Why RTO Will Not Solve Your Problems
Michael McCormick
Senior executive leadership advisor, founder, Agile transformation consultant and author of The Agile Codex, software architect.
There has been a lot of buzz and controversy around "return to office" (RTO) in the technology world.
Regardless of where you stand (or fall) on the topic, I believe that from a leadership and organizational perspective, it entirely misses the point of what we have uncovered as a result of the remote working revolution:
Async work is the future - no matter where you are sitting.
It may be true that forcing people into the same physical space will produce better outcomes for some organizations. This says more about your organization than you might want.
Every argument I have seen for this involves two fundamental pieces:
For point 1, I have found that the more creativity a role requires, the less you can "command" it to happen on a schedule.
If you believe this is true, hire and reward people based on outcomes, and let them find their best moments and methods to reach them. This can be challenging - you need to understand how to define and evolve those outcomes and how to fulfill your role to support your people to meet them. Not every leader or organization can do this.
Additionally, high-creativity work is inherently unpredictable. There are an awful lot of bad ideas that pave the way to the good ones. You need to have the stomach for unpredictability and the ability to communicate to the business the value of patience and trust. You need to be able to turn qualitative signals into measurable and believable milestones to bridge those gaps. Not every leader or organization can do this, either.
These are leadership and organizational skills and priorities, not location or schedule problems.
Point 2 is a lot more interesting. If your business requires spontaneity and physical proximity to form connections, then you are deciding that there is no alternative - no possibility to be intentional instead.
Being intentional about how to best bring people together synchronously to connect, inform, brainstorm or decide means respecting the time and attention of your people, making every attendee matter, and facilitating an outcome that is clearly aligned with the most important goals of the business. The process of getting there requires asynchronous work - recording and conveying information efficiently before the meeting takes place.
In this sense, RTO can be an implicit reaction to having low bar on communication skills. As with managing to outcomes, this lack of communication skill is a leadership problem, not a location or schedule problem.
This is a very big subject - deserving of a very big pile of words. Read the following to up-skill your Async.
Async Practices and Effective Meetings
The Tech world has a big opportunity to upskill our async ways of working, which, if done well, will increase the effectiveness of our organizations - and the thing this lever will move the most is in our meeting culture.?
This document outlines some specific practices that I have seen work well in this regard.
Effectiveness Defined
First, what makes a meeting effective? I see this is having:
As you can see, there is a lot to do to set the stage before an effective meeting can be called. By definition, if this work is not happening in a meeting, it is async work!
The key around all of this is that each meeting has deliberate goals and intentions which can be assessed after the meeting.
Let’s double-click on each of those bullets, from bottom to top.
In Order To
Every interaction in a business context has at least one purpose:
This is simply the sharing of information. This information may be input to some action that this person needs to take now or in the future or not at all. It may not even be known at the time, but worth ‘filing away’. Because information is context, it is not always obvious to the sharer or the receiver what value or purpose it will have before it is shared.?
This step describes the synchronous back and forth discussion of information and reshaping it into new information for consideration toward its usefulness related to the goal. While ‘brainstorm’ sounds open-ended, the purpose of the discussion is to “come up with an approach or new framing relevant to solving problem X”.?
The sharing of information and possibly brainstorming along the way can help with making the best decision possible. This bullet refers to going into a discussion with a specific decision to make in mind - e.g., “We want to decide the best way to manage the software budget for FY25” or “Should we expand our office space?”
You can imagine each of these builds on the other. No decision can be made without information, and coming up with all the questions and filling in the full context around the possible decisions that could be made requires brainstorming.
The important thing is to understand that each one builds on the other and assigning a specific purpose to an interaction automatically tells us what needs to be done – first – to achieve it.
We can all think of meetings where decisions needed to be made but the required information was absent, or no time was set aside to consider the information together, causing the team to waste time making guesses about information or acting without thinking things through.
Every decision to be made must have a clear decision maker identified.
The Right Information
Having the right information means identifying, gathering and providing the contextually relevant information for the intended purpose. It can be a challenge to know what information is relevant before starting to gather it, and once it’s been gathered, it’s important to be disciplined to remove the information that is not relevant (or is redundant) after all.
As the intention moves up from inform to brainstorm to decide, it becomes more and more important to be ruthless about excluding any information that may be distracting or less-likely to be relevant.?
The Right Time
There is always a tension between deciding quickly and deciding with all the information and brainstorming that would be ideal. When to call a meeting is a balancing act between acting in a timely manner and having the information required to be effective.
