Operations director told me to switch our weekly standups to async and productivity tanked

My ops director at a 40 person company in Austin pushed us to move all standups to Slack threads back in March. She said it would save 5 hours a week across the team. Instead, our project blockers went from being solved in 10 minutes to taking 2 days on average. Turns out the quick check-ins were catching a lot of small issues before they grew. Has anyone else tried async standups and seen something similar happen?

2 comments

2 Comments

charlie2691mo ago

Yeah that makes total sense, the real value is in the quick fixes.

abby_singh1mo ago

Honestly, the whole "saving 5 hours a week" thing sounds great on paper but it totally misses how much gets caught in those 10 minute standups. We tried the same Slack thread setup at my last job and suddenly small issues that used to get fixed in a quick hallway chat turned into multi day email chains. It's like you lose all the context and urgency when it's just a text wall instead of people actually talking.