It’s the end of 2022 when I’m typing this, and some people still work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. This is an outdated format invented for factory workers in the 19th century and implemented all over the world in the 20th. It was designed to find a balance between work and play, and also to regulate employment relations at that time.

Intellectual and creative work doesn’t apply to the working shifts and regulations. It’s a very individual thing. Some people need to get up early and spend their morning alone or with their families, and only after kids leave for school do they get down to work. Others prefer to work at dawn while everyone else is sleeping. For example, so did Hemingway and other famous writers.
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To stay creative and productive from day to day, it’s crucial to be in the best state of mind. Going to the office is not a solution to that. Creativity can't be regulated. It can only be nurtured in a certain environment suitable for a certain person. Then why pull them out of this environment?
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The shift to working remotely, in your own rhythm, has already started. We believe that in 10-15 years from now it will be a preferable condition for any creative worker to:
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There are two types of remote communication: synchronous and asynchronous, or simply sync and async. Here’s how they differ one from another.
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Remote consists of sync and async communication. These two types are interconnected flowing from one to the other. We switch between these modes, but it’s still remote.

People have been using remote communication for centuries, and it’s still here, with us. The first prototype of remote communication were handwritten letters, postcards, and telegrams. With the rise of the internet in the 90s, emails replaced handwritten letters and brought remote communication to the new level. That was the moment when first partly remote teams like 37signals appeared.

Later in the 2000s forums and ICQ occurred. They were prototypes of the messengers we know today: Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, etc. During the 2010s the tools and technologies we use for remote and async communication today emerged: Google Docs, Zoom, Notion, Figma and Mirror with its collaboration boards, various chat apps, and others.

From the 1990s until 2020 remote was considered to be something radical. Corporations were skeptical about these new technologies. Their managers didn’t consider remote to be a serious way to conduct business and coordinate teams. Moreover, there were so many questions, such as: how to manage it being in different time zones, how to control the workers, how to attain desired KPIs, and etc.
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The pandemic forced everyone to switch to remote communication, whether they like it or not. It turned out that for many companies, remote communication works just fine. It was the point of no return, when business began to look at remote differently and saw an opportunity for cost optimization. Besides, the pandemic revealed a set of problems many companies were dealing with long before.

Communication is the glue connecting people in teams, departments, products, etc. Therefore, the tools we use for remote communication should work as a glue to keep us connected and present as if we were in the office.
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Live communication has many invisible threads that keep us connected. When we work remotely those threads get torn apart and we need to weave new ones to stay in the know of ongoing events, projects, and tasks. That’s why we try to compensate for them with a large number of emails, meetings, voice messages, and calls. We just want to be connected again.
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In a nutshell, the problem is that the people from remote teams are disconnected, poorly connected or overconnected today. At least they are not as connected as when they sit and work together in the same room.
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Being connected is the biggest challenge we’ve faced since the start of the pandemic and the rise of remote communication in our teams. So far, the tools we use today are not helping us cope with this problem.

Disconnected
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‍As a result people who are disconnected or poorly connected get fired because they didn’t do their job well and didn’t make any progress.

Overconnected
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‍As a result people who are overconnected burn out and quit the job.

As we compare communication to glue, here goes the main problem we face: all tools for remote work are shitty glue. Let’s take a look at Slack and Microsoft Teams, well-known and widespread communication tools.
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These examples show that the current communication tools do not provide a thoughtful and worthwhile solution. They offer you crutches instead of bionic legs and suggest you run a marathon. This’s not OK. The responsibility for making Slack, MS Teams, or any other tools the communication link—the glue of your company—is entirely passed on to your team, to the users.
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The only place where you can tie all the communication together is your head. It’s the only tool that allows you to come up with your own system, to glue all these up. Transparent and coherent communication has become the responsibility of each individual team member, which, due to human nature, will never work properly.

The share of remote communication may vary for different companies, in different fields, at different stages of their development. There are companies that can be 90-95% remote today—we call the remote-first. For example, design studios, creative agencies, lawyers, and psychologists.
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On the other side, there’re companies where the share of async communication is only 10-20% and this percentage can’t be expanded. It includes building companies, medical clinics, and hairdressing salons. Their employees have to be present in the office or at the building site to get a job done.
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We don’t see remote as a universal remedy for all communication problems and challenges remote teams are facing today. However, it’s one of the most flexible management approaches to communication and workflow organization we ever had in the history of humanity.
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