I ran a fully distributed engineering and design organization for over a decade at Mayven, with people in seventeen countries. I've watched, in the post-COVID years, dozens of companies fail at remote work and conclude that "remote doesn't work" when they actually failed at async work. The conflation has produced an entire genre of bad takes.
Most remote-work commentary is either evangelism ("remote is the future, everyone should do it") or backlash ("remote killed culture, everyone needs to come back"), missing the mechanics of how it works.
Remote works when it's async. It fails when it's just Zoom-from-home.
The mistake most companies made between 2020 and 2024 was lifting their in-office workflows directly onto Zoom and calling it remote work. Meetings got more frequent (hallway conversations disappeared and meetings became the substitute). Interruptions got worse (Slack, Zoom, and email firing constantly). Hours got longer (office-leaving signal vanished). Exhaustion piled up. Then leadership concluded "remote isn't working" and called everyone back.
What failed was keeping the synchronous, real-time, in-person model and just changing the location. That model doesn't work well distributed. It depends on hallway conversations, casual proximity, ambient awareness of teammates' work. Lose that without replacing it, and you get failure: meeting overload, communication chaos, slowed decisions.
Companies that nailed remote-first — GitLab, Automattic, Zapier, early Buffer, original 37signals — had something in common. They built their operating model around async communication first, sync second. That's not just policy. It's a practice with specific habits and costs.
What async-first actually means.
Most decisions happen in writing, not in meetings.
When a question requires more than a yes-or-no answer, it's written down — in a doc, thread, or comment — and people respond in writing on their own schedule. Response time is usually hours, sometimes a day, almost never minutes.
The trade is real: slower clock-time answers. But you get answers from more thoughtful colleagues who had time to think, and the answer is durable — it lives in the doc, searchable, referenceable, six months later. The async approach front-loads time and back-loads waste. The sync approach front-loads waste (the meeting) and back-loads pain (nobody remembers what was decided).
Meetings exist for genuine collaboration that benefits from real-time interaction.
Brainstorming. Difficult interpersonal conversations. Decisions where principals need to wrestle with tradeoffs together. Status updates do not qualify. "Recurring 30-minute syncs" do not qualify. Default disposition: this doesn't need a meeting; what does it need instead?
Meetings that do happen have a written agenda, a written outcome doc, and a default time of less than an hour.
The agenda forces preparation. The outcome doc captures decisions. The time cap forces focus. Without these, meetings expand to fill time and produce nothing.
Documentation is the substrate of the company.
How things work, why decisions were made, what's planned, what's done — all in writing, all searchable. New hires onboard from docs. Team members find context from docs. The CEO and IC engineer have access to the same information. This is a real investment — keeping docs current takes time — but the alternative is institutional knowledge trapped in people's heads, which is fragile and bottlenecking.
Tools are chosen for async-friendliness, not sync-comfort.
A team using GitHub Issues, Linear, Notion, and async-default Slack channels works very differently from a team using Microsoft Teams and shared Google Docs and constant ad-hoc meetings. Tool choices encode the operating model. Async-friendly tools nudge toward async behavior. Sync-friendly tools nudge toward sync behavior. Be deliberate.
The specific habit most teams refuse to adopt: write down the decision before the meeting.
This is the highest-leverage async habit and almost nobody does it consistently.
Before a decision-meeting, the person who called it writes a one- to three-page doc covering: the decision to be made, relevant context, options under consideration, pros and cons, and the author's recommendation. The doc is shared 24-48 hours in advance. Everyone reads it before the meeting. The meeting itself is then focused — disagree with the doc, surface considerations the doc missed, ask clarifying questions, agree on the path forward.
This is the Amazon/Bezos meeting model and it works extraordinarily well. The first time you do it, the meeting takes ten minutes instead of an hour, because the work happened before the meeting. The third time, you realize some meetings didn't even need to happen — people read the doc, commented async, and the decision got made without the meeting.
