January 21, 2022
4 min
The last time I took a 16 personalities test I came out an INTJ (Architect):
Architects are known for their independence. Even in entry-level jobs, they may chafe at anyone who tries to limit their freedom. Their worst nightmare would be a micromanaging boss who monopolizes their time with pointless meetings, insists on useless rules, and appraises employees’ performance based on how likable they seem rather than their actual merits.
This feels accurate. I hate pointless meetings. I find Zoom calls draining. I’m a bit of a lone wolf, happiest when left to manage my schedule and get things done.
There’s good news for us introverts. A new type of company is emerging with the following attributes:
We are still at the early adopter phase of teams operating like this but there’s a growing list of smart founders building their teams this way.
They attract the best talent, who are motivated by time and location freedom over the highest possible salary. Clear priorities and outcomes are documented, rather than bullshit meetings and visibility.
These types of teams are an introvert’s best bet. Here’s a list of 40 I’ve been researching via my weekly newsletter.
People have the space and trust to disconnect to focus on deep work. No one is expected to respond to messages immediately.
Slack (or Microsoft Teams, or similar) should be used primarily for informal communication. If you are accustomed to Slack being an always-on center of urgency in a prior organization, breaking your reliance on it as a core part of accomplishing tasks will require deliberate effort and reinforcement.
All communication is thoughtful. Because nothing is urgent (unless the site is down), comments are made after mindful processing and never in real-time. There's no drama.
We don’t have (or need) any meetings, rarely exchange emails, it doesn’t matter where or when I do my work.
Flexibility to organize your own time.
Always default to asynchronous communication which allows almost no synchronous meetings (in real-time). This lets everyone have more time for deep work and value outputs instead of face time.
We don't have managers, we don't have meetings, there are no time-sheets to complete. We're responsible, autonomous, creative, and proactive in doing our best for our customers.
We literally developed Discussions to remove the need for most meetings and treat important topics through 1 long thread of thoughtful messages
Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time.
We communicate asynchronously, work autonomously, and take ownership of our work.
No meetings - Try to minimize where possible.
We have a few meetings a week. While zero meetings would be ideal, it feels impractical. Once again, being a remote team, we want to make sure everyone feels connected to their coworkers and the company’s mission.
This isn’t your typical work from home job. Everyone works from the location they choose. We’re spread out all over the world in more than 70 countries. We track about 70 percent of our projects on P2-themed WordPress.com blogs, 25 percent in private chat rooms, and the rest on Slack.
Leaning into asynchronous video communication makes Loom a place you’ll love to work by creating a workplace that is flexible, balanced, and engaging.
Build a culture of written, asynchronous communication. This will save so many meetings, avoid people feeling left out if they weren't in the meeting, and protect focused work.Your team will also be forced to clearly articulate and refine their ideas.
Our culture rewards work-life balance above all, transparency and autonomy. We work 5 hours a day, which helps prioritize the important. Fully async-remote, no meetings and no urgencies by default.
Asynchronous communication first. Our first lines of communication are tools like Slack and Notion. We document everything and we openly share it, unless it’s confidential.
We are a remote-first organization that enables asynchronous participation where possible so you can set a schedule that helps you and your family thrive.
We are and will remain a fully remote company that values asynchronous work—you can work anywhere, any time. You’ll have the space, trust, and time you need to promote balance and do your best work.
Does it even have to be a meeting? Often it’s better for everyone if you simply write down what you want to talk about, for example on our Basecamp or as a Notion page.
We meet once a week as a team on Google Meet. Everything else is async first, with one on one syncs when needed to collaborate in real time.
We set out to design a modern organization from the start—one that’s global, remote, and asynchronous-by-default.
We opt for resilient, remote-first systems and processes, async-first communication, and empowering our teams to grow through autonomy and trust.
Async-first: We prioritize time for deep work and only have meetings when we have to.
Nobody knows when they start their workday, when they stop, and when they do breaks. So, they are trusted and evaluated by the quality of their work and impact, not the hours they put in.
So not only do we not share an office, most of the time, we don’t even share time zones. For this reason, we use asynchronous (async) forms of communication as much as possible and conduct synchronous meetings only when it’s really necessary.
We value a calm and low stress work environment and mostly use asynchronous communication.
As a general rule, default to asynchronous communication. It's easy to switch from asynchronous to synchronous, and hard to go the other way.
Have as few mandated meetings as possible.
Async-first mentality, efficient meeting culture.
We never hold any all-hands meetings, or rarely any meetings at all for that matter. If we do, we make sure they're quick, about a specific topic, and are mostly 1 on 1's. We don't even use Zoom.
We believe that growth and fulfillment come from all spheres of life, not just your job. As a distributed company, we back up those beliefs with fully asynchronous workflows.
Our schedule is 100% flexible so you can adapt it whenever needed. You can choose to work at the time of the day you are more productive.
Asynchronous: We work in different timezones so it makes sense to write and record for others to pick up later rather than set meeting times.
Everyone in our team enjoys the enormous benefits a flexible work policy brings, and we truly believe that the future of work will gravitate in this direction.
We highly encourage written (long-form) communication and documenting things on Notion and generally don't like tight fixed schedules.
We limit recurring meetings to 1-2 hours per week per team, with no synchronous daily standups.
More often than you believe, you don’t need to constantly communicate through video meetings.
We do async communication, i.e., you can communicate with anyone whenever you want, but do not expect an immediate response.
As long as it suits your team, you have the freedom to build your work schedule around your life.
