How team process can scale to enable seamless remote working

In this article I’ll share my experience of working, time-to-time, remotely. From 1 day (Work from Home) to 1 full month remote in different timezone (7 hours time difference). Working remotely is the new trend in tech companies. however it’s not scaling well for all team process.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous team

We can split team process into 2 categories: The one with Synchronous and asynchronous process. I’ll go through both with advantage, tradeoff and how is it scaling to enable seamless remote working.

Synchronous team process

Having a synchronous process is the default standard in most of the companies. This can be defined by:

• Everyone has to join a meeting at the same time
• Use Slack as instant message service

However, this process will not be scalable for seamless remote work. Having a scrum meeting every morning at 10am SGT regardless where you are in the world. It can become a nightmare if you are working from with 7 hours time difference.

Synchronous company process can only have employees working remotely in the same region / timezone

Asynchronous team process

This process is the most suitable to enable seamless remote working, wherever you are in the world. It can be defined by

• Asynchronous meeting (Using tools like https://carrot.io)
• Communicate with emails

Asynchronous meeting will scale better for remote employees (No timezone required). However, making alignment can become more complex or take more time. It can add extra idle time and delay to all communications.

When sending an email you don’t expect to receive a response within the minute unlike when you are sending an instant message (E.g: On slack). Having email as a backbone of communication can scale better and create less frustration during idle time.

Which process for which team

Having an asynchronous process will be more suitable if your team has a full time remote member. If you don’t have any, or if it is partial remote, you can probably accommodate with the synchronous process and skip a few of the meetings that are not critical. If your team only has 1 remote member, you can also accommodate and find a middle ground to avoid the tradeoff of being 100% async team.