If you adopt asynchronous work, everyone should be able to work on a schedule that’s convenient to them. But that may not be the case from day one. You must first build your deep-work muscle.

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.

Distributed agile software development projects rely too much on synchronous communication. This not only leaves too little time for deep work, it also leads to burnout, less diverse teams and knowledge and information sharing practices that don’t scale.

Asynchronous work has the potential to transform distributed agile so it’s fun, sustainable, inclusive and scalable.