The Definitive Guide to Effective Asynchronous Communication

We document our decisions so that others can understand the archeology of codebases and projects. We put effort into editing and maintaining our company-wide documentation in all departments, so that all employees have the same source of truth about teams, the organization chart, and projects.

• Examples of async communication include email, chat, comments on a document, and recorded video presentations.
• Sends a reply to the sender when it has done the work on its side, with no time limitation on its doing so.
• You probably already use Slack or something similar for both synchronous and asynchronous communications at your workplace.
• There are several software solutions designed to enable asynchronous collaboration and some which lend themselves to it incidentally.

While this should come as no surprise, any sensitive topic is best discussed in real time — preferably over video call. Body language and tone of voice is a huge part of communication and can get lost or misconstrued if not handled properly. We put together an Async Cheat Sheet, which you can reference below if you’re looking for recommendations on what meetings you can take async.

Make sure everyone has access to the right documents

I used to leave messages for my colleagues on our dispersed operations team across the ocean, and I’d do this, knowing that the communication with them would be async. With Haiilo, companies build their unique culture through the stories of their employees and empower their workforce to be the best version of themselves – even remotely. A big portion of these messages doesn’t even resonate with your employees. Unfortunately, many employers still don’t have an adequate way to segment employees by various criteria such as job functions, departments, geolocation, languages, interest, and others. Now that you know more about the differences between these communication styles and the pros and cons of using each, you’ll be better equipped to streamline communication within your remote team. Your team won’t waste precious productive hours checking in yet still gets the message. Synchronous communication can cause unnecessary stress and anxiety if remote workers are always having to check-in to make sure they don’t miss anything.

And when the live stream is over, the on-demand recording is ready for immediate viewing. Such data offers powerful insights into how to make asynchronous communications more efficient and impactful. When asynchronous communication is the primary way of communication in an organization, it is crucial that employers continuously collect feedback from their people. Even though asynchronous communication is on the rise, real-time communication is not going away.

Easier to build trust

With more flexibility, you spend extended periods on more important tasks, resulting in improved performance and productivity. Asynchronous operations can happen at the same time — you can move to the next step while another step finishes. We reimburse the cost of a coworking space so our people can get outside their homes and be in a more office/community setting.

• A 2015 study conducted by Yahoo Labs found that the most common email response time was just 2 minutes.
• From there, you can make changes to your overall workflows — and reflect these changes within any documentation in your knowledge base.
• Again, it’s information that is consumed when the audience is ready.
• Consider hosting asynchronous skip-level meetings to get a sense of what works best for your team on the ground, too.

Hiring remote employees around the world gives you access to talented employees who don’t live within commuting distance of your office. Good talent is everywhere and there’s a high chance asynchronous communication that the most qualified person doesn’t live in the same city as you. While it’s possible to get employees to relocate, the best talent now prefers remote teams over in-office roles.

The Truth Behind Why Meetings Fail

With async messaging, though, these issues are much less likely to occur. Here, messages can be sent and received at the individual’s leisure — or, rather, when it’s most productive for them to do so. This is where the true difference between sync and async communications lie. If you read that and pictured a network of employees actively communicating with each other, in various ways and on multiple channels at the same time…well, you’re not wrong. Today, these tend to happen only when there’s a formal meeting and time set, so that everyone is available and mentally present when the communication is happening. Synchronous communication is any communication where all the participants are engaged and present at the same time.

Whether you know it or not, you engage in asynchronous communication every day — both inside the workplace and out. Any time you receive a notification, whether it’s your phone screen lighting up or your inbox burgeoning with yet another email, you’re the recipient of asynchronous communication. We said before that embracing an asynchronous communication model doesn’t mean that you’re rejecting synchronous work. When you’re part of a distributed workforce, every meeting counts. The pandemic forced us to take a hard look at how we were using our meeting times and really think about the best ways to utilize everyone’s time. Knowledge hub tools such as Slab help to encourage asynchronous learning and skills sharing. Slab provides an accessible resource base for employees to access information about teams.

With async collaboration, you’re giving everyone an equal opportunity to contribute their ideas in their own way. If your team has adopted a hybrid work structure but attends more meetings than ever, you’re doing it all wrong.

Your first response to any given situation is often not your best response. Once again, this is obvious, but incredibly powerful as it creates a running log of communication that happens at work that can be referenced over time . For example, if I send an email, the record exists and can be referenced years from now. Tettra is an internal knowledge base that has smart workflows that allow you to answer repetitive questions.