Is real-time interaction always necessary for effective teamwork?

Do you consider yourself working efficiently with your remote colleagues? What are your default tools for team collaboration? Video calls? Chats?

The more we talk to people, the more we realised that the biggest challenge isn't working together in real-time, but rather working separately at different times while still producing cohesive results.

Imagine this: What if every time you needed something, you knew exactly where to find the answer and could rely on getting what you needed, even if you didn't know the person who created it? It may seem like a far-fetched idea for many companies, but in communities like GitHub, haven't you used repositories from contributors without ever directly collaborating with them in real-time?

We believe this is the new way of working that we need to adopt. Making asynchronous work effective requires changes in habits and tools to support the workflow - this is the area that illumi is exploring.

So, let's think again: do we always need to spend significant "real-time" effort talking to our coworkers and building relationships to get our work done? Or is there a more efficient/balanced way?

What's your view on this?