Asynchronous communication happens ‘out of sync’, not in real-time, and allows your team members to communicate on their own time. Questions, conversations, and projects are primarily documented in writing (or through asynchronous tools).
Asynchronous communication brings more freedom and helps to promote the self-management of a team and mainly the primary metric becomes the results and not the number of tasks.
Results rather than tasks, that’s the metric.
Asynchronous work eliminates the need for real-time communication that was considered essential for “productive teams”.
Documentation and transparency are the cornerstones of asynchronous work.
Documentation and transparency eliminate confusion regarding expectations and work details, while synchronous communication information can get lost.
Documentation types for asynchronous communication:
* NFR (New Feature Request)
* Playbooks
* Meeting Agendas and Minutes
* Decision records
* Internal knowledge base
* External knowledge base
* Change log
* Guide / Learn
The preferred modes of communication for asynchronous work are email, collaborative documents, whiteboards, and project management tools.
Types of asynchronous tools for communication and collaboration
Start breaking in a structured way
For asynchronous to be effective, you need to break value deliverables as much as possible into cycles, sharing work progress as much as possible, generating more value in the same period of time.
Communication
Effective work relies heavily on effective communication in an asynchronous workflow. You need to develop good documentation and written practices, choose messages over calls, and respect people’s deep work sessions.
Create the culture of Blend Meetings, the synchronous meeting with asynchronous collaboration.
Imagine a combination of asynchronous collaboration, not happening at the same time, in a synchronous meeting where people connect at the same time. There is typically asynchronous pre-work and post-work to replace synchronous information sharing.
Being able to reduce the duration or number of synchronous meetings, improve the quality of synchronous time, focusing on decision making, innovation, or connection.
Blended meetings are designed to help your team get more done in less time. Rather than using meeting time to provide status updates or define the next steps, plan to share this information with meeting participants in advance. This will allow you to dedicate your synchronous time to discussions, decision-making, and action.
The benefits of asynchronous communication:
- Time savings and reduced interruptions
- Burnout prevention and productivity increase
- Reduction of dependency and progression at work
- Reduction of micromanagement and strengthening of trust, control, and autonomy (self-management)
Tips for asynchronous work
The main purpose of the asynchronous work model is to allow people who work in different locations to collaborate better and be more productive. To achieve this goal, an effective asynchronous system is needed. Here are some tips to improve asynchronous work:
- Improve team members’ writing skills.
- Start deleting meetings
- Better to over-communicate than under-communicate
Synchronous work is valuable, and it can have more impact than good asynchronous work. More impact in the same amount of time. I believe that asynchronous communication is a trend because, like us evolutionary beings, we always seek to impact more with less effort, asynchronous communication implies being more assertive in the information you want to convey. Combined meetings or blended meetings make it possible to extract the best of both worlds.
In asynchronous communication, we have to reduce the need to clarify or explain. The first message itself should be as clear and complete as possible. If not, it will require back-and-forth and since it is not synchronous communication, it will cost people more time.
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