Remote Work Is The Way

The 2020 book on how knowledge-work teams actually go async-first — and the playbooks that made it stick.

Remote Work Is The Way was published in 2020 at the height of the global shift to distributed work. It is a practitioner's manual — written by Iwo Szapar after years of running and advising async-first teams — for leaders who suddenly had to design hiring, onboarding, communication, performance management, and culture around people who were no longer in the same room.

The book argues a simple thesis: remote work is not "office work, but at home." It is a fundamentally different operating model, and pretending otherwise is what causes the burnout, drift, and middle-management churn that companies blamed on remote when the real cause was the half-implementation. The book then walks through the operating model: how to write so things stay decided, how to hire when you cannot read body language, how to onboard without a buddy desk, how to run meetings sparingly and productively, and how to build culture when nobody shares a coffee machine.

What's inside

• Async-first communication — when to write, when to speak, and how to design a documentation layer your team will actually use
• Hiring distributed teams — sourcing, interviewing, and compensation models that survive across time zones
• Onboarding without a desk — the 30/60/90 framework that gets new hires productive faster than the old "shadow a senior" model
• Meetings, redesigned — the four meeting types worth keeping and how to kill the rest
• Culture as artifacts — why remote culture lives in shared documents, rituals, and rituals, not in office snacks

Who it's for

Founders, heads of people, engineering managers, and operators building or running teams of five to several hundred people across multiple locations. It is opinionated, short, and meant to be argued with — every chapter ends with a playbook you can adapt to your context.

Get the book

Print and ebook editions are available through major retailers. For the latest links and any companion material, see about or reach out via the site contact.

About the author — Iwo Szapar has spent the last decade building distributed companies and advising remote-first teams. He is the creator of MemoryOS and the AI Second Brain framework, and is currently focused on AI implementation for knowledge workers. More at /about.