One-on-one meetings are a great way for managers to connect and manage their remote team members. Here’s a guide to run these meetings effectively.

All’s not well in remote work paradise. For many employees a remote work arrangement is a Faustian bargain. They have to endure the dark side of remote work.

Middle-level and people managers play a crucial role in companies, but they also model many corporate dysfunctions. It’s time for people managers to get back in service of the people they lead.

Many decisions execs take for their employees, ignore externalised costs. Mike Hopkins of Amazon claims their RTO policy has “no data” to back it. Lyft CEO, David Risher can only advocate for snacks in the office, while batting for RTO. Meanwhile, employees and other stakeholders pay for such decisions through costs to their health, productivity and happiness.

Poorly formed teams are woefully ineffective, but I see it so often that I’d be remiss not to state the problem. In this article, I’ll call out two common problems I see leaders repeat when forming new teams. I’ll also describe a few simple ways to avoid these problems.

A common argument against remote work is that coaching and mentoring are harder when you’re all remote. But I believe that if companies are intentional about building modern coaching and mentoring skills, they’ll do much better being remote-first.

Organisations can benefit from volunteerism in the workplace by harnessing their people's spare capacity. But how do you get it right? Allow me to explain.

Constant urgency is the enemy of deep work and an async-first culture. Often this means getting on meetings, and being ok with days full of IM interruptions. With enough of these “urgent” tasks, even the most motivated teams can slip back into their old, synchronous ways of working. In this post, I explain techniques to deal with urgency.

If you learned to be a manager in an office-centric setup, async-first remote work may seem like an opaque way to lead your people. How do you manage without walking around and listening? In this post, I’ll unpack the risks of leading unhappy, disengaged or struggling team members in remote teams and what you as a manager can do to pre-empt these problems.

Every work model has its pitfalls. It’s not as if a remote workplace can’t go south. In today’s post I want to explore some anti-patterns I’ve seen in remote-first and “hybrid” organisations that can make your workplace toxic. When you know of these possibilities ahead of time, you’ll be able to pre-empt them and put the right guardrails in place for your team.

There are different approaches to estimation and planning depending on the outcomes you’re looking for and the context you’re operating in. Making synchronous workshops efficient is part of this. Many activities can be asynchronous as well. You also need to consider if estimates are necessary in your context. I cover all these topics and more, in this post.

In an async-first culture, the role of a manager is crucial. If the company is the mother-ship, the manager’s the employee’s bridge to it. They should be the individuals that know the most about their people, their skills, abilities and strengths, their personalities and their aspirations. You need managers who lead with care. In this post, I want to address how you can show that care as a leader and a manager.

In today’s post, I want to address four sets of factors that’ll affect your team’s productivity and happiness. As a leader, you’ll to address these factors using your judgement, experience and vision. Your choices will influence your new async agile team’s behaviour.

As a leader, you’re responsible for much more than the mechanics of work. Depending on the size of your company you’re a custodian of culture, or the one who defines it, or someone in between. In today’s post, I want to share with you how you can foster a culture that supports async agile.

As a manager or a leader in any tech firm today, I imagine you have a DEI agenda. Your people’s ability to work asynchronously can be a powerful tool to not just further that agenda, but also to differentiate you as a progressive leader.

In today’s post, I want to share a few notes about diversity and a few more about inclusion. I expect these perspectives will help you shape your organisation’s culture and eventual competitive advantage, starting of course with the people you influence.

Remote and async first work is all set to be the standard way of working in the next decade. There’s still a window of opportunity for firms to be the early majority. Those that miss this window will lag the innovation curve in designing the workplace of the future. A misunderstanding of “hybrid” work can set organisations back in this journey. This is also counterproductive to async agile.

In today’s post I want to unpack the term “hybrid work” for you and I want to explain why misunderstanding this term is dangerous.

When I speak to managers and leaders about asynchronous work, I receive a variety of responses. If they’re remote work naysayers, then there’s an obvious scepticism. Then there are the remote work believers who listen carefully. There are some who can immediately think of ways this “asynchronous work thing” would work for them and their teams. Many leaders, however, see the value for their people, or maybe “other people”, but claim it won’t work for them.

If you’re one of those leaders or managers, allow me to unpack asynchronous work for you. Who knows, you may find an idea or two to enrich your own work life.