Failure to communicate

The Four Levels of Remote Communication, or Why Your Team Forgets Everything

Everyone knows remote and distributed teams live and die by how well they manage communication and collaboration. Yet for such common knowledge, it's amazing to me how many remote and distributed teams remain stuck in poor communications modes.

Before I get into that, let's clarify terms. "Remote" means there are no offices, everyone works from home. "Distributed" means there is an office (or multiple offices) and also many workers, geographically dispersed, who are working from home as they see fit and prefer. "Hybrid" means there is an office and everyone comes to it according to some schedule, whether they want to or not.

These aren’t just labels. They shape how communication succeeds or fails. But the important part of each model is this: as soon as one person on the team isn't in the same place as the others, you effectively have a distributed team. Act accordingly.

Which means in 2025, virtually all teams are distributed. Even if the company policy is to be in-office, it's pretty rare for everyone to actually be in the office at the same time.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Work#

Let's get one more definition out of the way: synchronous vs. asynchronous work.

Synchronous means we're collaborating in real time: a meeting, a Slack huddle, a live doc edit. It can lead to fast results, but only once everyone is actually able to meet. It requires finding alignment — on schedules, availability, and context — before the actual work can even begin.

Asynchronous work means I can make progress, give input, or respond on my own time, and the system still works. It may be slower -- maybe -- but it is far more resilient across time zones, roles, and distractions.

Five years after COVID, a lot of organizations have managed to get pretty good at synchronous remote work — even some who turned around and ordered a return to office. Fewer have adapted to the reality of distributed or hybrid teams and balancing the needs of in-office and remote people. Fewer still have made the leap to asynchronous work.

Even as we've gotten better at remote communication, we still recreate in-office failure points, only now they're propagated across time zones.

A maturity model for communication and collaboration#

Some of you may recall I've mocked maturity models in the past but I have to admit, sometimes they are useful. This is one of those times.

When thinking about how distributed, remote and hybrid teams can best communicate and collaborate, we can define levels of effective communication, from worst to best, from uninformed chaos to unimpeded collaboration.

The Levels#

Level 1: Undistributed communication

This sounds obvious, but people get it wrong all the time: For communication to work well across distributed teams, the communication itself has to be evenly distributed. It's only the bare minimum, yet many hybrid teams fall down.

Evenly distributed is the key here.

The failure mode is that a few people meet, whether in-person or in a call, make decisions, then don't share their conversation with anyone else. This is especially a failure point with hybrid and distributed teams, where office-based folks accidentally -- or intentionally -- form a shadow org.

As far as the rest of the team is concerned, these undistributed conversations may as well have never happened. It doesn’t matter how productive it felt in the moment for the people having the conversation. Maybe they cracked cold fusion or cured cancer. But if they didn't tell anyone else, then no one will have any idea what's going on when they start implementing their brilliant plan.

Shifting conversations out of 1:1 channels into broader channels is the key to climbing out of this level: Have a great hallway conversation, then immediately start taking that conversation the wider team. Get out of DMs. Get into open video calls and other shared spaces. At this point communication is still highly synchronous, but at least it's distributed.

On the other hand, if conversations and decisions are not shared evenly and widely -- if people aren't "in the room" -- then you're failing to communicate effectively. And if you think, “we’ll remember to tell people later” — you won’t.

Level 2: Unrecorded communications

A lot of remote teams understand the need to include everyone in calls, then trip on the next level: What happens when people can't make the call? Is there any record?

We've all seen this one: There's a big meeting. Lots of people talk. Talking points are hashed and rehashed. Digressions are made (we see you, Bob, now stop it). Eventually, painfully, decisions get made.

But there’s no note, no summary, no transcript, and no video link. There's definitely not a list of assigned action items published anywhere. If you're lucky, someone remembers to @ a coworker on Slack and tries to remember the gist of it. A week later? It’s gone.

This is unrecorded communication. It means you just wasted a lot of time, and you'll almost definitely have to have another big meeting to rehash (again) what you went over in the prior meeting.

"Recorded” doesn't necessarily mean an audio or video recording, either. It's any durable record of what was discussed and decided — somewhere people already look. That could be a transcript or video recording. It could be comprehensive notes in Word. Even a quick Slack post, it's still better than the alternative.

