Transcript: No schedule, no meetings — are ‘working hours’ history?

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘No schedule, no meetings: are ‘working hours’ history?’

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Scott Farquhar
Do I want to sit in meetings for 30 hours a week? Is that the culture that we want as an organisation? Or do we want a culture when we get together, we are sparring, we’re collaborating, we’re creating ideas because we’ve all got the context in an asynchronous fashion.

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Mischa Frankl-Duval
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Mischa Frankl-Duval, standing in this week for Isabel Berwick.

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At the top of the show you heard Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of the software company Atlassian, talking about how people at his company work asynchronously. It’s not a term that rolls off the tongue exactly, but it describes a very simple concept. Some companies are allowing employees to work not only in the places that suit them, but at the times that suit them as well. But can you really work with colleagues when your hours never overlap? What do you do if you need someone but they’re not online? And how on earth can managers do their jobs if they never meet their teams? We’ll come back to Scott from Atlassian a little later to find out. First, though, I’m going to speak to Jen Rhymer. She’s an assistant professor at the UCL School of Management, and she’s done lots of research on asynchronous work.

Jen Rhymer
So asynchronous work is work done without the expectation of an immediate response. So it allows people working to sort of use their time as they wish, work when they want to work, and that the time they work is not dependent on their colleagues.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
So at its most basic, what does a day in the working life of somebody look like when they work asynchronously?

Jen Rhymer
So one of the great things about asynchronous work is this is gonna vary a lot with each individual. For one person, it may look like getting up, sending their kids off to school, doing some work, potentially having a long lunch with friends and then coming back in the afternoon, doing more work. But they’re able to fit that work into the parts of the day that make sense for them, so they’re able to work in their most productive times of the day.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
So do what you want, when you want, as long as that’s what you need to do.

Jen Rhymer
Exactly.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
Got it. So I understand there are certain operating principles that govern successful asynchronous work. Could you outline what those are?

Jen Rhymer
First, there needs to sort of be open access to all of the information, right? So because you’re not able to rely on another person giving you that information, you should be able to go in and look and see and find the information that you need to do your own work, right? So sort of all of the information across the whole company is captured. And this is open to everyone in the company.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
OK. So we’re talking a high degree of transparency when it comes to everyone’s work. And the second principle?

Jen Rhymer
The second practice or principle has to do with the depth of information. For any sort of decision or piece of work you’re able to go back and see the full history. The conversation, the back and forth, the disagreement, all of that information that led to the production of that work product so that people can understand all of that context in making the next decision that they need to make.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
Right. So a lot of detail that goes along with that transparency. What’s the third principle?

Jen Rhymer
The third principle is this idea that employees are one, responsible for sort of understanding the information that’s relevant to their work as well as being trusted to sort of make decisions and move things forward, right? So this is not I’m gonna work without a manager, but this is maybe my manager’s gonna look at it actually 12 hours after I make the decision. This essentially sort of allows for people to keep working, to move their work forward despite the fact that there’s this disconnection in time.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
OK, I understand that, but what if something needs to be done urgently and I need to speak to someone to move something forward? What happens then?

Jen Rhymer
The information that you need, the other things that your co-workers are doing should be available to you. The system works if everyone participates. And so yes, in order for you to be successful and sort of reach these deadlines is based on the presumption that those you’re working with are also making this information available and you’ll be able to access it. I would also say that not as many things are urgent as perhaps people make them out to be. Most of the companies I worked with, it was generally understood that within 24 hours was the norm. It’s not that you’re never responding to your colleagues, you’re just doing so in a time that makes sense for you, right? And so that information will come. It just might not be instant.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
Does that need for everyone’s work to be transparent to other employees? I’m not sure how I’d feel about it.

Jen Rhymer
It requires employees to work essentially in public, right? So making everything available as it goes, all of your work in progress; you’re not finishing something, making it nice and neat, correcting it and then sharing it with people. That can be very challenging for a lot of people. And some people may decide that that’s sort of not something that they’re willing to do. This is not a way of working that aligns with sort of their preferences. A lot of people I’ve talked to were hesitant sort of as they started working this way and then it became very normal.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
I understand that working like this means you can be wherever, work whenever. But I can’t really imagine never meeting the people I work with. Isn’t it sort of necessary to meet your manager or colleagues to work with them effectively?

Jen Rhymer
It’s not that it’s absolutely necessary, but it is gonna accelerate sort of building that trust early on. And then a lot of times, once that’s established, the amount of time or the frequency in which you see that person is gonna decrease. And maybe for a lot of people seeing their colleagues going into an office one week per quarter would actually be more feasible and make a lot more sense and be as productive as potentially going in once a week.

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Mischa Frankl-Duval
Jen laid out the case for asynchronous work pretty clearly there. As long as people in a company are committed to documenting their work in detail and being unfailingly transparent about what they’re doing, they can work with a lot of freedom. That sounds appealing in theory, but does it actually work in practice? And are people really happy working at a company where they basically never see their colleagues? That’s what I wanted to know for my second guest.

Scott Farquhar
My name is Scott Farquhar. I’m the co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, and we provide collaboration software for about 300,000 companies around the world.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
Atlassian has a policy called Team Anywhere. Its employees, more than 11,000 in 13 countries, can work hybrid or remote. Many of them work asynchronously, including some of Scott’s direct reports. Among the tools Atlassian makes are Confluence, a workspace product, and Loom, which allows users to create shareable videos. Those tools allow people to work asynchronously. Scott reckons working this way saves time. I started by asking him to explain how.

