We’re launching our public beta today. It’s an exciting day for us. And as good a day as any to explain why we built Acapela.

We’re getting rid of time spent on busy work

Software has eaten the office. The average company uses 137 software tools vs. 16 in 2017. For all the many benefits that’s brought, this shift has also led to a noisier and unproductive work environment.

A recent report showed that nearly two-thirds of all work time is spent on ‘busy work’. That’s time spent on activities like communicating about work, switching between apps, chasing status updates and commenting on notifications. That’s an incredible waste of time and energy.

How much potential could we unleash if we flipped that? What if instead of two-thirds of our time spent on nothing-y, low-value tasks, we could spend it on quality work that has real impact? A lot, we think.

We’re centralizing your work communication.

The reason we spend so much time on ‘busy work’ is because our tools are fragmented. We’re using nine apps every day at work, on average. Not to mention multiple Gmail accounts and Slack workspaces on top of that.

Fragmentation makes interruptions, tab switching and reactive mode the default state.

To improve out workflow we first need to simplify it. And we do that by bringing all your messages and notifications into one inbox.

Centralizing means you don’t context switch. It means you don’t miss messages because they stay in your inbox until you action them. It means you can batch many messages from different tools together, saving time and, more importantly, protecting your focus.

We apply Inbox Zero across your entire tool stack

Inbox Zero is an amazing productivity methodology for processing email. But it was made famous in the pre-Slack days, when all communication - internal and external - happened on one communication channel.

That’s changed. Unless you’re a VC or a sales person, most work communication now happens outside of email. It happens in chaotic Slack channels, in lost Notion comments and across project management tools like Asana. These disconnected, disruptive workflows are inefficient.

But with your tools centralized, there’s no reason why we can’t no apply an Inbox-Zero like methodology to every work tool - Slack, Notion, Jira, Asana and, yes, email tool.

A single, focused workflow means fewer interruptions, less FOMO, and calmer work days.

That’s where we’re at now. But we’ve got one eye to the future. We’re thinking about collaborative features like shared inboxes between teams. Customizable automations where you turn messages into to-dos for yourself or others. And even a developer platform so others can build apps that plug into Acapela. So this is just the beginning of more exciting things to come.

Workplace notifications are a necessary evil.

They’re necessary because they inform us of the things we need to do and remind us to respond to others. In a remote world - if we don’t want to spend our whole day in scheduled video calls - notifications are the only way to notice that there’s something that requires our attention. If we’re managing people, we need these notifications to unblock our teams and to do our jobs.

They can be evil because they’re distracting and draining. They clutter up our email inboxes. They interrupt us on our desktops. They give us FOMO. They overwhelm us with their sheer number, making it tough to distinguish between what’s important and what’s not. They make it hard to carve out focus time and do the high-level thinking needed to make good decisions.

We founded Acapela early in the pandemic and spoke to hundreds of teams about how their ways of working changed. Collaboration moved online. Video conferencing, messaging apps and document tools became the places where teams interact. As they used more tools, and used those tools more frequently, their notifications skyrocketed.

This has consequences. Work as we know it has too many interruptions and too much noise. That’s even more severe if your main role is to manage other people or collaborate with different teams.

Our brains aren't wired to cope with a never-ending stream of messages from other humans we don't want to disappoint. We know we should protect our time better and carve out more of it to focus on the things that matter. That’s what moves the needle at work. That’s what makes us feel fulfilled after a long day. But we get sucked into letting notifications control the rhythm of our work days. We default to reactive mode to get through them all, in our desire to prevent ourselves from being a bottleneck.

Is that what work should look like? Is our job to be a spider at the center of a web of notifications? Endlessly replying, frustrated and unfulfilled?

What’s so Bad About Notifications?

Let’s take a closer look at some of the core issues about notifications.

1. They interrupt us. Constantly.

This is bad for obvious reasons. Interruptions force us to switch contexts. It's proven that context switching reduces our cognitive power.

When collaborating with others, we need to be responsive and prevent ourselves from being a bottleneck. But we also need time to focus. Constant interruptions make it difficult to build in time for focus, to think strategically or to make sound decisions. 

2. Most notifications don’t matter

Even if being responsive is a core part of your role as a manager, you don’t need to respond to everything. You need to focus on the right things and respond to the right messages. That’s how you leverage the finite time and attention you have. That’s how you make the biggest impact on your colleagues.

The challenge is that some notifications are important and need our attention. But to get to them, we have to sift through a bunch of useless ones. This is a waste of time and a drain on our energy. 

