Asynchronous communication, and why remote work is an operating model: Darren Murph

The whole case for asynchronous communication comes down to one substitution: stop optimizing for how fast one person can explain something to another, and start optimizing for how fast anyone can find the answer without asking.

Darren Murph, who CNBC called the Oracle of Remote Work, is VP of Workplace Design and Remote Experience at Andela. Before that he led workplace strategy and operations at GitLab, scaling the world's first fully remote company to IPO, and helped pioneer the head of remote role.

Michael sets the terms up front: this is not another debate about whether to return to the office. It is about the operations that make remote companies work, for the ones staying remote and for the ones wondering whether to give up.

Low context communication

Murph's answer to what makes remote work is specific: low context communication, which he has elsewhere called the dark horse resume skill of the next decade.

The definition is slightly paradoxical. It means assuming your audience has low to no context, and therefore defaulting to a high degree of detail and precision, as though people are starting from scratch.

The reason is structural. Without a synchronous meeting or an office as a communication bridge, people in other time zones have to loop themselves into a project or a train of thought. If you want their input, you have to supply enough information for them to have a perspective or move the work forward.

Without it, the only remedy is a meeting. Murph quotes the corporate formulation everyone recognizes: let us touch base so I can bring you up to speed. On strong remote teams, people bring themselves up to speed instead.

He adds a requirement Michael's follow-up draws out, which is that the communication must also be scalable. Spoken word is fine, but capture it in something like Loom so it can be shared in one click, or write it into a knowledge base. Low context communication that lives only in a small tight-knit group still does not scale, and in a remote company you are almost always working across time zones or with people on nonlinear days.

Michael pushes on whether this is sustainable, given that explaining everything from scratch every time would be enormous.

Murph's answer is that it compounds. Communication on a remote team works like compound interest. A company documents its values and culture, what it believes and how work happens, and every subsequent piece of communication stacks on that. Onboarding puts people at the established base, and questions build from there.

Situational awareness still applies, and he acknowledges the honest answer to most questions is that it depends on how long someone has been there and what they already know. But his position is firm: you cannot go wrong over-communicating, and there is no such thing as too much context. It takes longer to convey, and it makes things faster by going slow to go fast.

Knowledge transfer versus knowledge retrieval

Michael restates the idea as bringing people along, and Murph corrects him in the most useful moment of the conversation.

Done well, it is not the human bringing people along. It is the systems.

Office-centric organizations optimize for the speed of knowledge transfer: how fast person A can tap person B on the shoulder or get a meeting and move information from one brain into the other. That does not scale and does not work in a distributed workforce.

Distributed organizations have to optimize for the speed of knowledge retrieval: how fast two people can reach into a knowledge base and find enough to iterate and move work forward.

The caveat he attaches matters. If you are rehashing the same things rather than adding layers as new questions arise, the whole thing becomes unmanageable.

Perk-level investment, product-level expectations

Asked where a company should even start, Murph offers the framing that explains most failed remote transitions.

Are you treating remote work as a perk or a work from home policy? Or do you see it as a technology, a product, an operating model? Because you will engage with those two things completely differently.

A wellness plan is a policy. It does not dictate what tools you use, how people communicate, or how teams decide things. Remote work done properly transcends being a perk and becomes an operating model.

His diagnosis of what goes wrong: companies put perk-level investment in and expect product-level results. That misalignment is why many snap back to the office, and it has very little to do with the real estate. The office represents the operating model they already knew how to run.

Once you hold the operating-model frame, remote becomes something you can test, experiment with, and evolve, with two-way doors you can walk back through.

Start with process definition, not connection

The sequence Murph gives is process definition, then rigor around documentation, then culture, connection and belonging.

His observation about companies complaining that they do not feel connected as a remote team is that they are starting at the wrong end of the nail. The head is process definition. Is it defined how people work together? Do you even have a knowledge base, something like Almanac, Guru, Notion or Slite? They all do roughly the same thing in different ways, and you need one, because in the absence of a physical office the digital knowledge base is the shell that houses your company.

The GitLab handbook is his illustration, and the point is not the individual tips you can lift from it. Zoom out one level and it is the operating manual to the company. Instead of walking into an office to absorb the operating rhythms, it is written down, which means it scales to every household and office in the world.

He knows that reads as daunting to a company with nothing documented. His counter is that during COVID he watched companies go from zero documentation to a basic framework they could build on in as little as six to twelve months. The requirement is hiring someone to steward the change and putting a team in place to do the work.