Any record that people can refer back to can work. Without that, even good remote-first orgs quietly drift into chaos eventually.

As a side note, there's a particular kind of manager who loves living in Level 1 or Level 2, for two reasons:

1. It means they know things other people don't, and that makes them feel important.
2. It means they can call a meeting any time they want to tell new people the thing they didn't share previously and refuse to write down.

I call those people "Bad Managers." Or worse.

Level 3: Uncurated communications

At this level, people are doing a good job of writing things down. Your team Slack is full of information. So is your Google Drive. So is Confluence. And emails. You're positively drowning in shared information. So much so, that no one can ever seem to find the one thing they're looking for.

When each new bit of information is effectively a message in a bottle, lost in a sea of other documents, communications are lost and fail.

The tricky thing is that this isn't really a technical problem. Most likely, you don't need new tools. The culprit here is team norms and processes. You need a change in culture. You need curation.

Does the team have a shared idea of where things live? Do naming conventions match up with phrases actually search for? Are records and their storage structured in some way, or just scattered? Is anyone curating or organizing anything?

If not, the knowledge exists — but good luck finding it in the sea.

This is, however, a great spot for the folks who are able to think like librarians and can find things. They quickly get a reputation for knowing everything.

Level 4: Asynchronous Distributed Communication This is the gold standard. The boss level. Each level before is still highly synchronous, relying on real-time meetings and collaboration, followed by near real-time documentation of the output.

In Level 4, though, things are getting done on time and the team is collaborating well, even if no one’s in the same location, time zone, country or even the same day.

This is amazing. It's like shifting from big releases to continual deployment. All those meetings begin to fall away, replaced by a continuous process of getting things done, across time zones, independently.

Decisions get made because the context is there, the discussion is documented, and people trust the process:

• Updates are shared proactively.
• Decisions are made from documented context.
• Questions are answered from existing records.
• People aren’t waiting on live conversations to move forward. They have agency.

Asynchronous work is a relay race where everyone knows where the baton will be and how to best hand it to the next runner. It's intentional. Inclusive. Resilient to time zones and calendar chaos.

Truthfully, I've yet to see any organization live here consistently, but I've seen great teams manage an awful lot of work asynchronously.

It takes all the earlier levels working well, first. And then, on top of all of that, you need to have a ton of clarity, self-discipline, process, and trust -- all things that are too often in short supply on too many teams. These success factors are important enough to call out again:

• Clarity
• Self-Discipline
• Process
• Trust

This is why teams that reach this exalted level are no place for arsonists and alarm-bell-ringers. They can't call too many emergency meetings when the culture dictates that meetings themselves are an org smell, and emergencies indicate poor planning.

The process says we should have this under control. Everyone sees the context. Everyone knows what to do. And we trust them to do it. It takes real cultural effort to get to a culture of asynchronous work and communication, but when it works, it’s incredible.

So Where Are You, Really?#

Are you really “asynchronous” if you let people turn their cameras off and they multi-task through the meeting? Are you “distributed” if decisions still happen in private 1:1s and hallway chats?

If your team:

• Has undocumented meetings
• Leaves new hires confused about where things live
• Regularly relies on hours-long "standup" time to co-work

Then you may be stuck at Level 2 or 3. That’s normal. Most teams are. But you can do better.

At this point, we've (mostly) learned we don't all need to be in the same office at the same time to work well together. If we stop there, though, we just rebuild the failures of office culture without any of the benefits.

If you want remote work to actually work — not just feel like Zoom cosplay — the only way through is communication designed for distributed teams.

It bears repeating: as soon as one person on the team isn't in the same place as the others, you have a distributed team. Act accordingly.

So build your communication to leverage the strengths of distributed teams. Otherwise, you're just talking. Then forgetting. Then talking again. And eventually — scheduling another meeting to talk about what you forgot.

A postscript: A couple of people, notably Rich Lafferty and Matt Menzenski pointed out that Asynchronous isn't inherently superior, and that one can (and should) intentionally choose to optimize collaboration through coworking sessions and other synchronous activities.

They are, of course, correct. What's important is that you have the systems and processes in place to push asynchronous work forward, allowing you to focus and maximize synchronous time as you wish. It allows you to be more intentional about your communications and when you choose to have them.