This Is Post 1 of 5 in Our Series on Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication
Today, having a global organization is nothing unusual. Cross-border communication is part of everyday business.
More companies than ever are working remotely, and outsourcing services is now standard practice.
Having developers in Italy, a design team in L.A., and back-office staff â plus more developers â in Sweden is hardly strange anymore.
Working from the office some days and from home on others is also the new normal. But just a few years ago, it would have sounded impossible.
Back then, we werenât ready â and we had zero knowledge of how to manage a remote organization, especially one spread across different time zones.
Where Do We Start?
Many companies have embraced remote work and are undergoing a digital transformation as we speak.
The pandemic accelerated this shift, supported by more mature technology.
Tools like lynes, Office 365, Dropbox, HubSpot, Trello, and Google Workspace made it all possible.
This shift marks the move from the industrial age to what we like to call the
âAnders, we can see you but we canât hear youâ era.
Despite the growth of remote work, weâre still in its early stages.
Weâre learning how to build frameworks for distributed teams, manage large-scale remote projects, hire internationally, and onboard people without ever sharing a conference room.
As the Americans say â itâs a whole different ballgame.
The Biggest Challenge: Internal Communication
You might think communication is the least of your worries â after all, itâs never been easier to send a message anywhere in the world.
But as your company grows, scaling communication correctly becomes a challenge â and getting it wrong can kill productivity fast.
For remote organizations, itâs crucial to think about:
- How departments can collaborate across time zones
- The role of synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
- Which systems you use today (WhatsApp? Email? Chat?)
- Which communication tools are best suited for remote work
The goal of this series is to help you structure your internal communication and provide the right tools to collaborate more effectively.
Above all, weâll show how your companyâs communication can be designed to account for time zones, workload, and transparency â all key to a healthy digital workplace.
The Difference Between Office and Remote Work
When you work in an office, communication doesnât have to be perfect â it just needs to be good enough.
But in a remote setup, perfection matters.
When the physical office is replaced by a digital one, your collaboration and chat tools become mission-critical.
How you structure communication internally will define your success.
Navigating Time Zones
Expecting an instant reply while youâre in Ădeshög and your colleague is asleep in L.A.? Thatâs unrealistic.
And yet, managing time zone differences is one of the biggest challenges in remote work.
If your teams are spread across regions, you need to stay organized â otherwise, those time gaps can quickly turn into bottlenecks.
Remote Work and the Loss of Emotional Cues
In a physical office, you can easily pick up on subtle cues â a shift in tone, a facial expression, a sigh.
Those nuances disappear online.
Being a leader in a digital workplace means paying closer attention.
You canât rely on visual signals to sense how your team is doing â and many leaders overlook this entirely.
A Harvard Business Review article highlights how costly this loss of nuance can be:
âWhatâs missing in our chats, emails, texts, and conference calls?
Body language, facial expressions, tone. Even when we work in the same office, the tone of a message is open to interpretation. These misunderstandings can be expensive â lowering morale, engagement, productivity, and innovation.â
To maintain a healthy digital work environment, companies need new ways to check in and understand how their people really feel.
Maintaining Transparency in a Digital Workplace
Information silos are a real bottleneck.
They create gaps in knowledge-sharing and make it harder for teams to perform at their best.
When discussions and decisions arenât documented, an information hierarchy forms â and remote workers end up at the bottom.
The rule of thumb is simple:
If one team works remotely, everyone works remotely.
Your companyâs routines should always be built with remote-first principles in mind â even if some employees still spend time in the office.
If you donât have internal wikis, documented processes, or shared repositories (like SharePoint) accessible to all, youâre unintentionally working against your remote colleagues.
Communication hidden in private chats or meetings creates silos.
Digital workplaces need the right mix of tools and processes to ensure everyone has access to the information they need.
