How to Build High-Performing Remote Teams in Medical Affairs

Medical Affairs has always operated as a matrixed, cross-functional function, but coordinating across time zones, geographies, and now shifting return-to-office mandates has made that coordination harder, not easier. Teams report camera time stretching from early morning to after dinner, fragmented communication scattered across thousands of Microsoft Teams channels, and colleagues they rarely see in person even once a year.

Acceleration Point CEO Scott Thompson is joined by Liam Martin (co-founder, Time Doctor and Staff.com; co-organizer, Running Remote conference; Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Running Remote) to unpack how the world's most successful remote-first companies operate and what Medical Affairs teams can learn from them. At the center of the conversation is asynchronous management: the practice of leading teams without relying on real-time, simultaneous communication, built on three tenets Martin calls deliberate over-communication, democratized workflows, and detailed metrics. If your team is navigating hybrid schedules, global time zones, or return-to-office friction right now, this is the session to watch.

What You'll Learn

• The three tenets of asynchronous management: deliberate over-communication, democratized workflows, and detailed metrics, and how each applies to a distributed Medical Affairs team.
• Why documentation-first collaboration (recorded video updates, threaded channel replies, project management systems tied to a single source of truth) reduces the redundant status meetings that eat into field and strategic work.
• A four-step process for auditing and rebuilding team workflows: discover the history of the process, design a revised version, deploy it for feedback, and debug it into a working system.
• How to replace synchronous status meetings with async updates, reserving live discussion time for genuine disagreements rather than items the team already agrees on.
• How to shift Medical Affairs team metrics away from task lists and toward outcomes, such as medical information response accuracy and timeliness, publication output and citation metrics, HEOR budget and impact analysis, and insight actionability.

FAQ

What is asynchronous management?
Asynchronous management is the practice of leading a team without requiring real-time, simultaneous communication. Work is structured so team members can maximize individual productivity without waiting on others for live updates.

What are the three tenets of asynchronous management?
Deliberate over-communication, democratized workflows, and detailed metrics. Together they focus a team on documenting decisions, making information accessible to everyone rather than a few, and tracking outcomes instead of activity.

Does research support remote or hybrid work for productivity?
A randomized study of Ctrip call center employees by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and coauthors found a 13% performance increase among home-based workers, along with a 50% drop in attrition, compared to office-based peers (Bloom, Liang, Roberts & Ying, NBER Working Paper No. 18871).

How can Medical Affairs teams reduce meeting overload across time zones?
By moving status updates out of live meetings and into recorded videos or threaded channel posts that team members can review asynchronously, reserving synchronous time for the small share of decisions the team genuinely disagrees on.

How should Medical Affairs teams measure remote team effectiveness?
By tracking outcome-based metrics tied to function, such as medical information response accuracy, publication output, HEOR impact, training completion, and insight actionability, rather than task completion alone.

About Our Speakers

Scott Thompson is CEO at Acceleration Point. He leads Acceleration Point's work helping Medical Affairs and Field Medical teams operationalize scientific engagement and data-driven strategy.

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/medical-excellence/

Liam Martin is co-founder of Time Doctor and Staff.com, time-tracking and productivity platforms used by remote teams worldwide, and co-organizer of Running Remote, the world's largest remote-work conference. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Running Remote: Mastering the Lessons from World's Most Successful Remote Pioneers.

Connect with Liam on LinkedIn: TODO — pending verified URL (see Name/Link Note below)

About Acceleration Point Webinars

Acceleration Point webinars bring Medical Affairs and Field Medical leaders together to share practical insights, emerging strategies, and real-world perspectives on the challenges shaping the industry. Each session is designed to support the professionals driving scientific exchange, field medical excellence, and Medical Affairs transformation.

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