Scott Farquha
Yes, if I think about the problems we need to solve as knowledge workers every single day, it’s really a problem of knowledge silos. And knowledge is trapped in people’s heads. By the time you’ve written something down, you’ve solved, you know, 90 per cent of the work. You spent time getting out of your head, composing your thoughts, writing it down. But most of that ends up being trapped in a shared drive that no one can ever find. It’s not, you know, commentable. People can’t edit it and add to it or improve it.

The product for that’s called Confluence; is, you know, similar to say, Google Docs or Microsoft Word. And so we’ve had Confluence as a product for, you know, 15 years as one way of sharing information. And now, as video and bandwidth and other things have improved, we can now take that same approach, which is, hey, let’s record a video. And once you’ve recorded it, people can comment on it. People can share it. People can respond and record their own video back. We’ve recorded almost 4mn minutes of video with Loom and that estimates that we’ve saved about 400,000 meetings from people’s calendars.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
And in terms of managing at or leading an asynchronous company, what’s the biggest challenge there?

Scott Farquhar
I think knowing when to be asynchronous and knowing when to be synchronous is important. We start with a belief of let’s start asynchronously and see how we go, and we can always escalate back to a synchronous, you know, Zoom call or a synchronous meeting if we need. And culturally, that’s been a big change. And so the things that I’ve had to model as a leader is really starting async first and say, let’s not organise a meeting, send me a Loom. And if the Loom works well then I can respond and we move a lot faster as an organisation. And knowing though that if it doesn’t work for some reason, you know, one in 10, we need to escalate back to voice. That’s a much easier way to do it than starting and saying, well, one in 10 I should send me something asynchronously. And I think leaders, if you’re thinking about this and working at your organisation and looking at your calendar and it’s back-to-back meetings or working long hours trying to hit people in different time zones, you’ve really gotta step back and say there’s a whole different way of working and we need asynchronous work.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
At any company, things go wrong. What do you do when that happens but the people you need aren’t in the same place as you or aren’t online at all?

Scott Farquhar
There’s always emergencies and there’s always, you know, a customer escalation or something that needs to get done, you know, with a, you know, group of people. But because our diaries are now freed up because of asynchronous work, because now I’m not trying to schedule in amongst 30 other hours of meetings in a week, that actually allows me the time to jump on something that is urgent. And so the times you need synchronous work are now easy to do because of the investment in asynchronous work.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
So working miles from your nearest colleague, never seeing them in the office — that’s not for everyone. Have you ever had an employee say I just can’t work like this?

Scott Farquhar
I don’t think we’ve had people opt out in that way. When we as a company chose to go remote and have people all over the world and not force people back into offices, we had to say that there’s going to be a certain group of people that may not want that as a lifestyle. But because we have a hybrid environment where, you know, some people come into the office if they want, some people work remotely.

We’ve actually had less people choose, you know, to not work in a distributed environment than I had thought. And at a practical level, there’s no company really forcing people back in office, you know, that way. And so the world has to adapt to asynchronous work. And whether you’re in an office three days a week or, you know, three times a quarter, everyone has to adapt to this. And so we haven’t had anyone say I opt out. I wanna change the way I’m working. And because again, asynchronous starting as the default and you can always escalate back to synchronous voice, synchronous video, synchronous meeting. And people will just try it on for size. And there’ll be some people that have adapted more, and they’ve got more time back in their calendars as a result. They’ve got less meetings. And there are some people that are still on that journey.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
But you do need to see the people you work with at least some of the time, surely, to have confidence in them as colleagues.

Scott Farquhar
I do think that you build trust by bringing people together on some regular basis. And I believe that distributed work is not that you never need to get together. It’s that you don’t need to sit next to someone in a cubicle every single day to build trust. And you can build that trust in, you know, fewer but more intense times, together. And that frees up a whole bunch of things.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
What about culture? Don’t you struggle to create a meaningful culture if people don’t meet or in some cases, even talk to each other regularly?

Scott Farquhar
Culture is just how work gets done. Do I wanna sit in meetings for 30 hours a week? Is that the culture that we want as an organisation? Or do we want a culture when we get together, we are sparring, we’re collaborating, we’re creating ideas because we’ve all got the context in an asynchronous fashion? Do you want a culture where two-thirds of your, you know, directors and above are working late in the evening and being burnt out and tired? Or, you know, can you do that asynchronously and keep the synchronous work there? So I don’t think necessarily, you know, in-person, remote, distributed, whatever, is a driver of culture in terms of good or bad. And I think at Atlassian, we have a stronger culture than ever, you know, even without distributed work, because of how deliberate we are about how work gets done here.

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Mischa Frankl-Duval
Scott, thank you.

Scott Farquhar
It’s been fantastic. Thank you.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
Asynchronous work involves a lot of trade-offs. You sacrifice some of the human contact that makes work enjoyable, but you do your job whenever you want. You have to document what you’re doing all the time, and it’s often out in the open, but you don’t have to attend as many meetings. Those trade-offs will sound dreamy for some of you, but they won’t work for everyone. I’m not sure I agree with Scott that culture is only about the way you work. Plenty of people would say a workplace culture is about the bonds you form with the people you work with, and that is surely easier when you see or at least speak to your colleagues frequently. I value freedom and flexibility at work, but seeing the people I work with regularly is a big part of what makes my job enjoyable. Speaking of which, Isabel Berwick will be back next week.

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Thanks to Jen Rhymer and Scott Farquhar. This episode of Working It was produced by me, Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive producer was Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.