Working remotely shouldn't mean more meetings

This is insane:

In an April survey from meeting scheduling tool Doodle, 69% of 1,000 full-time remote workers said their meetings had increased since the pandemic started, with 56% reporting that their swamped calendars were hurting their job performance.

Constant check-ins have become some bosses’ version of micromanaging, a way to keep tabs on workers they don’t trust. Coordination that used to happen by swiveling your chair or walking across the hall now requires extra formality and time for everyone still spread out across home offices. [...]

In the Doodle survey, 70% of respondents said they hope to have fewer meetings once they head back to the office.

-The Pain of the Never-Ending Work Check-In | Rachel Feintzeig, WSJ

Working remotely should decrease your meeting load. It is a fundamentally different way to work, not merely a change in the location of your desk. That organizations are seeing an uptick in meetings evinces dependence on synchronous collaboration, which itself evinces a dearth of prudence: do you wear hiking boots to the beach? trunks and sandals on the trail? It would be equally absurd to ignore context when making business decisions, yet that’s exactly what companies do when they shift to distributed working without altering the way they work.

Remote meetings and the path of maximum resistance

In the context of remote work, synchronous work habits—like scheduling meetings for every dang thing—are akin to hiking boots on the beach. They’ll only slow you down and deprive you of the benefits of your environment. Why? It’s deceptively simple: Because your team members are apart when working remotely, you—both individually and collectively—must use precious resources to simulate coming together (and staying together for any length of time). If you’re all in the same building, synchronous coordination is the path of least resistance. If you’re all in different places, it’s the opposite.

But Zoom! But webcams! They’re cheap and easy to use! Don’t kid yourself. These tools cost more than their sticker price. Slack, for instance, may be only a mouse click away, but without mindful and judicious use parameters, so is perpetual distraction. It’s a chat app. Chat. And video calls?

“During an in-person conversation,” writes Julia Sklar for National Geographic, “the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from dozens of non-verbal cues, such as whether someone is facing you or slightly turned away, if they’re fidgeting while you talk, or if they inhale quickly in preparation to interrupt.” Video calls deprive you of those non-verbal cues, requiring “... sustained and intense attention to words instead.” It’s exhausting. A video call is not a one-to-one replacement for in-person conversations; the former demands more of your cognitive bandwidth than the latter. Why use precious energy that way when your context—remote work, i.e., being apart—is better suited to asynchronous working?

Meeting remotely should be the exception, not the rule

I work for a company that’s been happily remote since its inception over 20 years ago. If you asked me how to do remote work right, this is what I’d say based on my firm’s success, seeing the same methods work for others, and seeing that the organizations that don’t do remote work well all do the opposite of this:

Make work visible
Use project management software (e.g., Asana, ClickUp, Trello, etc.) to surface all work for everyone on the team. If it needs to be done, it should be represented in software that everyone has access to.

Prioritize and re-prioritize work
As work surfaces in your project management software, team leads must prioritize it, continually planning and adjusting plans as needs or resources change.

Work when you prefer to and let others do the same
With work surfaced and prioritized in your project management software, everyone knows what to work on next. There’s no need to meet; just get on with it.

Communicate asynchronously
Collaboration and coordination with teammates is just as necessary for remote teams as it is for colocated teams, but remote teams should do the lion’s share of it outside of real-time conversations and preferably in public (to the team) channels.

Supplement with meetings
Make meetings the exception rather than the rule for remote collaboration and, when you do meet, turn off webcams.

When you work this way, you don’t need so many meetings. Your meeting frequency, in fact, should go down. Your throughput, however—and this is, again, both individually and collectively—should go up. Why? Because not only are you not wasting resources trying to simulate the colocated office, you’re also replenishing resources like attention span, focus time, and mental energy by reducing interruptions and working when and where you’re likely to be most productive.

Use meetings to support your context, not to change it

The remote way of working yields the best results when teams embrace their apartness rather than fighting it. And to be clear, embracing it doesn’t mean eschewing collaboration; it simply means collaborating in a different way, an asynchronous way. Teams that do that tend to use meetings largely for the purpose of growing and supporting a healthy team culture, which is harder to cultivate remotely. So it isn’t that meetings have no place in a remote company; it’s that their place is different than it is in the colocated workplace. Remote teams need meetings for rapport and empathy building, for conveying nuance, for difficult conversations, and for connection. Though we often get things done in or as a result of meetings, the purpose of meetings for remote teams is not to get the daily work done. As a result, we need less of them. The same can be true for any remote team willing to work differently.

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