3. Notifications trick us into thinking we’re doing real work

It’s easy to fill our days with light communication. But our true value as managers isn’t just in our ability to respond to our colleagues as quickly as possible. It’s in how deeply we can think about the needs of the products we sell and the customer we sell them too.

Communication is the glue that aligns the teams we work with. Responsiveness prevents bottlenecks. But if the pendulum swings too far the other way, we lose the necessary focus time needed for deeper work. Deeper work leads to better decisions and better decisions lead to better results.

From Inbox Zero to Notification Zero

We need notifications. They contain important information that makes it possible to do our jobs. But we get too many of them and we often don’t have the right system for prioritizing the relevant ones.

If the current way of dealing with notifications doesn’t work, then what’s the alternative? Luckily, people have dealt with inbound messages before and have come up with solutions. One of the most relevant ones is Inbox Zero for email. 

Most people don’t have a clear system for reviewing their emails and actioning them. As a result, they get distracted, waste time and fall behind on it.

Enter Inbox Zero. Inbox Zero is a productivity method focused on organizing email. It has a few rules at its core:

1. Proactivity > Passivity - You never "check" your email in a passive way. You always process it, applying an action to every email before you move on to the next one.

2. Complete short tasks now  - If an action is doable in two minutes or less, you do it now. If it needs longer, you do it later. 

3. Default to action - You do one of four things with each email you receive: 

   1. Delete (or archive) - if it requires no further action

   2. Delegate - if somebody else is better placed to do it 

   3. Do - reply if you can finish it in under two minutes.

   4. Defer - if it takes more than two minutes.

4. Hit Inbox Zero every time - The goal is to get to "Inbox Zero" everytime you open your email. This stops you from ever falling behind.

5. Stay out of your inbox - After reaching zero, you proactively close it and do other things. The goal is to process your inbox less often, but more effectively, freeing up time and headspace for other tasks.

We can apply these same concepts to take control of our notifications.

First we need to bring our notifications together in a similar way to an email inbox. With a unified inbox, we can batch our notifications together, rather than checking them throughout the day. Fewer interruptions means less context switching. This makes it easier to manage our time and carve out the necessary blocks of time we need for higher-level tasks.

Then we can action our notifications in the same way we approach Inbox Zero - Delete, Delegate, Do or Defer.

Using the same Inbox Zero principles, we can stop them from being a distracting drain of our time and energy. 

Introducing Acapela: The Inbox for your Notifications

We’re shifting communication away from a real-time distraction by building an inbox for your notifications. 

By using a more async, Inbox Zero approach you tackle your notifications less often, but more efficiently. You unblock your team quicker, and win back more time for focus and deep work.

Here’s how we’re doing it.

1. Everything in one place

Acapela is a unified inbox for your work notifications. To be the hub for your notifications, we connect to the tools that you use in your daily work like Slack, Notion, Figma or Google Docs. Anytime there is a notification in these tools, we capture it in Acapela. Collecting them in one place stops each tool interrupting you individually. This means less information scattered across different places and no more switching between apps.

2. Separate the signal from the noise.

Notifications should be filtered, so you can easily determine what’s important, and what can be ignored. A message from your CEO is more pressing than an @channel in #random. 

In Acapela, you can customize what notifications you want to respond to first. You can pull in @ mentions from Notion, DMs from Slack and tickets from your project management tool, all into one single tab. Aggregating your important notifications means you’re more responsive to the things that have the highest impact for your team.

3. Make it faster (and more fun) to work through your notifications

A high-performance desktop app and slick keyboard shortcuts make it easy to power through your notifications faster than an inefficient, scattered workflow. With the press of a button, you Reply, Snooze or Resolve your notifications, using the Inbox Zero methodology to work through them all. Deep integrations let you reply to comments & edit contents directly in Acapela - no need to switch over to other tools. 

This is a more efficient and fun way to work through them than having them drip-fed into your desktop, Slack and email inbox.

4. Getting rid of distracting real-time notifications.

In Acapela the goal is always Notification Zero. By aggregating them together, you turn notifications into one single task, rather than multiple real-time distractions. The efficiency of batching them together means you also spend less time responding, but unblock your team even quicker than before. And, more importantly, dealing with notifications becomes a shorter, more efficient part of your day. That gives you more time for focus, thinking and working on the tasks that matter.

____

Acapela is currently in beta and we’re looking for early adopters to help us shape the future of our product.

If you use Slack, Notion or Figma and are looking for a better way to handle your work notifications, then go here to join our early access waitlist. We’d love to have you test out what we’re doing and hear what you think.

There is a gap between quarterly planning and daily communication, where business efficiency goes to die.

Quarterly planning has its uses. Without it, you're inviting misalignment. You risk your team focusing on the wrong tasks to hit the wrong goals.