When gathering information asynchronously, there is an additional moment to look for where discussions start to become inefficient, with people talking in circles, or an extraordinary amount of back and forth drilling unsuccessfully into nuance that may be difficult to carry the breadth or depth of in writing. It may also simply become confusing in a threaded, asynchronous discussion who is waiting on whom to respond, and who is preparing a response, if anyone. While these difficulties can be addressed through upskilling and training around asynchronous communication, they still do appear, just later.
The Right People
In the process of gathering information and brainstorming it becomes obvious who the ‘right people’ are - they are the ones providing the information and thinking things through.
In asynchronous communication, there is room for more communication modalities to exist, making a more inclusive funnel for ideas and perspectives. So the right people would include those who may be more reticent to speak up in a synchronous meeting but whose ideas and information should be part of the discussion. Everyone is set up to succeed when they have had a chance to engage in their preferred mode first, and they aren’t required to do a lot of synchronous exposition from the ground up in the meeting itself.??
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Effectiveness in Practice
Asynchronous information exchange occurs spontaneously; Slack, comments in Google docs, email, Loom… all of these represent asynchronous channels of communication. In many cases, these are sufficient. The better we get with asynchronous communication, the more often they will be sufficient.?
In most cases, it should only be when certain things become true in an asynchronous interaction that we decide to escalate to having a synchronous meeting at all. This means we should, as a general rule, not default to a meeting (especially when we are at the inform stage), but rather start with informing async.
Async vs. Sync: Communication Skills
Compare these two text exchanges:
1?
JOE: “Do you want eggs or pancakes for breakfast tomorrow? We only have hard boiled eggs and our pancakes are vegan and gluten-free so they might be more like crepes.”?
JOY: “Eggs are good.”
2
FLO: “Do you want eggs or pancakes for breakfast tomorrow?”
PHIL: “Eggs”
FLO: “Are you ok if they’re hard boiled?”
PHIL: “I don’t know. What kind of pancakes are you thinking of making?”
FLO: “Vegan.”
PHIL: “That sounds better.”
FLO: “Oh, they’re also gluten free.”
PHIL: “So they might be a little flat?”
FLO: “Yeah.”
PHIL: “Ok. I’ll have the eggs then.”
Which of these interactions would be most efficient to do async? I hope you said 1!
The simplest way to answer the question is to identify the number of round trips – i.e., the number of messages required to come to the decision. In async conversations, there is a calendar time delay between each message. The more messages, the more calendar time it takes to get to a conclusion. In sync conversations, responses are nearly immediate, so the number of messages has a much smaller impact on the time required to get to the conclusion.
This apparent time efficiency inherent in sync communication is a double-edged sword for the effectiveness of communication as a whole. It asks nothing of the muscles that async communication rely on - primarily, a laser focus on the goal of the conversation and an understanding of the interests and knowledge of the conversation participants. This is required in order to minimize the amount of back and forth.?
In our example, Joe wants to minimize round trips. So he provides as much context as possible, making some guesses as to what would be relevant for Joy to make the decision. There is a chance he will provide too much context, or miss a relevant item. The more he understands Joy and Joy’s responsibilities, the better he will do at this. This comes with time and attention and through building a relationship and familiarity with Joy and her role.
In the case of conversation 2, Flo doesn’t spend any time thinking about what is relevant to Phil. She allows that to happen organically through the conversation.
It is easy to see in these examples how a culture that is strongly biased toward having sync meetings would a) naturally feel that sync meetings are more efficient and b) struggle to succeed with async communication. One could easily imagine Flo being biased toward calling a meeting for every conversation in order to avoid the excruciatingly drawn out chain of messages she experiences (and causes).
The most interesting thing to discover here is that conversation 1 is more efficient overall, regardless of if it happens sync or async. Bringing the async skill set to a sync conversation makes the sync conversation more efficient, even in this highly simplified example. This underscores the value and importance of building strong async communication skills if the goal is to have more effective meetings.
Magnificent Meetings
If we start with the assumption that async is the default way to initially engage, we are left with two questions -?
When to Call a Meeting
There are two main criteria?
When the anticipated number of round trips hits a point of diminishing returns or the amount of time needed for a decision is less than the time it would require to continue the discussion async, it’s time for a meeting!
Operational Outline
As discussed in the beginning of this document, a magnificent meeting has
Here is a way to organize a meeting that leverages the async pre-work, stays focused on the goal, and formally spawns async work as an outcome.
Every meeting needs:
Following is a workflow describing how async communication sets us up for magnificent meetings. Note that any async conversation - intentional (e.g., a pre-read) or spontaneous can be the seed that leads to a meeting. And sync happens only after async work has been done.
Async: Advantages and Disadvantages in Practice
Working async brings many benefits, and also costs. Following is a cheat sheet for areas to monitor and shore up as you move forward in your journey.