Musings on: Unbundling Meetings for a Remote World

This is a continuation of a series, which last covered Spontaneous Collaboration in a Remote World.

As companies approach a more permanent unbundling of their physical office routines, meetings seem to sit at the crux of the change necessary. In person, meetings felt less costly — often even serving as a time for folks to catch up socially. Thus, they were used uniformly across a range of jobs from status updates and standups, to structured collaboration, to company-wide presentations and alignment. In a remote world, should we revisit what all the meetings are for? As Benedict Evans notes, the answer might completely reframe the tools needed. Perhaps we are still in the early innings of shifting from just Facetime for work, to the range of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, with new elements like async around the corner.

Why now?

Ample research has recently emerged around “Zoom fatigue”, which likely extends to the hours we spend staring at screens writing and reading content when not consumed by live-video. We are tired of engaging in high-fidelity, formal ways, yet a remote world means we need to communicate more than ever to connect and stay aligned. I’ve seen founders and companies struggle to keep a pulse on information flow and sentiment throughout the organization, leading to a higher frequency of meetings and written posts.

One way to combat this dilemma: take the most common types of meetings and think about how to move them to async. If the goal of these meetings is to get the intimacy and information of meetings — could that be consumed in more varied formats? Gitlab’s 2020 Global Remote Work Report, conducted pre-COVID, found that in companies opting for remote work, 50% of employees defaulted to shared documents for collaboration, relying on meetings only as a last resort. Similarly, we should look to the consumer world — seeing the rise of short form asynchronous text, audio and video as inspiration for new mediums.

More async collaboration and communication may prove essential in a remote, distributed world. Async allows for a time distributed force, either due to time zones or shifting schedules, to operate with equal footing. Gitlab wisely calls out “asynchronous communication is documentation“, which can be utilized both in the short and long-term to create shared context and processes (which begins to touch on culture). Finally, async will likely prove more inclusive, allowing introverts and those with pressing home lives to participate more comfortably. For all of these reasons, I believe async work communication will eat more and more of our mindshare (happily!) in the coming years.

What if? How might we?

Given the changes above, this section is meant to explore opportunity areas. “What If” extrapolates scenarios that are on the table in some form today. “How might” translates those into potential technological solutions and areas for startups to consider.

What if we ported most meetings devoted to lightweight shared context like standups and updates permanently to async? How might the TikTok and Twitter-ification of work content look, where people could post and view short (30–90s) updates on what teammates are working on and thinking about? These updates could become engaging windows into fellow colleagues, allowing newer teammates to get to know others passively. Taken one step further. those posts could be aggregated by projects or interest areas to create video / podcast-like content to be consumed passively throughout your day.

What if an async format increased rings of accessibility — who you felt like you truly new and could learn from. While content may seem ephemeral at first, it’s inherently an efficient log of information — best practices, senior leadership’s perspectives, prior metrics, etc. How might a repository for that content, like Loom, embed in a company’s daily life? As consumer apps like Instagram and Twitter has shown us, async experiences allow for new communities and relationships to form, a dynamic that will be critical but hard in the remote world.

What if people stay tired of meetings but the need to be connected, outside the flatness of text, becomes stronger than ever? How might we introduce the tools needed to make those as structured or fun as possible, fit to size for each specific teams need?

Full disclosure, I have been an advisor to Loom and an avid supporter of it.

More thoughts to come — feedback/comments welcomed. If you are tackling one of these opportunities, we’re eager to learn more! Please reach out to monica@kleinerperkins.com to get the conversation started.