But a business is a complex system. And in any complex system it’s impossible to plan for every eventuality. Unexpected things you can’t plan for are inevitable. They’re something that every person in every business has to deal with and take action on every day.

As the daily hub for company communication, these unexpected actions come up in Slack. But Slack optimises for communication, not for driving action. The important messages that require action are often missed, forgotten or ignored.

The accumulation of these missed, forgotten and ignored actions becomes a major bottleneck. It slows down execution speed, and frustrates and stresses out employees.

We need a way to bridge the gap between the planning layer and the communication layer. Without one, we're doomed to be unproductive and frustrating work environments for employees.

The everyday messy reality of collaboration

Quarterly planning works because it aligns a company on what’s actually important. When you define your objectives, you can use them as a filter to make decisions about what to do and what not to do.

Each team gets busy completing the tasks that help them hit their objectives by the end of the quarter.

One problem though. This top-down planning style can never account for the whole picture.

You can plan an initiative with 20 tasks and 100 sub-tasks and assign them to your team. With due dates. But that will never account for interruptions, crises or new information. Ad hoc tasks are inevitable. There is a 0% chance of ever accounting for everything..

And it gets messier. In theory a task can handled by a single person.

In practice, tasks require collaboration. Isolated tasks that don't need any input or feedback from others are the exceptions, not the rule.

And collaboration requires two things:

1. communication

2. actions from others.

And where does this communication happen? For most companies, in Slack

Slack: Where work happens collaboration gets messier

Slack is now the daily communication channel for most businesses. So that's where most collaboration gets kicked off. But communication is only one part of collaboration. The second part requires actions from others.

And while Slack excels as a communication channel, it comes up short as a way of managing actions. It’s distracting, easy to miss things and can feel relentless. Important collaborative actions get mixed in with more general communication. There’s so much noise that the signal get buried.

One solution is to try and move the communication layer into a project management tool. This can work great for certain teams with very specific workflows. Developers stick out as an obvious one. As a team, their work can live in a ticketing tool. Communication can sit in context-specific issues or cards.

But for the departments that live closer to the customer, it’s harder to keep communication out of Slack. Think sales, ops, customer success. And things fall apart when different teams don’t use the same project management tool. Slack becomes the default for making requests of other teams.

Slack messages that require action are ‘open loops.’ We need to close these open loops to move forward.

But Slack is not great at closing these open loops. They either get missed outright. Or they jump to the top of a to-do list because it’s front of mind, meaning more important work gets pushed back

We need something that:

1. help close these loops

2, assigns them the right priority within an employee’s to-do list.

Planning will never account for most of these inevitable open loops. And Slack is poor at closing them. We need to bridge the void between quarterly planning and daily communication. Our productive potential depends on it.

Closing the loop with Acapela

It takes three steps to close the open loops. We need a way to:

1. capture open loops.

2. organise and prioritise these captured loops.

3. notify relevant team members that loops are still open, or that they’re now closed.

Capturing

We need to collect the open loops we attract in Slack into a clear inventory of meaningful action items. This needs to be simple and not involve big changes to people’s workflows.

At Acapela, we do this by:

1. turning Slack messages into Acapela requests. When a colleague makes a request, you can capture it in a couple of clicks with a simple Slack action.

   

2. making requests of your colleagues. Using the /acapela command, you can turn a Slack message into an action item for your colleagues.

With open loops captured, we can now start to deal with them.

Organising and Prioritising

Once we capture our open loops, we need a way to help organise and action these tasks. We want to understand what’s urgent and what’s important, so we know when and in what order to do this.

In Acapela, all open loops appear in a simple dashboard. They’re prioritised by due date and level of importance. A team member can view their actions in Slack or the Acapela web-app if they prefer a distraction-free space.

This reduces the cognitive load on each team member. They don't have to guess what they need to do first. They can focus on the thing that matters - closing loops and unblocking their colleagues.

Notifying

With open loops organised, we need to make sure everybody understands their status. That way, nobody needs to chase anyone or waste time following up for a status update.

In Acapela, colleagues are notified when you add an action item to their dashboard. Acapela prioritises these for them. Then as the due date approaches, they’re nudged to complete the task. Actions get completed when they’re needed, without any frustrating chasing of colleagues.

This simple three step system helps to make the communication layer more actionable. By making it easy to capture, organise and close these open loops, we tone down the chaotic nature of Slack. These inevitable open loops get closed quickly and effectively.

That means better collaboration, more focus on action and happier employees.

