Is your company a synchronous company or an asynchronous company?
- A new company developing a brand new product that needs constant, realtime brainstorming <— better as a synchronous company
- A stable and mature company where the majority of time can be spent on iterating on product features and processing pull requests and bug fixes <— can operate as a fully asynchronous company
In order to design the best work setup in 2024, synchronous vs asynchronous is perhaps a better question to ask than remote vs office vs hybrid.
Problems happen when:
- A synchronous company tries to operate like an asynchronous company (e.g. introduces too many time zones that results in bunch of 3 hour zoom calls at 10pm in someone’s time zone)
- An asynchronous company tries to operate like a synchronous company (e.g. brings everyone, including software developers, back to office 5 days a week)