In my work with organizations trying to move to remote work and specifically async work, I’ve noticed they often encounter the same initial challenge: getting rid of calls.

Here’s what usually happens: the company is heading toward being remote first, and has decided to adopt async work practices to get more flexibility, efficiency, work-life balance, and get ready to scale up further. They have good discussions, identify good tools, reshape some guidance, identify incremental steps to introduce the change, and maybe they have already a pilot program that has been successful. Then… the adoption stalls.

What is happening is that people have tried to adopt async practices without first identifying and reducing the amount of sync practices. Which usually means: meetings and calls. This is because meetings due to their sync nature take precedence: the people present live get all the attention. The meetings are already on the calendar. Recurring meetings keep recurring. Some people have days where they have so many meetings they are already struggling to do the work they are expected to complete.

Ironically, the very thing that async will help solve is the very thing standing in the way. It’s a vicious loop, where a call follows another call, and steals all the time needed to read and respond to async requests.

How to get over the calls obstacle

If your organization or team is at this stage, we can assume that there’s some desire to make the change. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet. Fortunately, there are many techniques that can be adopted — always with consent and discussions — in order to facilitate the adoption of async work practices.

• Reserve Time — Give everyone the right to reserve time each day where no call can be scheduled. Some tools, like Google Calendar, can also auto-decline any invite in these times.
• Revise Recurring Calls — Run a workshop with the team and create a list of all recurring calls, no matter how trivial. For each of these, make a group assessment on which ones the team is willing to remove first. While it could be tempting to switch everything at once to async, it might be wise to do this in phases to help the team get better over time.
• Calls Type Mapping — Do some research and collaborate to identify different categories of calls, and then create a map on what async practice (if any) can replace them.
• Calls to Text — I’m not a fan of “transcripts” or “notes” for calls, but I think every call should have at least “decisions” and “next actions” as outputs written somewhere, and not left to the people involved to remember them. Once people realize that now they are spending time to do the call and then to write the outcomes, and that needs time, they will also start to think that maybe they could have done everything in a discussion thread.
• Enabling Call Etiquette — Can anyone in the company say “no” and refuse a call if they don’t think they should be included? If not, empower people to reject calls they don’t think are useful to them, and instead make sure that all the people invited get the output of the call decisions and next actions (I’m not a fan of transcripts and notes, I think it’s a waste of time).
• Top-Down Example — Leadership should keep reminding people of the change, and set themselves the example. To be clear: by setting the example I don’t mean they need to be perfect, but they need to be trying and pushing. Change isn’t easy, and the example is in the progress not in perfection.

This is not an exhaustive list, but should give an idea of a menu of activities you can take and remix for your use. Be incremental. Be patient. But not let it slide. Slowly people will start see the benefits, and will want more.