_________

Acapela is currently in beta and we’re looking for early adopters to help us shape the future of our product. If you’re interested in making remote work more actionable, then you can book in a demo call with our team. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Ever since the pandemic started, remote work has been adopted at a crazy pace all around the world. Today, organizations don't ask themselves whether remote work will continue to impact our lives post-pandemic but rather to what extend. As we at Acapela were a hybrid-remote company from the beginning, we have had our fair share of learnings in the past. However, before we jump into the experienced benefits and challenges of hybrid-remote teams, we created a short recap of the three major work settings so we're all on the same terminology.

Recap - 3 major work settings:

1. Fully remote: There are no office spaces and all employees work in a fully remote capacity.

2. Hybrid-remote:

   a. There are office spaces. All employees live in close proximity to the office and can decide whether they want to work at the office or at home.

   b. There are office spaces. Some employees live in close proximity to the office and go there daily. Some employees don't live in close proximity to the office and are fully remote.

   c. There are office spaces. Some employees live in close proximity to the office and can decide if they want to work at the office or at home. Some employees don't live in close proximity to the office and are fully remote.

3. Fully onsite: There are office spaces and all employees work there.

For further context: Acapela has office spaces; some employees live in Berlin, Germany, and go to our HQ during some days of the week; some employees don't live in close proximity to the office (Poland, Estonia, USA) and are fully remote.

Challenges of a hybrid-remote setting

Before diving into the challenges, we should stress that these can be avoided and overcome if the company implements processes countering these potential pitfalls. If you're curious about how to do this, there is another blog post already waiting for you.

1. Remote employees have worse access to information
   Most companies transitioning to a hybrid-remote work setting haven't been fully remote before but rather fully onsite. This means that informal office chats and random meetings exist to share information and develop culture. In a setting where not every employee is present all the time, information sharing can be a challenge that can eventually lead to confusion, frustration, and eventually underperformance.

2. The onsite experience dictates the culture
   Hybrid-remote employees often have a suboptimal experience when it comes to bonding with other team members. This can lead to onsite vs remote struggles where co-workers might pass over their counterparts for promotions or development opportunities. Additionally, companies that build culture primarily in the office have a hard time offering remote workers an equal experience when it comes to physical perks and benefits.

3. The feeling of being lonely and forgotten
   During the pandemic, almost everybody felt somewhat disconnected from their co-workers - imagine that for the rest of your career but nobody noticing it. Although a situation like this is definitely a two-way street, remote workers have a harder time expressing their mood as they are not surrounded by people all the time which makes it easier to hide when they are feeling bad and harder for co-workers to notice if something is going on.
   

Benefits of a hybrid-remote setting

After reading through the challenges you're probably quite doubtful whether hybrid-remote makes sense at all, but bear with us. Although there the challenges should definitely be taken seriously, they can get overcome when the right processes are in place. And then, the only thing left to do is to enjoy the significant benefits of hybrid-remote.

1. Productivity gains through uninterrupted working time
   Being in the office is great for connecting with other people or having a change of scenery from a remote setup. However, if a deadline is closing in quicker than anticipated it helps to work from home and thereby having no commute and no co-workers pulling you into a random meeting or social event.

2. Better access to talent due to flexibility and an increased talent pool
   Every company is made up of the employees that work there. Attracting, hiring, and retaining employees is crucial to every business. Companies offering more flexibility to their employees not only have a much bigger pool to hire from but also attract much more diverse candidates which is crucial for every team's decision-making and cultural setup.

3. Cost savings resulting from reduced office space
   For an early-stage startup, the business case deriving the savings in office space from having a hybrid-remote work setting exists but is obviously limited. However, as the company scales, cost savings become increasingly apparent. For bigger companies, it will be much more enlightening - to put a number in your head: Capgemini's remote workforce survey showed that expected real-estate cost savings due to remote working will range between 20% and 48% across all industries in the next 2-3 years.
   

Final thoughts

Having these challenges and benefits in mind and continuing to experience and iterate on our work setting while talking to other teams, we believe that in the future all companies will start offering some variation of hybrid-remote to their employees. Prominent tech companies such as Coinbase, Dropbox, Figma, Spotify, and many others are already championing this evolution, and established corporates such as Siemens and most recently Deutsche Bank are also pulling along. Given the added complexity of a hybrid-remote work setting, we at Acapela figured that teams around the globe need tooling to facilitate this new way of working. If you're interested in what we are building, have a look at our website and reach out if you have any questions or want to discuss the future of work.

The shift to remote work caused by the pandemic has been one of the most profound changes in the workplace in the last decades. While for some of us this felt like an emergency landing on a different planet, others simply carried on. 

