, I'll do the onboarding myself sometimes, and I'll also have leads that lead the onboarding for that as well, just to teach them about how to handle getting someone on board.

But what you need to also do is have a clear ramp down period of that. So like maybe the first, like depending on who they are, if they're really junior, then you might, they might need a f- like a few weeks to a month of like [01:01:00] pretty like hand, hand-holdy support. If they're someone senior, a lot of times that'll only be like a week or two at most, and if they're not, you know, ex- going to the point where they, you can see them ramp down the need for someone to hand hold their hand, hold their hand, then that's ag- again, another good indicator that they, they're not, uh, understanding the async role.

Um, so you just need to judge how, what, what, depending on the type of employee and depending on the role, what kind of support they're gonna need and give it to them. Th- that's the most important thing. You cannot... There, there's never been a case where you, where you can throw someone into the fire in an async role without any sort of synchronous support, early support network.

Uh, it's just, it's just a, a... You're just gonna burn people out immediately. Like you need to have a, a situation where they can ask you questions quickly in the first little while, or someone, ask someone on the team questions quickly. It doesn't always have to be you [01:02:00] as a manager. It can be someone like a, a lead developer or someone that's been there for a while, uh, that, that kinda shadows them and stuff like that.

So that, that's a really, really important part that I see m- some companies miss, um, and, and make async work kind of a negative thing, uh, where like, "Hey, I didn't get any support. It was bullshit, so I'm gonna go back to an office." Which is fair, like that, you know, in an office you have more chance at support.

But you really can do both in, in, um, in an async environment. You really do need to.

Matt: I, I think that, that kind of doing that synchronous training, the onboarding is really key. I also think that doing though, doing that though, in private makes a lot of sense. So you mentioned DMs, like telling the person, you know, "Hey, you're gonna DM this person," really kind of gives them the privacy.

Obviously they're talking to another person, but instead of them sort of going with- going and, and sending too many messages to the team or spamming the team at inappropriate times or sending messages that are too long to the team or whatever [01:03:00] the process, whatever the sort of team dynamic is, they don't wanna be too disruptive.

Obviously a new person's gonna be a little disruptive for a bit. the point is, is that having that sort of outlet professionally in a DM is, is, is perfect because then, then it's like, "Hey, talk to this person," and if, if you're assigned a big task, maybe that person will say, "Hey, before you send the sort of notification to everybody that you've completed this, send that message to me.

We'll edit it together and then we'll do it." So that way there's not that little bit of embarrassment. 'Cause it's not usually a big deal if you accidentally send something that's a little bit not within the team culture, especially if it's like not inappropriate. If it's just sort of like, "Oh, you know, we usually tell- we usually give everybody like, you know, a, the, the password in a separate chat," or, "We usually don't write in paragraphs here," or, "We usually like bullet point forms," or, "This should be in a different channel." Being able to mess that up one-on-one with somebody who's like in that team culture is gonna be huge, [01:04:00] especially for people that have any sort of social anxiety because they need... You know what I mean? They need... 'Cause, 'cause they're gonna be... Like just like how we

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: the second guessing of the meetings if you look at the metrics, you're gonna be like, "Do I send a message?

Mikhail: Yep

Matt: a message?" And you're gonna have that throughout your career and I'll, I'll just text, I'll DM people and be like, "Hey man, like I wasn't sure if I should send this." "Oh, yeah, yeah, go send it." "Okay perfect." Boom, done.

Mikhail: Mm-hmm.

Matt: Like having that like bit of that confidant, but it's not even about confidential information.

It's just sort of like, "Hey, like kind of shape me into the team member that would like me to be from a communication standpoint," especially in async when a- when comms are like such a foundational piece

Mikhail: Yep. Yeah, that, and I, I think that's it, honestly. I think it's, it's super-- It's not a clear thing. It's not super easy to become an Async employee. I, I want that, make that clear. If you're thinking about it from only a, like, "Oh, man, I get to travel everywhere, and I get to do all this. Like, I have free time, and I get to take my [01:05:00] kid everywhere, and I don't have to work as much," it's probably not gonna work out.

Like, just be, just to be fair. Like, yes, you have some of that. Like Matt was saying, you know, taking, you know, y- your girlfriend or wife somewhere when they need to, you have that flexibility. You can't travel all the time. You can't. I, I can guarantee you, unless you're working at a really big company where you can hide your, you know, hide that stuff, maybe.