Most teams don't adopt this because writing the doc is harder than calling the meeting. The author has to do the thinking. They can't hide behind "let's discuss it." So the discipline gets resisted, even though the team-level productivity gain is enormous. Teams that push through the resistance compound. Teams that don't slowly fill up their calendars with meetings that don't decide anything.
Across time zones, design intentional overlap, not maximize it.
Many teams try to find time slots where "everyone is online" and end up with one or two hours of brutal overlap that doesn't work for anyone. The better model: identify, for each pair of teammates who need real-time interaction, a small window — usually two or three hours per week — when they're both available, and protect that window. For decisions that don't need that pair, async is fine.
The mistake is over-rotating either direction. "We have to all be online together" forces unfortunate schedules and limits hiring geography. "Everything is async, no overlap needed" produces real friction when issues need rapid resolution. The right answer is intentional, targeted, narrow overlap — usually 10-20% of the workweek, not 100%.
Remote-first vs. hybrid.
There's a real distinction between fully remote and hybrid. Fully remote, where every employee works from wherever, optimizes for async and tends to work better for async-disciplined companies. Hybrid, where some people are in an office and some aren't, often degrades into the worst of both — the in-office crowd has informal conversations and makes decisions, the remote crowd is excluded, and the operating model never quite commits to either mode.
The fix for hybrid is to operate as if everyone is remote, even when some people are co-located. Meetings happen on Zoom even when some people are in the same building, so remote attendees have parity. Decisions happen in writing, so in-office side conversations don't become decisions. The office becomes a coworking space, not a decision-making forum.
Most companies that adopted hybrid don't do this and let the in-office model dominate. Remote employees feel like second-class citizens, which they are in this model, and the company's behavior says "in-office is what counts." This is the worst version of remote work.
A few specific operational habits worth naming.
Async status updates. Every team writes a short weekly update — what got shipped, what's planned, what's blocked. Everyone reads them. Replaces the "team status meeting." Saves hours per week and produces a durable record.
Decision logs. Significant technical and product decisions are written down with: the decision, context, alternatives considered, rationale. Reviewable later. Saves the cost of re-litigating the same decision every six months when someone joins and asks "why did we do it this way?"
Default-public Slack channels. Almost all conversation happens in public channels. DMs are for private things only. New hires can read the history. People can lurk in adjacent channels and get context. The cost is a louder Slack; the benefit is dramatically less information silo-ing.
No emergency Slack-pings outside hours. If someone is offline, they're offline. If something is genuinely urgent, there's a phone-based escalation. Defining "urgent" tightly means it almost never is.
Onboarding-by-doc. New hires read through a curated set of docs, write their own questions and impressions, and pair with people for specific things. The traditional "spend a week shadowing" model doesn't work remote; the doc-driven model does, if the docs exist.
Quarterly in-person. Companies that nailed remote also nailed regular in-person time. Quarterly off-sites where the whole team gets together for a few days — for product strategy, relationship-building, for conversations that genuinely benefit from being in a room. This is expensive but the ROI is high. It doesn't substitute for daily in-office time; it complements async-first daily work.
The honest tradeoffs.
Remote-first is harder to do well than in-office, in the same way that good async writing is harder than good in-person conversation. Companies that succeed at it have invested in the discipline. Companies that fail tried to skip the discipline. The pattern is consistent enough that "we tried remote and it didn't work" almost always decodes to "we tried Zoom-from-home and didn't develop async muscles, and it didn't work."
The hiring market for remote is much wider than for any single city. The talent pool is global. The cost structure is often lower. The flexibility for employees is a real recruiting advantage. These benefits are real, and if you can capture them, the business case is strong.
But you have to commit. Half-remote, hybrid-without-discipline, "we say we're remote but the leadership team is all in the same building" — these all under-perform fully-committed models in either direction. Pick a side. Commit. Build the muscles. Companies that do this win.