The assembly line argument

Michael pushes on cost. In a tight economic climate, these are roles that do not directly grow revenue, and not every company wants to hire a head of remote and a team behind them.

Murph's answer is historical. Imagine running manufacturing before the assembly line. You have roles, rhythms and results. Then the assembly line arrives. You have a decision: retrain people into new roles with the new system, or double down on how you already work while your competitors re-skill and re-tool.

Then he closes the loop on headcount. Even office companies have office managers, lobby managers, employee experience managers, roles that exist to maintain the physical space with some intentionality. If the office is no longer in the picture, that should free up revenue and re-skilling capacity, and the question becomes what the distributed version of those roles looks like. Shifting models means some things you no longer need to do, and those are the targets for retraining.

His read on the labor market is that the window is limited, with the caveat that this applies to knowledge work rather than to jobs that must be physical. For work where people commute in to sit on video calls all day, there is a short period during which top talent tolerates a forced return. Some companies are large enough to force it for a decade or two. For most, talent will start prioritizing flexibility and treating organizations that invest in remote infrastructure as the more attractive option.

No agenda, no attend

Michael asks the practical question, which is where he personally starts, given that Tucows had been fully remote since the start of the pandemic with practices that formed organically rather than deliberately.

Murph offers the building block Andela was implementing at the time: no agenda, no attend.

The request is simple. Look at every meeting you are the organizer of, meaning every meeting where you are commandeering other people's time. Check whether the invite has a shared document agenda permanently attached to the invite itself. Google Doc, Notion, Teams, whatever you use.

What that produces is the ability for an invitee to decide independently whether to attend, by opening the document and getting the context: the overview, who else is invited, the expected outcomes, any pre-reads, what they need to do to show up well, and what questions to ask so the time is used properly.

The second-order effect is that it rewires how you think about other people's time.

And the side benefit is a cleanup. When you reach a recurring meeting that has been on everyone's calendar for four years, go to add an agenda, and realize the discussion is finished, do not add an agenda. Delete the meeting and give people the time back.

Michael notes the more dramatic version of the same idea, which is Shopify deleting every meeting at the start of a year and requiring anything critical to be added back.

Productivity is an operating model question

Michael raises a widely-cited claim that remote workers waste several hours that office workers do not, and asks how to measure and improve performance.

Murph's first move is to reject the framing. Asking whether people are more productive in the office or at home is the wrong question. The right one is which operating model you are set up to make people most productive in.

His objection is that the conversation points at the individual, when there is very little an individual can do until the organization unlocks a new field for them to play on. That is why knowledge management matters, why the tool stack matters, and why changing organizational ways of working matters.

For evidence he points at a Forrester study, accessible through Guru's site by searching for the return on investment of knowledge management, where you enter your employee count and get an estimate of hours lost. Three categories: time spent searching for information, time spent answering the same customer questions repeatedly instead of documenting them once, and time spent in meetings that are purely status updates, information sharing or loop-ins.

Most people in a corporate environment, he suspects, are nodding at that list.

Why knowledge management became an AI prerequisite

This is the part of the episode that has aged best.

Murph argues that generative AI is only as good as its underlying data set, and that too few people were saying so out loud. Companies were imagining a world where anyone could ask in Slack or Teams what the expense reporting policy is, or how to get a new project pitched to executives.

But if those answers are not documented somewhere the system can reference, it does not work.

So his long-standing argument that knowledge management helps people work efficiently and live better now has a second leg. It is a prerequisite for a company becoming AI enabled. You have to build the data set before anything can reference it.

Michael's reframe is that this is a proprietary data set, and it happens to be the shared language and operating procedures of the company.

Murph's addition is the sentence worth pinning up: great remote-first principles are simply great business principles. Even a company that wants a fully in-office culture benefits from a knowledge base where a new employee can search what to expect in their first week.

Onboarding, and the transfer of power

Michael cites a Paychex study finding that remote employees with a poor onboarding experience are considerably more likely to quit within the first year than in-office employees, while noting it is a relative figure.

Murph's method is to put yourself in the position of someone joining enthusiastically with no context and none of the legacy a longer-tenured person has. What would you want to know coming in fresh? What about the culture needs to be front and center? And what might people need to unlearn before they can learn how this company works?

He expects remote onboarding to take longer, and argues the payoff is a more retentive environment.