But from my experience, it's very obvious

Matt: the green screen behind him and he's skiing on

Mikhail: Yeah.

Matt: seen those

Mikhail: Yeah.

Matt: remote work era of, of COVID?

Mikhail: Yeah, like that, that kind of stuff really gives a bad, a bad look for remote work, and that's what CEOs point to in being like, "Look, these guys are taking advantage of it," 'cause they are.

Matt: Yeah,

Mikhail: There's people that are absolutely taking advantage of it, and that makes it look bad on everyone.

Um, so you don't wanna be that person. You wanna, you wanna give it your all. You wanna be the person that p- people wanna hire in a remote atmosphere. And y- you do get some advantages. Like it's not like you don't get to-- You don't sit in [01:06:00] traffic. You do get the flexibility, especially in async, of working in the hours that you wanna work.

You can work in the evenings. Like I-- For me, my hours are kind of like usually 9:00 to 5:00, but if I have to take my, my daughter somewhere, I'll take my daughter somewhere, and then I'll work in the evening after I put her down for a couple hours. That happens more often than, than I would probably like, but I have the flexibility to do that, and I do do it because shit has to get done.

Like there's just no other choice.

Matt: And

Mikhail: If I don't do it...

Matt: like worry-free where

Mikhail: Yes.

Matt: take

Mikhail: I don't have to tell anyone I'm doing that, yeah.

Matt: I'm gonna go take her to the doctor or whatever.

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: her for a ride or take her to get candy, whatever. And then I'm gonna like, then, then I'll talk to the team, then I'll do whatever, then I'll talk to the team, then I'll do

Mikhail: Yeah.

Matt: then I'll do my emails

Mikhail: There's no guilt there. There's no guilt because you don't have to ask for permission to do any of that. You just do it and you do your work and everyone succeeds in that sense.

Matt: Yeah,

Mikhail: But yeah. But that's it. I think, uh, I think that's async remote work. Uh, let us know what you think. Let us know if you're [01:07:00] in a situation where you can-- where you are working remotely in async, and if something's different for you, uh, because every environment is gonna be very different, I bet.

And, uh, I've definitely had my experiences of good async remote and bad async remote, so yeah. Curious to see what everyone else thinks

Matt: I would like to make a slight announcement. fix worked

Mikhail: Yeah. We're back up

Matt: So now I have to go apply it to all my clients

Mikhail: That's not as fun

Matt: I am very, very happy that I paid attention in DNS, in my DNS learnings because that AI was not correct. Well, it, it, it got there. It got there, but man

Mikhail: Well, you have to guide it, which is like the traditional AI crap.

Matt: Yes, but DNS is one of those things where it can be very simple, it can be very complex, and I'm just glad that I just understand it thoroughly because I just don't wanna think about it. I just know what the heck's going on. [01:08:00] Anyway, celebrations again. Let us know what you think, like Mike said, about your async... A- I almost said desync, your desync work. Uh, your asynchronous, your synchronous work, your in-person, remote, et cetera. Let us know what you think about all that whole situation, and if you wanna support episodes like this, please do so. You can do so on patreon.com/htmlallthethings, and many thanks to our $3 tier patrons, Tim from The Web Hacker on thewebhacker.com, Jason from Geek Life Radio via geekliferadio.com, Garrett Segall, Level Up Financial Planning via www.levelupfinancialplanning.com, Magnus from Yes Web via yesweb.se, Syntaxify from the HTML All the Things Discord server, and Stacy Mostiller from the website swimworthydesigns.com. last but not least, we'd like to give a shout-out to Michael Larocca, contributing author on htmlallthethings.com. Michael is the author of Self-Taught: The X Generation blog at selftaughttxg.com. And if you wanna learn how [01:09:00] to code so you can work one of these asynchronous jobs, ooh, wanna learn how to code, remember, you can do so on Scrimba, and you can get up to 20% off their Scrimba Pro plan. You can go learn some back end, some front end, all kinds of great stuff using their interactive media player code editor with our link to get that d- that discount, excuse me, is in the show description, and it's also in the show notes with full details on how it works in those show notes on htmlallthethings.com. And that's it. Feel free to leave a comment or review on the platform that you're listening to this on, and we are signing off