Most companies didn’t go remote this year. They went to Zoom jail.
I’ve been running Decloud as a remote-first company for a while now. When the pandemic hit, I watched every company around us scramble to “go remote” and immediately do it wrong. Their playbook was simple: take every in-person meeting, slap it on a video call, and declare victory. Then wonder why everyone is exhausted by 3pm.
That’s not remote work. That’s the office with worse lighting.
The point is async
Remote work’s real advantage isn’t location flexibility. It’s time flexibility. Your engineers can do deep work when their brain is on fire instead of when the calendar says so. But that only works if your default communication mode is async.
Async means I write something clear enough that you can read it, understand it, and act on it – without needing me online at the same time. That’s it. Not complicated in theory. Apparently very complicated in practice.
Why most teams get this wrong
Because writing is harder than talking. In a meeting, you can ramble for ten minutes and people nod along. In async, you actually have to think before you communicate. You have to structure your thoughts. You have to anticipate questions.
Most people have never been asked to do this at work. So they default to what’s easy: “Hey, got a minute for a quick call?”
No. I don’t. And neither does any engineer in the middle of debugging a production issue.
What actually works
At Decloud, we have a few rules that keep async working:
Write complete thoughts. Don’t send “hey” and wait. Don’t drip-feed context across fifteen messages. One message. Full context. Clear ask. Done.
Decisions go in writing. If it happened in a call and nobody wrote it down, it didn’t happen. We write short decision docs – what we decided, why, what we considered and rejected. Takes five minutes. Saves weeks of “wait, I thought we agreed to…”
Response times are explicit. Chat gets same-day responses. PR reviews within 24 hours. Decision docs get a couple of days. On-call stuff is immediate. No ambiguity.
Meetings are the exception. We use sync time for things that are genuinely hard to resolve in text – conflict, brainstorming, incident response. Not for status updates. Never for status updates. Write those down and give people their mornings back.
The hard part
Async requires trust. You have to trust that someone not responding immediately is working, not slacking. You have to judge people by what they ship, not by their green dot in Slack.
Most managers aren’t ready for that. They’ve spent their careers managing by presence. Seeing butts in seats. Remote forces a reckoning with that, and a lot of them are responding by demanding cameras-on all day. Which is somehow worse than the office.
If you’re a leader and your reaction to remote work was “more meetings,” you missed the point entirely. The unlock is fewer interruptions, better writing, and trusting your team to be adults.
Stop recreating the office on Zoom. Start writing things down.