The structural advice is to onboard people inside the knowledge base they will actually work in. His analogy: you would not onboard someone in a satellite office for two weeks and then have them do all their work in the main office.

His read on the statistic itself is the sharper observation. Remote talent has more options. How many mediocre in-office onboarding experiences were simply tolerated because relocating again was too expensive to contemplate? People treated it as a sunk cost and dealt with it. Remote removes that friction, switching costs collapse, and organizations have to be better.

He welcomes this. He describes the pandemic as triggering the largest transfer of institutional power he has seen, and considers it healthy, because it puts accountability on organizations to become more disciplined and less dysfunctional. Uncomfortable, unrequested, and pointed in the right direction.

Connection is different, and that is allowed

Michael pushes back on the human side. Onboarding aside, people stay at jobs they dislike because they like the team, and that camaraderie is harder to build through a screen.

Murph's answer starts by saying the quiet part out loud: it is different, and it is fine that it is different.

His analogy is education. You can spend two to four years on campus getting an MBA and meet a lot of people and professors, or take the same credentials online, possibly from the same professors, and look back on a completely different experience. For every advantage of the in-person version there is a trade-off. Being on site limits how much you can travel and where you can live, possibly putting you thousands of miles from family.

The mechanism he thinks makes remote work is getting people to fill their social reservoirs outside of work. His view is that we have relied on the workplace to supply fulfillment for a large share of life, and people now have permission to question that ratio.

He is careful not to universalize. Some people, in some seasons, genuinely want to be around their teammates in person, and in-person workplaces will always exist for them. Others prioritize being near family, or air quality, or walking distance to a hospital equipped for a specific childhood condition, and are willing to trade in-person rapport for the life that makes possible.

The warning for companies that were built in person and are switching: expect cultural misalignment as some people opt out and different people opt in. Rather than trying to replicate every in-person benefit remotely, he suggests acknowledging that new working lanes exist and people will sort into them.

In-person strategy is part of remote strategy

Murph is emphatic that nothing he has said implies people should never be together.

Two things. First, virtual experiences have improved substantially, because five years earlier the addressable market was too small to support good products, and the pandemic created product-market fit at a different scale. His recommendation is Luna Park, which lets distributed teams run their own game shows hosted by comedians from studios in New York.

Second, and more important, an in-person strategy is an essential part of a remote strategy.

His example is Dropbox, which was predominantly an office culture before COVID and shifted to what they call virtual first, keeping a small number of studios around the world. Some of the savings from closing large offices went into budgets for getting people together on a cadence. Day-to-day virtual, supplemented by deliberate in-person time for breaking bread, building rapport, some strategy, and mostly just being around each other.

He adds that if you still have one or two offices, they are useful onboarding vessels. Bring a new hire out for their first two weeks, let the in-person experience catalyze the virtual work that follows. He is a proponent of onboarding cohorts where the budget allows.

Michael's own version, from Automattic, which has been remote since 2006 and remote from inception: each team picked somewhere in the world once a quarter to get together, and the whole company gathered once a year.

The travel and emissions tension

Michael raises a genuine conflict. Tucows measures its carbon footprint and is working toward net zero. Global greenhouse gas emissions run to tens of billions of tons annually, with air travel a meaningful share of it. He understands the value of getting people together and is uneasy about the flights.

Murph says he is a fan of boring solutions and reaches for the most boring one available, which is offsets, and points to Pachama as a way to choose where carbon credits go. He does not claim it settles the question, but calls it a healthy way to start the conversation.

The comparison he adds is fair and rarely made. In-office companies were paying for hundreds or thousands of people to uproot and relocate to Silicon Valley or Singapore. Those people were on planes too. Compare how you used to operate against how you operate now, then do the math on the credits.

Office hours for the early-career cohort

An audience question, from Tucows CEO and founder Elliot Noss, asks how to engage people new to the workforce alongside people who have been there decades.

Murph's answer is boring on purpose. Regular office hours: once a month, 60 or 90 minutes, with senior leaders rotating so the same few are not always on. New hires are auto-invited to every instance for their first six months, after which it fades to optional.

There is an agenda attached, so anyone new can add questions in advance, and it functions as group mentoring. The version that does not scale is pairing every new hire with a senior leader, which runs into bandwidth limits fast.

What he has seen the group format do is create psychological safety, because the cohort shares an understanding that they are all somewhat lost and learning together, and because the company has visibly built a structure connecting them to people who have been there longer.

