Back to office, staying fully remote, flexible hybrid setup. Global pandemics gave millions of knowledge workers the taste of remote work. And a lot of them are never going back.A global distributed workforce means access to untapped talent but it also means time zone and synchronous meeting challenges. Getting everyone from your local Toronto office to show up to the same meeting at 10am EST is pretty easy. Running the same meeting with a team spread across 5 time zones makes this much more challenging. Especially if you want to promote autonomous and flexible work schedules.The solution isn’t less meetings or hybrid meetings. The solution is asynchronous communication.In today’s episode we’re going to cover what async means exactly, being able to say “I’ll get that done on my own time”. We’ll dispel some of the misconceptions and dive into the stages of transformation towards autonomy. Hopefully you’ll be better positioned to encourage async in your day to day, whether you're in-house or freelance adapting now is key for leading any teams in the future.IntroHundreds of companies declared themselves remote first and digital first last year. A lot of them are massive corporations too. This transition will be excruciatingly slow and painful for big orgs. These orgs are studying companies who have been doing this for decades. Remote work isn’t new for everyone. Convertkit, Close, Basecamp (60+ actually much lower with recent policy changes), Helpscout, Clearbit, Buffer, Doist (100+) and Zapier is 500 people, remote-first all smaller, very little funding, innovators in the remote space.There’s also the bigger teams too.Automattic, the people behind WordPress are 1,000+ global distributed team and have been from the early days. InVision is fully remote, 1000+, GitHub is 3,000+.Something all of these distributed work pioneers talk about is over-communication in the written form, but specifically, asynchronous communication. In the world of most marketers, and knowledge workers for that matter, very little of your day to day tasks are emergencies, or require immediate action.The nature of async can be summed with a short sentence: I’ll get to that as soon as I get the chance, or on my own time. Async is sending a message and having a common understanding that an immediate response is not expected. Email is usually async. You send it and you expect an answer in a day or 2 or more. Recipient opens that email on their time and responds when they get the chance. Synchronous communication is sending a message and the recipient needs to process and respond in real time immediately. In a meeting with your team on Zoom, you say something, your team members receive and respond right away.When you take the time to think about it, most of what you do in your job could be done with a 1-way written update sent to a single person or a group of people, who can respond as soon as they get the chance. Obviously there’s times when there’s emergencies, or sometimes the nature of your work requires real time collaboration like live support teams or front line sales reps, and there’s different ways of tackling those situations than async.ExamplesInstead of saying: hey do you have 15mins to chat today About this project?Async is saying: here’s two questions I have regarding the last update you made on this project. Instead of saying: here’s an invite to a meeting where I’m going to walk you through a project update and I’m mostly going to be doing the talking, everyone will be seeing this for the first time and I’ll be asking for your attention for 1 hour and immediate feedback.Async is saying: here’s a short summary of a project update followed by a detailed overview of a problem I’m having and specific questions I’d like guidance on. Here’s what I’ve done so far, here’s when I need an answer by.BenefitsDeep work / flow stateA huge % of your workforce is introverted and perform better when they’ve had the chance to think before they are asked to give a