While asynchronous working styles are not new, over the past few years we have collectively experienced a massive shift in how we live and work globally.
COVID deeply disrupted our lives, making our homes serve as workplaces, classrooms, gyms, and entertainment centers. While some things are gradually returning to “normal” other aspects of our lives are forever changed. The most pronounced change is how and where we work.
Experts at McKinsey, Gartner and Pew Research all agree that the pandemic accelerated changes in how we work by several years in a very short time.
March 2020, we were all sent home from the office – expecting to wait it out at home for a couple of weeks until things settled down. After a couple years of straight work from home, endless video calls and virtual happy hours, we saw the mass emergence of hybrid.
Hybrid offered a promise of flexibility but without any of the guardrails for preserving a healthy work/life balance. The pressure to be “always on”, the lack of applied best-practices for hybrid left knowledge workers feeling anxious, worrying about boss-ware and burnt out.
We hear a lot about the time we’re in now, as the messy middle of a massive shift in how we work. While some leaders have used hybrid as a softer way to call people back into the office, others are looking into new ways to collaborate globally that reduces digital presentism and the expectation of always-on, always-reachable and rapid response 24/7.
What’s emerging is a new conversation around an increased need for focused time, deep work, removing distractions and alerts from our devices, ways to collaborate without needing to work synchronously with your team and a mad scramble to patch together a complex, hard to navigate technology stack that will help free teams from the endless meetings and messages. Hint, real-time messaging is not asynchronous working! While one might argue that plain old email is asynchronous technology, it’s the workplace expectation that the message is received when sent and response is expected. This is a cultural problem not a purely technical problem.
A new movement around asynchronous work is developing across organizations globally, in most cases inadvertently, and we see large and small companies struggling with new modes, models and technologies to help bridge the divide.
We see this future of work continuum going much farther than collaboration tools – it’s evolving into an entirely new way or working that prioritizes trust and transparency, outcomes and quality deliverables over presence and autonomy over attendance.
Our relationship with work is evolving and with it our global culture is changing.
Learn more about the shift and check out the Asyncwork Continuum.
