Almanac Co-Founder and CEO Adam Nathan on Why It’s Critical For Companies to Adopt Remote-Friendly Policies to Succeed
I’m really excited to sit down with Adam Nathan, the co-founder and CEO of Almanac. In this episode, we spent time digging into the nuts and bolts of remote and distributed work.
I’m a fan of Almanac and its valuable resources around remote and distributed work. Almanac contributes to the changing landscape of work by creating tools for remote teams to collaborate on documents. “We’re building an operating system for distributed work,” says Adam. “What we’re doing at Almanac is trying to provide the infrastructure and tooling to support distributed work, because we’ve seen that you just can’t take the old tools and throw them on the new way and expect it to work.”
Listen in to our conversation to hear what organizations may be losing by not adopting distributed work policies today, what HR leaders can do to adapt those policies and why hybrid work may not be a viable long term strategy.
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Ep 102 Almanac Co-Founder and CEO Adam Nathan
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Why Adam Believes Hybrid May Not Work
As companies map their futures, many are relying on hybrid constructs. Hybrid is by far the hardest one to get right because there’s so much complexity involved.
The truth about the hybrid model is that we’re still in meetings all of the time. We’re still doing all of the things we used to when we were all physically in the office. We are just doing it digitally now. So, I asked Adam whether a hybrid model is sustainable at all.
Adam wasn’t shy about his beliefs. “I don’t believe in hybrid. I think it’s an illusion.”
“I think collaboration and work ultimately come down to who it’s designed for. And if you think about office culture -- office culture was designed for people who are in an office.”
The complexities of hybrid are more than that. There are barriers between those in the office and out of the office. For one thing, people are notoriously bad at taking notes.
We have all of those meetings, which everyone needs to attend to understand anything. When some workers participate in person and others remotely, the ability to work and contribute is taken away. For example, remote workers can’t participate or contribute to visual aids such as whiteboard exercises.
This is precisely why Adam believes hybrid models may look attractive as quick and easy solutions, but we’ll continue to see issues that arise from the disconnect of forcing in-office policies and procedures on those joining remotely.
The Urgency of Adopting a Remote-Friendly Work Policy
Companies are going to have to let go of the old and embrace the new. Adam makes it clear that employees want the option of distributed work. And that they will quit if that option is not available and find a place where it is. Adam points out that some companies benefit from that, too. “I think those remote companies will then have access to better talent. And so they will end up winning.”
What is also happening is companies are keeping up with trends to stay relevant. “People who don’t embrace the trends start to become irrelevant, lose market share, become less profitable and eventually become kind of relics of their former selves.”
I think there’s so much opportunity now that is digital or distributed by default. People don’t have to work in a second-rate capacity within an organization if it’s not working out for them. They’ve got options, and they can find quality work elsewhere.
Some companies are shifting in the right direction, but Adam points out we still have tons to learn, too. “I think a really important part of all of this change is that people are able to come together and share what they’ve experimented with inside their companies.”
“I hope over the coming years, that’s what we moved from a focus on where and when work is exactly happening to how work is happening. I think that’s really what change needs to come.”
What HR Leaders Can Do to Adapt to New Policies
HR leaders and HR practitioners are interested in building people-focused organizations. Some of them may come from more of those traditional or co-located environments. Now they want to be thoughtful around intentionally designed work systems for distributed work and asynchronous work. I asked Adam about what resources he recommended.
In “A World Without Email,” Cal Newport recommends recreating a new set of tools for the new world and the new contexts we now live in. “It’s a really good diagnosis of how we got to this place where tools that were meant to help us become overused from their initial purpose.” Adam says. “As a result, we become overloaded with constant interruptions and context switching.”
And we all have to rethink the need for constant meetings. A useful tactic is to clear calendars and start over to weed out what is essential and what isn’t. “One thing that we see happening in companies is that there’s a meeting calcification, where things that used to have a purpose don’t anymore, but people just keep going because nobody feels like they have authority to cancel them.”
Adam explains that when clearing your calendar and starting over, including things like one-on-ones and stand-ups, asking yourself, “Do I really need this meeting, or can it be done asynchronously?’” is a good way to clear out some space.
What’s one unique thing that Almanac is doing to take away some of those constant interruptions? Every three to six months, Almanac has an “Async Week”, where Zoom and Slack are turned off for the entire company. It gives everyone a rest from meetings for a week. This break is for employees and also works as an experiment to better understand the potentials and challenges of moving to a fully asynchronous modality. As Adam understands it, these experiments are more critical now than ever before.