Companies like Gitlab, Automattic, and Zapier have been working in a fully remote setup for years (in some cases even forever). One thing all-remote companies rely on? Async communication.

We took a closer look at how async communication helped their teams navigate the challenges of team collaboration in a remote setting. So that one day we hopefully can all fully enjoy the benefits of working remotely!

Here are 5 reasons why async proved to be so powerful:

1. Autonomous Work Flow

When collaboration isn’t tied to a specific time and location, discussions can continue at any time of day or night. Especially for organizations operating across time zones, multiple discussions can be underway simultaneously operating 24/7 for days, weeks, or even months. Free of time constraints, team members have the autonomy to decide when they want to participate while still being mindful of deadlines. They also can determine themselves when they want to focus for long periods of uninterrupted time to produce quality work. Especially for working parents, being able to avoid a strict 9:00 to 5:00 allows for a heightened sense of work-life balance.

2. Fewer Annoyances of Sync Meetings

Sync meetings are and always have been time-consuming. Since working from home they have contributed to a new problem: Zoom fatigue. With async collaboration, everyone can contribute when it suits them. There will no longer be any timing issues, meetings running overtime, or people being late. Tech problems, such as slow internet or sharing functions not working won’t be able to slow down teamwork. Neither will last-minute cancellations. Imagine never sitting uselessly in a meeting again feeling like you’re wasting your time.

3. Encouraging Thoughtfulness

Our hyper-connected society has increased expectations to be always available. When cooperating asynchronously, it is not expected of you to be always “at your desk” and ready to immediately respond to your team members. Thoughtfulness is prioritized over urgency in async workflows. Instead of feeling the pressure to produce an immediate response, team members are given a chance to digest and think about a response before hitting send. Reactive responses are often not your best, anyways.

4. Creating a Knowledge Base

Asynchronous communication keeps an archived record of all conversations and decision-making that is automatically digitized. The documentation produced from asynchronous communication is also more efficient than in synchronous environments where notes must be created while the message is being received. While tedious and time-consuming in the short-term, the long-term benefits of documentation can be scaled as it is revisited time and time again. Because everything is documented, anyone in the company can ask to peer into meetings to gain the context needed to fulfill their role at any time.

5. Diversity & Inclusion

When communicating asynchronously, organizations are able to operate with flexibility and empower geographically dispersed teams. Want to work in a different city than the one your company is headquartered in? Go for it. When team members are able to communicate across physical and social boundaries the potential for increased diversity among teams presents itself. This means that organizations can recruit talent outside of the location of their headquarters without feeling “blocked” by physical distance. Furthermore, asynchronous communication levels the playing field e.g. by raising the voices of introverts or enabling working parents to circumvent a strict 9:00 to 5:00 schedule making the work environment more inclusive.

It’s been over 12 months since teams have been on a quest to find the right set-up and mode of collaborating. By now, we all know that remote is here to stay. Even if not all companies will be fully remote, most companies will have some sort of hybrid setup after the pandemic has ended.

Whether a team is fully remote or in a hybrid setup, the tools and systems that need to be in place don't differ much. Async collaboration has become the gold standard for remote teams and should be for hybrid teams as well. With Acapela, we’re on a mission to build the next-generation collaboration platform for remote and hybrid teams. We believe it’s finally time to end your meetings before they start! 

Pssst 🤫 You can sign up for early access here.

Everybody loves music. We do, too. (Even Donald Trump thinks everybody loves music). Music has a positive effect on how we do things. It can push us, calm us down, or help us focus. It gets us into "the zone" just by listening to it. Many musicians even get into "the zone" when making music. It’s a flow activity.

So, when Heiki and I started building tools to make team collaboration better and more delightful, we immediately thought of names related to music. We came up with a bunch of different ideas. Polyphone, Impro, Jive, Cadence. Not good enough. How about Acapella? Acapella definitely struck a chord with us. As we looked into more audio-focused features like voice notes and voice messaging, the name began to make even more sense. Because there are different ways of writing the word in different languages, we decided to go for the simplified "Acapela" (conveniently, we were also able to get the .com domain for that...).

Music and Teamwork

Choosing a name for your product is never easy and very often, there is a point when you question your decision. However, with Acapela this has not been the case. It was rather the opposite experience: ever since picking the name, we have discovered even more connections between the worlds of music and work. 

For instance, both are often best done in a team. Sure, Lang Lang is a great solo pianist and Einstein's work on relativity is mind-blowing. But for some things, you just need more people. How about performing Bohemian Rhapsody at Wembley or landing a rover on Mars? As a consequence of this collaborative aspect of music, there is a common language describing music and teamwork: "Let's have a jam session." "We have to find the right rhythm." "It feels out of tune." "That's the right cadence."

