The company behind Buffer, the social media management software, is made up of a distributed team of 82 people living and working in 15 countries around the world. Here they describe how they leaned into only asynchronous meetings

With any team, there’s usually the need to sync up. This usually takes the form of a meeting – or a video call, for those of us on remote team. On the mobile team at Buffer, this is what it looked like for us for a long time.

We had a video meeting of about 45 minutes every week where we got face-time as a team, got on the same page about work, talked though blockers and challenges, made decisions, and updated one another.

This worked great for us – until recently. One of our teammates was spending some time in Taiwan, stretching our team timezones from the US and Europe to APAC. With timezone differences, it was impossible find a time that worked well for everyone.

At first, we discussed whether the majority of the team should keep meeting and record the meeting. That would have meant that one person (likely the person in the most east or west timezone) would only see us in a video recording for months.

It didn’t sound like a great solution to leave someone out and ask them to watch the rest of the team having fun, so we decided against that. Rather than leave anyone out, we decided to lean into asynchronous communication so everyone could participate.

Read More at Buffer Blog

Read the rest at Buffer Blog