Town halls

Michael describes his own approach, using breakout rooms with a random question to get people talking. His pre-show question to Murph had been which animal would be the rudest if it could talk, and Murph's answer, defended by reference to a scene in Skyfall, is the Komodo dragon.

Murph's actual advice on town halls is to crowdsource it, and he defends that against sounding like a dodge. Every company differs in what resonates, and opening the question to the organization generates engagement by itself. It also surfaces people whose work is not very visible, and if a junior employee's idea is chosen, it celebrates them in front of everyone.

The framework someone at Andela gave him for evaluating a town hall: teach, inspire, learn. Hitting all three is a good sign, though it does not have to hit all three every time.

What he saw at the World Economic Forum

Murph's crazy story is from a growth summit at the World Economic Forum's headquarters, after two days among C-level leaders, heads of academia and heads of state.

His conclusion is that the only difference between people making decisions that shape the world and everyone listening to this podcast is a belief that anything can happen if you find the right partners.

What he saw was an attitude that there is no ceiling, and a dogged determination to find people who were smarter or who could open up their blind spots, and to get the right group around a table.

The use he makes of it is practical. When he hits something that feels like a dead end, he remembers that room and concludes it probably is not one. There is probably one more thing he has not considered, or one more person he could ask. His advice is to widen the net slightly and see who might contribute.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. Optimize for retrieval, not transfer. This is the reframe I keep coming back to. Offices are built around how fast one person can explain something to another. Distributed companies have to be built around how fast anyone can find the answer without asking. Every tooling and documentation decision follows from which of those two you are optimizing.

2. Perk-level investment, product-level expectations. Darren's explanation for why companies abandon remote is the most convincing one I have heard. They never resourced it as an operating model, then concluded remote does not work. The office they return to is not real estate. It is the operating model they already knew how to run.

3. Start at process definition, not at connection. Companies that feel disconnected reach for social events. Darren's sequence is process definition, then documentation, then culture and belonging. The connection problem is often a symptom of nobody having written down how work actually happens.

4. No agenda, no attend, and delete what fails the test. The rule is trivially cheap. The part I had not thought about is what happens when you try to write an agenda for a four-year-old recurring meeting and cannot. That is not a prompt to write a worse agenda. That is a prompt to delete the meeting.

5. Documentation is the AI prerequisite nobody budgeted for. Everyone wants to ask their internal systems a question in plain language and get the company's real answer. That only works if someone wrote the answer down first. The knowledge management work that has always been hard to justify now has a much easier business case.

FAQ

What is asynchronous communication at work? Communicating in a way that does not require the recipient to be present at the same time. Murph's version, low context communication, means writing with enough detail and precision that someone with no background can loop themselves in, rather than needing a meeting to be brought up to speed.

What is low context communication? A default assumption that your audience has little or no context, which leads you to communicate with high detail and precision. Murph calls it the dark horse resume skill of the next decade, because in a distributed company it is what allows people across time zones to contribute without a synchronous handoff.

Why do companies abandon remote work? Murph's argument is that most made perk-level investments and expected product-level results. Remote treated as a policy does not change tools, communication norms or decision-making, so it underperforms, and the company returns to the operating model it already knew how to run.

What tools do remote teams need for knowledge management? A knowledge base is the non-negotiable one, whether that is Almanac, Guru, Notion, Slite or something comparable. Murph's framing is that in the absence of a physical office, the knowledge base is the shell that houses the company. Loom or similar tools cover the cases where speaking is faster than writing.

Should remote companies still meet in person? Yes. Murph's position is that an in-person strategy is an essential part of a remote strategy. His model is Dropbox's virtual first approach, where savings from closed offices fund regular gatherings that are mostly about rapport rather than work, plus using any remaining offices as onboarding venues for new-hire cohorts.

Also mentioned

• Andela, and the no agenda no attend rule from its playbook
• GitLab and its public handbook, the operating manual for a fully remote company
• Almanac, Guru, Notion and Slite, knowledge base options
• Loom, for making spoken explanation scalable
• Luna Park, virtual team experiences hosted by comedians
• Dropbox and its virtual first model
• Pachama, for carbon offsets against team travel
• Automattic, remote from inception since 2006
• The World Economic Forum growth summit, and the belief Murph took away from it

Listen to the full episode

Darren Murph on Between Two COO's

Between Two COO's is hosted by Michael Koenig. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.