ANDREA DARABOS and STEFAN MORALES are two of the three founding members of a/sync, a company offering experiential learning programs to help teams and their managers achieve focus and flow. In this interview we talk about why being deliberate about how we use our time is critical to good collaboration and what the skills are for resetting how your team collaborates.
What is a/sync? For many large organisations, there is a lot of focus on whether to return to the office and on how to offer employees a choice to work from a location of their choice. While location flexibility is important, we believe there is a much bigger opportunity to upgrade our work processes and practices based on intelligent, autonomous employee choices.
For more information, visit:
- a/sync website
- Tomomi Sasaki (Twitter)
- Stefan Morales (Twitter)
- Andrea Darabos (Twitter)
- Qatalog and GitLab study reveals pervasive culture of digital presenteeism
a/sync is about resetting how your team collaborates
At a/sync, we offer experiential learning programs to help teams and their managers achieve focus and flow. So we believe there needs to be much more focus on upskilling as a first step and giving autonomy to individuals to make intelligent choices in how they work, when and where they collaborate from.
Our a/sync Manifesto summarises 6 Skill Domains for Distributed Teams:
- Take time to design our time: Design for variation in whether, when, and how we meet and collaborate
- Document and collaborate async: Make work more visible and collaborate without meeting
- Choose when and how to be productive: Work with the energy and attention of each individual
- Make commitments and decisions together: Build shared trust and transparency
- Reflect, learn, play: Invite serendipity and creativity into our work
- Prioritise our wellbeing and belonging: Don’t forget: we’re human
The philosophical background of the “/” in our brand name choice: “a/sync”
We help our customers – team leaders, organisational designers, remote workers – know when to move between asynchronous and synchronous time use and between various collaboration formats. We do not believe async is better than sync – it is all about intentionality.
Our mission is to help you become very intentional in how you use your time at work and at home
Besides synchronous – real time collaboration- and asynchronous – non-real-time, we also introduce the concept of “Parallel time”, which means using asynchronicity within a synchronous, real-time timebox. For example, parallel time use means doing 10 minutes of silent reading of a work proposal during a 45 minute real-time call.
We select Time as the material, the “clay” that you can use as a basis for your collaboration design options – (the tool, or the specific collaboration practices are secondary choices).
Podcast production by Podcast Monster
Graphic design by Alfred Boland
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