Scenario You are collaborating across two teams in an ongoing project. You are curious about what happens next, or are looking for clarification about something. Your first port of call is to ask a question directly to one of your colleagues over chat or email. For work to move forward, people have to be ‘around’.

➡️ This is the availability trap.

When peers hit a block or need to find information, they reach out to another colleague. This used to be the normal way to do things. In fact, asking for information is where a lot of conversation happens, and sometimes people confuse it with collaboration. In a remote team, this pattern is a killer. It means that people in a lot of different times zones, with different responsibilities have to be available to make work for someone else possible. The problem with that? It means people are incentivised to be ‘always on’ as the green dot, and we start to confuse availability with impact. This isn’t helped by the old school approach of presenteeism where managers measure the quality of an employee based on the time they are ‘in the office’.

Try a thought experiment. What would my team need if we weren’t able to have a meeting for 2 weeks? Don’t freak out! But really let yourself explore that question. This is the start to understanding how to build a team that is more and more capable of working asynchronously.

Scenario: You don’t invite someone on another team to join a meeting. At that meeting, you and your colleagues make a decision. You then share that decision with the person who wasn’t invited. They are upset about the decision and want to discuss it. What do you do? You choose to to "hop on the phone" with that person, so now your day has one more call and you have one less break.

We peek into keyholes so we can see what’s happening in meetings because that’s how we’re used to knowing what’s going on. We only get limited information because we weren’t there, and then we get stressed out, left out, and feeling side-lined. We’re much more likely to disagree with what comes out of a conversation we weren’t able to participate in and so it’s harder to make decisions, and create an environment of inclusion unless meetings are packed with too many people, or we have ‘check-ins’ with everyone that could possibly be implicated in a choice.

Review your calendar. Is anyone going to be peering through the keyhole worried they don’t know what’s going on? If so, how can you communicate more effectively about what happened during and after?

Scenario: You are on an email thread with 3 colleagues. Over the course of the next 2-3 days, 3 more colleagues are added to the thread so they can ‘chime in’ or ‘be read in’. By the end of the week, the email thread is nearly impossible to parse for people that have been in it since the beginning.And for those that aren’t on the thread? They’re left out entirely.

When you are a team that uses the MegaTelephone, you regularly use 1:1 modes of communication (like email or chat) to have group conversations. This creates a casual environment for communication that makes it hard to tell what’s important. It also makes conversation, decision-making, and longer-term alignment really challenging. You’re always digging for information, reading between the lines of a conversation, and re-confirming what came out of a conversation in chat, or email, or small meetings.

When you convene in-person conversations when there are more than 5 people, how do you structure these events and document them? Now return to the last group discussion you trapped in a 1:1 platform like email. What would you need to do to create the space for quality conversation, engagement and decision-making?

Scenario: Your team likes to take notes in meetings. They like to write down their thoughts. They like to share things that might be of interest for colleagues. They like to weigh in with thoughts and ideas. They like to make documents to articulate their ideas, strategies, and processes. One problem: the sheer volume of information! In teams suffering from the spew, creating information is easier than consuming it. And it takes a toll. People get behind on email, and even if they aren’t stuck in the availability trap, they get bombarded with 7 links to documents. Things are ‘captured’ but what should be accessible documentation turns into a rabbit hole of complexity. This leads to miscommunication, a false sense of security for managers (it’s in a document somewhere!), and exhaustion.

Your first instinct might be to make a document of documents, or a list of lists, or a process of processes. But sadly, this 'solution' just makes it worse. You need to reset the relationship between documentation and communication. Documentation is meant to share actionable information for people that had no hand in creating it.

Look at the last piece of documentation you read. What would have made it easier to take action based on the information? Now look at the last documentation you made. What could you have done differently to help others process that information?

Scenario: You finish a big project that you have been spearheading. It’s Friday morning for you, and your first work day after getting it done. You feel deep relief and satisfaction that it’s done. You’re really proud, and can’t wait to show it off. Then you realise that most of your team is in a kick off meeting for a new project today, and because you’re on the road, most of your work day doesn’t overlap. You end the week feeling alone, looking forward to the weekend, and by the time Monday rolls around, you’re feeling a little confused about whether it’s even worth bringing up.

It is really common for teams that work across time zones. If we don’t do anything about our team rhythms they become individualised, and then everything feels off. In music, syncopation is when beats happen in between where we expect them. It is really off-putting and creates a powerful effect. My favorite example is the Thom Yorke song Videotape. It might not be your style of music, but universally we feel that it’s off even if we can’t pinpoint why or how.

First, map the rhythms you feel personally in your work (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly). And then do the same thing for your team or organization. Do that for your organisation or team. Are they aligned? If not, what moments might you put in place at what cadence to start building that rhythm?

With an hour of time, you can get a quick sense of what people on your team think and feel about your remote culture. Your team will crack open a challenging for important conversation, and you’ll have ideas for what you might want to spend time changing over the coming months.