A remote first company almost has to encourage asynchronous workplace. Because expecting to have synchronous communication is just not very efficient. If everyo

A remote first company almost has to encourage asynchronous workplace. Because expecting to have synchronous communication is just not very efficient. If everyone is in the office, you can observe if a person is busy, turn your chair and ask "do you have a sec", knock on their door, or walk into their cubical and interrupt their workflow. But when everyone's working from home, you have less visibility on other people's availability. When you send a message to a person on slack, that person is likely doing something else, they may be working on something different, eating a meal, or even sleeping in another timezone. As a result, you should not expect people to always be ready to have a synchronous conversation with you. To keep communication efficient in a remote workplace, you have to consider all these facts. People says "how are you" on slack to me everyday, not because they really care about how I am doing, nor do they love wasting time waiting for my response to that, but .simply because mentally, when they type messages in slack, their brain is still thinking about mimicking a face-to-face synchronous conversation. They only realize this is a problem after they are exposed on the recipient side frequently enough.