Music Principles for Work

This language connection of music and teamwork is great and lends itself to many comparisons. We asked ourselves if it’s possible to take it one step further. Ideally, could we derive some principles from the world of music to improve the way we work? Could those ideas help us build better tools for team collaboration? Here are some of our thoughts:

Like in music, in teamwork you want to have the right people in the right role: someone providing the beat, someone responsible for creative parts, and someone leading the whole band.

When thinking of team composition it’s crucial to have the right people in the room - or in our case, in Acapela. To collaborate productively, the setup must empower the right number of people to play together nicely, so that everyone finds the part matching their skills. For instance, it’s difficult to imagine The Beatles having six band members or John Lennon playing the drums.

Like in music, in teamwork you need to find the right balance between playing nicely together and giving enough space for an amazing solo from time to time. 

Thinking of a band or orchestra playing together as a metaphor for teamwork, there should be time for individuals to shine. Very often, everyone on a team has their distinct super powers. There must be enough uninterrupted time for these virtuosos to do deep work, i.e. their solos. Keeping the right balance between collaboration time and focus time is crucial for each team member. For Acapela, this is an integral part of our mission. We want to enable remote and hybrid teams to have more focus time while staying connected with asynchronous meetings.

Like in music, in teamwork you don't want to have everyone playing the same tune. You want people to play different, individual tunes that fit well together.

When talking about meetings, playing the same tune equates to having the same opinion as everyone else or blindly following the most actively voiced opinion. Team dynamics are crucially important for the outcome and the decisions made. Whether it's because of groupthink, power dynamics or personality factors (e.g. extroverts vs. introverts), there are many reasons why the greatest ideas sometimes do not come out on top. With asynchronous conversations, Acapela helps to mitigate these influences by providing a more level playing field.

Make Teamwork Feel Like Music

For many people, a brand is just a name. It has to sound good. It should be easily recognizable and the logo should look nice. For us, it’s much more. Ultimately, it touches the core of what we’re trying to achieve with Acapela. How can we enable teams to work together more effectively, ideally achieving a flow state in their collaboration? How can we bring back more joy into their working lives? Can we make teamwork feel more like music?

Thanks for reading. For a sneak peak of what we’re working on, visit www.acapela.com. Stay tuned.

Roland 

(Founder, Acapela)

In the past decades, employees typically traveled to offices to work together. This in-person work environment primed synchronous collaboration - when two or more parties meet at the same time, normally in the same location, face-to-face, over the phone, or on video. 

As the world has gone remote in 2020, teams were forced to deal with team members not sitting right next to each other or even adjusting to collaborate with co-workers in completely different time zones. Since the complexity of work doesn’t decrease when people are remote, workers have had to find new ways to fit the same amount of work in less synchronous time. Therefore, mastering workflows asynchronously has been a topic catapulted in companies’ daily workflows when trying to maintain productivity during the pandemic. Asynchronous communication is the art of communicating without the need for the other team members to be available at the same time and place. For instance, sending a message to a colleague on the other side of the globe updating them about progress and receiving an answer when they start working again.

The status quo of remote work

As the workforce becomes more familiar with remote work, the reliance on synchronous communication tools has continued to dominate collaboration globally. Presumably, the reason for this has been the sudden shift from full-time “on-site” to full-time remote work, prompting teams to simply replicate their in-office experience without thinking about reimagining the way they work. This has led the day-to-day of millions to consist of countless Zoom meetings and cluttered calendars in the hope of recreating the “always in touch” office environment. 

Since most current workspace tools were developed during a time where remote was more of the exception than the rule, they are heavily catered to synchronous office communication. For instance, Zoom is meant to be used for remote synchronous collaboration. Other tools are also being repurposed to work asynchronously. For example, Google Docs was initially a real-time collaborative writing document that has turned into an asynchronous idea board/meeting preparation tool/general notepad.

Problems with moving to asynchronous tools

The current issue is that organizations operate remotely, but their mentality is still “on-site”. The question is how teams can adjust to a remote-first mindset and utilize asynchronous tools instead of synchronous ones. If successful, this shift in mindset and tooling will enable organizations to operate sustainably in a full or hybrid remote work environment in the coming years. 

Although we believe in the power of written communication for multiple reasons, we do feel that the transition from synchronous to asynchronous shouldn’t mean every person has to become an avid writer and reader overnight. That being said, we also believe that solely focusing on written communication leaves lots of room for miscommunication and misinterpretation, while removing personal interaction from collaboration.

