These key team members aren’t thriving with remote work.Netflix entertains the world, providing a wide variety of TV shows, movies, and documentaries to hundreds of millions of members across the globe in over 30 languages.The next in-demand job title: head of the future of work.Because in the new world of remote, hybrid, and flex work, employees need to work and interact largely on their own schedule. The best tools for doing so are yet to be determined.įor now, it’s time to start thinking about time. when the kids are asleep.Īsynchronous communication tools will need to replace most meetings, most “water cooler conversations,” and most brainstorming and collaboration sessions. Each employee will be happier and more productive if they can engage with coworkers on their own time, whether it’s during the old 9-to-5 workday or whether it’s after 9 p.m. More importantly, it’s time for your organization to get very serious about enabling high-quality asynchronous communications-not only because you’re operating over multiple time zones, but also because asynchronicity is a foundational element of flexible work. And it means that the skill of conducting concise, purposeful meetings becomes immeasurable. That means the purpose of real-time video meetings must pass a high bar for them to occur at all. The scarcity of time makes it super valuable. in Honolulu.īut whether your overlapping window is three hours, one hour, or zero hours, overlapping time windows are short. The 9-to-5 business hours in Istanbul take place between 8 p.m. If you have employees in Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, and Istanbul, then you’ve got a problem if you want all-hands, real-time video meetings. That means you have exactly one hour for real-time meetings. But this can be accommodated by a minor shift to either beginning the workday in California at 8 a.m. (9 a.m.) happens at the same time as the end of the day in London (5 p.m.). For example, if you’ve got employees in both Los Angeles and London and locations in between, you’re in luck. to attend a business meeting because of their location.Įvery organization, division, and team will need to develop an all-important awareness of time zones and the hours each day when reasonable business hours overlap. It won’t accept people routinely getting up at 2 a.m. The future of work is flatter and less hierarchical. Over the next few years (as the new world of remote and hybrid work sets in) remote work will become increasingly normal for our teammates and colleagues in different time zones. Suddenly we find that our workplace is no longer a place-a critical mass of our colleagues are elsewhere, which means work-from-home staff are no longer a barely tolerated minority who have to bend over backward to accommodate the in-office staff. The appeal of Slack is that it’s not quite real-time, but not quite asynchronous, either. Slack-like tools are like streams you can dip your toe into, which keep on flowing whether you’re participating or not. Metaphorically, email is a bucket that collects messages until it overflows. Like a social network, most of the conversations in platforms like Slack just keep on going and wait for no one. And so workers, especially younger workers, came to prefer Slack and other messaging platforms that offered a range of communication options, from topic-specific “rooms” or “channels” to instant messaging-like conversations. “That meeting could have been an email,” complained the deep-work introverts.īut then some people lost control of, and patience with, email, ending up with inboxes filled with old, obsolete emails, personal drivel, marketing promotions, spam, and other detritus. Tension arose between coworkers and managers who felt a visceral need for meetings (either as a way to navigate the details of various projects and initiatives or as a habit for procrastination) and people who were negatively affected by punctuating their time in the office with distracting meetings. In a hierarchical organizational structure, meetings-especially status update meetings-were a huge time-saver for the Big Boss and a time-waster for everyone else.Īnd so the rise in email use for communicating with people in the same office became the norm.
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