Buffer is Remote but not Async-First, Here’s Why

With so many years of being remote, we’ve experimented with communication a lot.

One conversation that often comes up for remote companies is asynchronous (async) communication. Async just means that a discussion happens when it is convenient for participants. For example, if I record a Loom video for

With so many years of being remote, we’ve experimented with communication a lot.

One conversation that often comes up for remote companies is asynchronous (async) communication. Async just means that a discussion happens when it is convenient for participants. For example, if I record a Loom video for a teammate in another time zone, they can watch it when they’re online — this is async communication at its best.

Some remote companies are async first. A few are even fully async with no live calls or in-person time at all.

However, this isn’t what we’ve chosen for our culture. We aren’t an async-first company. There are many cases where discussing something synchronously (on a live video call) is the best solution for us.

Here’s more about our communication style at Buffer, and how async fits into it.

Why Buffer isn’t an async-first company

It comes down to this — there are some real benefits to synchronous communication. Through iterating over time, we feel we’ve found the right balance for synchronous and asynchronous communication for us during this current season of Buffer.

Synchronous helps with moving quickly or complex problems

When there are projects or situations that arise that either need