The future and its tools are asynchronous

Clearly, in order to strive in the new world of remote work and asynchronous communication, new tools are needed to enable frictionless communication and seamless collaboration between teams. This new generation of tools will provide teams with all the benefits of asynchronous communication but also maintain the personal aspect of communication and be well structured and better documented at its core.

As this is our vision for the future of work, we are building Acapela, an asynchronous meeting platform at the forefront of this transition. Conversations are meant to entail personal touches, not leaving space for unnecessary misunderstanding all the while being more structured and easier to relive than typical in-person meetings.

Curious to learn more about asynchronous communication? 

Follow us for more blog posts and sign up for our newsletter here:

Subscribe now

Organizations have dedicated the last decades to building amenity-filled workspaces designed to maximize collaboration and productivity. Employees were tempted by perks like unlimited snacks and on-site gyms to essentially live in-office. 

But, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations to rethink the appearance of a productive organization. Through embracing the use of leading-edge technologies, organizations have found remote work can be as effective (and less expensive) as face-to-face collaboration. 

While WFH was initially seen as a temporary solution, some organizations are beginning to publicly commit to the idea that WFH is the way of their organization’s future, offering employees the option to work remotely after offices reopen. 

The unprecedented nature of a remote organization means navigating how to structure a remote organization. It’s not easy and comes with challenges. To normalize this new way of working and help organizations successfully adapt to a remote operation, we summarized the best practices for addressing organizational challenges of remote work and what managers should change moving forward.

1. Collaboration 

While there are a lot of aspects to the way we work that have changed in the past year, one skill has remained just as necessary for remote organizations: collaboration. But trying to replicate the way we collaborate face-to-face does not suffice in an online environment. No longer are our workdays filled with spontaneous water cooler conversations with colleagues or spur of the moment brainstorming sessions or debates. Scheduling back-to-back video meetings have not been found to have the same effect on productivity as face-to-face meetings either. There are no clear boundaries for organizations on how to keep remote collaboration fluid without making employees feel like they need to be online all the time. At this point, it’s pretty clear that remote work demands a different approach to collaboration. What does successful remote collaboration look like? 

Our tip: The solution to remote collaboration lies in developing an operation that supports the unique demands of the digital work environment. It is okay for managers to want to stay in constant contact with employees. But, they must choose how to communicate strategically. Instead of planning another time-consuming video call, managers should opt to collaborate asynchronously with their teams. This means that employees respond on their own time, produce more documentation, and create fewer meetings in the long-run. The possibilities of async collaboration are vast and ease organizations’ struggles with remote collaboration, such as differing work schedules or time zones. Asynchronous communication tools like Acapela allow teams to collaborate on tasks intermittently, over time.

2. Company Culture

Millennial and Gen Z employees have shifted their career priorities. Choosing a workplace is no longer exclusively determined by money, location or perks, but about the reputation of the organization’s people and culture. We spend the majority of our lives at work, so we might as well work for an organization we feel loyal toward with people we identify with. Not to mention, in times of crisis a strong company culture can be the glue that holds the organization together. In an in-person work environment, company culture is cultivated naturally by spending time with colleagues. But in a remote organization, how does company culture develop? How are new employees supposed to find their place in an organization or get to know their colleagues on a personal level? And how should organizations respond to younger employees suddenly feeling bored with their WFH jobs? The importance of company culture has been highlighted by the shift to remote work as it influences morale and the quality of work. 

Our tip: Be deliberate about building and maintaining company culture. From planning time for new employees to socialize with the rest of the team during the onboarding process to scheduling team lunch or coffee breaks. Maybe even plan social events like trivia nights, or annual company retreats (COVID-19 safe, of course). This will help employees feel emotionally engaged with the company. Survey employees to gauge what type of social events would interest them to maintain a sense of community. Also, don’t forget to collect feedback regularly and frequently communicate the company’s goals and vision. 

3. “Lack of Control” 

Evaluating the quality of output from time spent on a task is outdated: yet many managers still do this. In a remote environment where it is difficult to track time, managers tend to cope by micromanaging their employees due to a lack of control. This style of management has a negative impact on company culture because employees feel untrusted by their superiors. Obviously, simply telling managers to trust their employees is unlikely to be an adequate solution. What is the balance between management control and employee autonomy in a remote work environment? 

Our tip: Focus on outcomes, not input. Empower your employees and learn to trust that they will find the right solutions. It is normal for everyone to work at their own pace and now most likely on their own schedule. Clearly define the company goals. Jointly define team and individual goals. This can be done using tools such as an Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system. Frameworks like OKRs help organizations align company and team goals. This guarantees that all employees understand how their work contributes to the greater company vision. 

