Can you imagine a workplace without meetings and emails?
We’ve all had our fair share of “Zoom fatigue” over the last 18 months and as hybrid working becomes accepted as the norm, virtual meetings will remain an important part of our day-to-day experience. We’ve also been doing more of them than before. Last year, we attended 13% more meetings and the number of people in those meetings rose.
But while meetings are commonplace in offices, an increasing body of evidence is showing that they’re probably not always the best way of getting work done. A survey by Harvard Business Review of 182 senior managers, found that 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work and 71% said that meetings are unproductive and inefficient. At TheSoul Publishing we strongly agree and this is why we recently made the shift to asynchronous communications — communications which don’t require real time input. In practice, the most visible examples of this are no meetings and no emails.
Quoted in Fast Company, COO Arthur Mamedov says: “I like to compare meetings to large conferences. Speaking in front of a group of people easily becomes an inefficient information exchange. Some people might get distracted in the moment. For others, the information may not be relevant. And during Q&A sessions, the speaker may forget important details. Meetings can easily become a passive activity that wastes participants’ time.” This effect is of course exacerbated as groups get bigger, leading to diffusion of responsibility across attendees.
With our headquarters based in Limassol, TheSoul Publishing is a remote forward company with a global team of more than 2,300, located across 70 countries. As well as banning meetings (except for in very special circumstances, with special rules attached), we’ve categorically ruled out the use of internal emails. As a result, employees work on their own schedules and have control over when they communicate with their teammates. Our team works across many different time zones, in some cases having a 10-hour time difference between locations. This can physically make meetings hard to arrange. But more than that, we simply don’t believe they’re the most efficient way of getting things done and they certainly don’t reflect the diversity of working styles.
We‘ve designed a process that simultaneously allows for communication which doesn’t require everyone to be at their desk at the same time — you’ll know, if you’ve ever tried organising a call between Sydney, London and New York — while also ensuring transparency and giving everyone access to the same information. By sharing all relevant information on a mutual platform, everyone can access it as needed, bringing greater transparency and equity to our approach. This means both our remote workers and our office team members have equal access to information, avoiding some of the “us-and-them” that can arise in hybrid working arrangements.
We’re often asked: “but doesn’t it make things harder to arrange?” Contrary to common belief, asynchronous communication improves efficiency, rather than slowing things down, because it forces teammates to get better at planning ahead. At the start of a project, we ensure that everyone involved is fully aligned, setting clear deliverables and deadlines, so that contributors know what they need to provide and by when. From this point, teams have the flexibility to work autonomously, with clear expectations on what they need to deliver. From our experience, employees work best without a forced schedule and are most productive when they can truly manage their own to-do lists and connect with colleagues when it works best for them.
Although largely reduced, meetings do sometimes happen, but only for special cases. There are strict protocols in place as to how to go about this. We always aim to provide at least 24 hours’ notice, we limit the meeting to two participants, and they last no longer than 30 minutes. After the meeting, the host logs the results in the system where the project work is stored, so everyone can benefit. If the meeting was on Zoom, the recording is posted, as well.
This has taught us that meetings do not help build a strong culture. In fact, when team members are given more space to find their own ways of working, culture begins to thrive in other ways. This is absolutely not about removing personal communication. Our team has organised book clubs, share their weekend highlights with colleagues on group forums, and catch up with each other outside of project delivery. If anything, these personal connections have grown more inclusive. Rather than limited to side conversations, the whole team can share in each other’s successes and challenges. We support this by, amongst other things, bringing the team together in Cyprus, once a year. There’s no greater sight for us than the majority of our remote workforce in one place, enjoying themselves and sharing inspiration.
For us it’s simple: live meetings don’t drive successful work cultures and they aren’t productive. Putting in place the right processes, within which our team has the freedom to work out how to achieve results, their way, has led to brilliant business outcomes for us and work satisfaction for our colleagues. While an immediate move to completely asynchronous comms may appear to be a scary prospect for some, we strongly believe there are learnings in this way of working for everyone. Whether it’s reconsidering how best to distribute information, to fostering a more open and sharing culture, every manager should ask themselves whether the way they’ve always done it, remains the right way for the future.
