In remote teams, async work was supposed to be the miracle cure. 

Fewer meetings. Fewer interruptions. 

More focus. More autonomy. And for a while, that promise held.

But somewhere between the Slack channels, Notion pages, and Loom recordings, everything slowly starts to fall apart. 

It’s like an orchestra without a conductor. Everyone can play independently just fine - and as a collective, the music sounds whole. For a while… 

It only takes one player to be out of time, and it’s over. Soon, everyone is playing at different parts at different speeds, and you no longer have a sweet symphony, but a racket! 

And it's annoying, right? Because the more efficient our tools became, the slower our teams moved. Slack is instant, but alignment isn’t. Notion is detailed, but decisions stall. Loom is clear, but nuance can’t travel inside a video.

Async removed friction - but it also quietly removed context, emotion, clarity, and connection.
It made the work faster, and the humans behind the work slower.

This is the Async Work Paradox:

Async is efficient for tasks … but inefficient for humans.

So, this poses the question. Is 2026 finally the year companies pay the price?

“The data on remote work shows strong productivity gains, but it also shows challenges when it comes to connection and team cohesion - the very things that make long-term collaboration effective.” — Remote Work research overview. 

‍

The Promise (and the Breaking Point)

Async was built on good intentions. Protect deep work. Reduce noise. Respect time zones. Give people autonomy, not calendars full of calls.And for teams who already have strong trust, clarity, and senior talent, async is a gift. It lets individuals work independently at their highest level.

But the paradox appears when organisations begin running entire cultures on async alone. That’s when the cracks form: Meaning becomes interpreted, not shared. Feedback becomes documentation, not dialogue. Threads grow longer, but clarity doesn’t. Teams drift from each other without noticing. Remote work isn't the issue. Isolation disguised as efficiency is.

This mirrors what we’ve written before about why trust and flexibility - not constant communication - are what sustain healthy remote cultures.

Even Doist, arguably the world’s most successful async-first team, emphasises this. Their philosophy is clear: Async is powerful, but it can never replace the human rhythms teams need to thrive. Their culture works not because it avoids connection, but because it is designed for it intentionally, both online and in person.

Doist themselves write openly about the emotional and psychological risks of fully remote work - isolation, depression, anxiety - and why remote culture must be built on how people work together, not how often they “hang out.” Even in the most disciplined async organisations on earth, connection still requires moments that cannot be written, stored, or threaded.

“People are more productive working at home than people would have expected … but remote work makes it harder to delineate work time from personal time.” — Dan Springer, CEO DocuSign (on remote work challenges and schedules). (Hive)

‍

The Hidden Performance Costs of Too Much Async

Here’s why the Async danger is so dangerous. It’s hidden, at first, and when it’s finally spotted, it’s already too late - like our analogy with the conductorless orchestra. 

Async-only teams don’t collapse dramatically. They slow down in ways that are hard to notice until the lag becomes expensive.

We see the same patterns again and again:

1. Decision-making stretches from hours to weeks: Threads become essays. Ownership gets fuzzy. Everyone waits for everyone else.
2. Execution diverges quietly: Two teams interpret the same sentence differently — and both think they’re right.
3. Trust becomes transactional: Colleagues turn into usernames. Conversations turn into updates. Disagreement turns into a comment thread with no resolution.
4. New hires struggle to “find the story”: Onboarding becomes archaeology. Information lives everywhere, meaning lives nowhere.
5. Culture drifts into abstraction: People stop feeling the company - they simply work for it.

Remote work adoption is high - about 22.8% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part-time in 2025 - yet this wide adoption doesn’t automatically solve connection problems. (Backlinko)

This is something we repeatedly see surface when teams finally meet in person - often at company retreats - where misalignment that lingered online for months becomes obvious within hours (Check out IFT / QuoIntelligence alignment stories for IRL examples). And the irony is that async was meant to fix speed - not undermine it.

‍

Why 2026 Forces a Hard Rethink

2026 is shaping into a year where remote teams face three pressures at once:

• Budget scrutiny - tools need ROI, not novelty.
• Expectation of speed - leaders want decisions, not documentation.
• Culture fragility - remote teams feel the effects of drift faster.
• AI acceleration - compresses timelines and expectations, increasing the cost of poor alignment.
• Return-to-office backlash - signals that forced presence doesn’t repair culture, and often accelerates disengagement when trust is already thin.

More tools aren’t the answer. More documentation isn’t either. And more “autonomy” without relationship only worsens the problem. Async is not the strategy. It’s the format that supports the strategy.

Without intentional in-person reset points, companies are discovering that async becomes incomplete - even counterproductive.This is why starting early matters when planning in-person time.

“Remote work has been great for autonomy and flexibility, but teams still need human connection to build trust and shared purpose.” — Hayden Brown, CEO of Upwork (on future of flexible work). (Hive)

‍

‍Three Things Async Cannot Do (No Matter How Good the Tools Get)

1. Build real trust: Trust forms faster through tone, timing, shared humour, spontaneous side conversations. Emojis cannot replicate this.
2. Accelerate difficult decisions: No one in the history of work has solved a strategic disagreement in a Notion comment. A 20-minute walk between sessions builds alignment faster than 20 pages of written back-and-forth.
3. Create shared purpose and momentum: Zoom aligns words. In-person time aligns energy.

This is why so many teams arrive at an offsite thinking they’re aligned - and by 11:00 AM on day one realise they’ve been making different assumptions for months (link: IFT / EF / Convert case studies). Async hides misalignment. In-person time reveals it - and resolves it.

What the Best Remote Teams Do Instead

The smartest remote companies aren’t abandoning async - they’re learning how to balance it.
Async remains the backbone for deep work and individual execution.

But the teams that thrive long-term pair it with intentional in-person moments that give them what async can’t: clarity, alignment, trust, and the sense of working with each other rather than simply alongside each other.

This isn’t theoretical. Doist, one of the most disciplined async-first organisations in the world, designs their entire operating system around this balance. They’re async-first - but never async-only. They have annual global retreats, team-level gatherings, onboarding mentorship trips, and a cadence of real-time touchpoints where they matter.

Why? Because they understand a truth most teams quietly know but rarely say out loud:

Culture is how you work together, not how often you talk.

This mirrors what we’ve explored before around downtime, white space, and why unstructured moments matter - and why teams like QuoIntelligence deliberately design retreats around it.

And working well together requires a level of trust and shared understanding that async alone can’t maintain over the long term. In-person time doesn’t replace async — it reinforces it.

So What Should Companies Actually Do in 2026?

A simple starting point for any remote leadership team is this short self-check:

• Are decisions taking longer than they should?
• Does everyone interpret priorities the same way?
• Do new hires feel connected or slightly on the outside?
• Does the team feel like a team - or a collection of contributors?

If any of these give you pause, that’s your early warning sign.

The next step isn’t to overhaul tools or rewrite processes. It’s to reintroduce the moments that restore shared context. Plan intentional in-person time - not as a one-off, but as a rhythm. Choose one core outcome your next offsite needs to achieve. Let async remain your execution backbone. Use in-person time to reset trust, unblock decisions, and rebuild the shared story your team runs on.

Teams like Entrepreneur First, IFT, and Convert have seen months of stalled progress unlocked in days when retreats were used this way.

Async will keep the wheels turning. But in-person connection is the oil that prevents friction, drift, and slowdown. You don’t need to choose between them. You just need them working in the right rhythm.

‍

The Line Worth Remembering

Tools get work done. Relationships get results.

And 2026 will belong to the teams who understand that async is an amplifier - not a replacement - for human connection.

Get in touch - we can build an on-site together that will have your team working asynchronously.