The challenges of remote work affect both organizations and individuals. Today, organizations must understand that skills they once depended on in face-to-face work environments do not translate digitally. In order to normalize our new way of working, we must use new tools and strategies. This is unchartered territory - for everyone. It’s time to shift our perspective of the pandemic from a trigger to an accelerator.

Curious to learn more about the challenging aspects of remote work and collaboration, and how companies around the world deal with them? 

Follow us for more blog posts and sign up for our newsletter here:

Subscribe now

Our pre-pandemic work lives seem like a faint memory: sitting in an open-plan office, commuting to business meetings, conducting in-person presentations and interviews. 

While we miss the social interaction, the radical changes this pandemic brought have not been entirely negative. Over the past year, we have said goodbye to obsolete systems that outlived their usefulness. Companies have reacted by shifting to a completely remote-working environment. 

As vaccine distribution becomes more widespread, we are frequently approached by teams asking for our insight on how remote work will evolve after the pandemic has ended. Will everything revert back to pre-Corona times? 

Our verdict: remote is here to stay. 

Here are the top three reasons we have identified: 

1. There is simply no going back: the behavioral and structural changes caused by the pandemic are too significant. 

   We have been working from home (WFH) too long to not have a significant impact on our ways of working. Many teams were forced into a remote set-up and had to adapt quickly because there was simply no alternative. On average, it takes a person between 3 weeks and 8 months to form a habit. Therefore, it is likely the organizational changes made a year ago have begun to sink in, habits have changed and new behavioral patterns have emerged as routines. 

   A phrase we continue to hear from managers is that the shift to WFH “wasn’t as bad as expected” in their companies. Their teams have coped with the challenges better than anticipated. Teams are reporting increased productivity (in some industries between 8% and 13%). Further, employees satisfied with their remote workplace tools are twice as likely to maintain or increase their productivity on collaborative tasks. Most notably, more employees are trusting their teammates to be as productive in a remote setting. In the past, WFH was seen as the equivalent of taking the day off. This is clearly no longer the case. Bye-bye stigma! Hello, 2021! 

   Today we are not only observing a difference in how remote work is perceived, but in the way companies are structuring themselves too. For instance, employees and companies are investing in tools and software to make WFH feasible and efficient. Companies are learning how to hire remotely, even for long-term positions. Many start-ups have even become fully-distributed companies in the past year. 
   

2. WFH saves employees and companies time and money. 

   In many cities, a long commute into the office was common. While WFH, this time (on average 41 minutes per day) is saved and used either more productively or added as free time. But saving time isn’t the only aspect that needs to be taken into consideration. With the possibility of remote work continuing long-term, many employees living in urban cities are opting for housing with better value than their downtown apartments provide. Significantly improved living conditions are also leading employees to consider a longer commute time for the limited number of days they might need to come into the office. Some companies are even allowing employees to go fully-remote; offering the option of moving to low-cost cities or countries. 

   WFH saves companies money, too. With only a fraction of people in the office, companies are able to downsize their office spaces in central city locations and save remarkably on rental costs (and CEOs are already planning to do so). It’s a win-win situation. 

3. The opportunity to hire talent globally. 

   To remain competitive, companies aim to hire the best talent available. In the past, the “best talent” was restricted to those who lived in close proximity to the company’s headquarters. Remote work eliminates geographical limitations during the hiring process. This is a very good argument for companies to embrace remote work. 

   On an individual level, talented people will no longer have to choose between personal requirements and their dream job. Remote work grants the freedom to choose one’s place of residence while keeping the opportunity to work for a top company open. This way they will also be able to live closer to their family in a different town, split their time between two residences more easily, or live location-independent altogether. fact, countries are actively planning to attract more digital nomads to boost their local economies. 
   

At Acapela, it’s clear to us that we are witnessing one of the largest behavioral shifts in the workplace since the invention of the internet. As expressed above, the shift to remote work will stick with us long-term and continue to drive behavioral changes, unlocking the potential for more cost and time-efficient work and reshaping organizational structures. While there is no doubt that this change will present challenges, the numerous advantages of remote work presented to businesses and individuals are promising. The benefits simply outweigh the costs. 

We are bullish on what comes next! 

Curious to learn more about the challenging aspects of remote work and collaboration, and how companies around the world deal with them? 

Follow us for more blog posts and sign up for our newsletter here:

Subscribe now

Welcome to the Acapela Blog. Acapela helps remote teams be more productive by avoiding unnecessary video meetings.

Sign up to the waitlist

Also, subscribe to our newsletter now so you don’t miss updates about remote collaboration and our company.

Subscribe now

In the meantime, tell your friends!