Is ‘async’ the key to remote working?
>>Remote working is all about flexibility and its success is built on understanding how teams and individuals can be most productive and deliver on key objectives. However, not everyone works on the same schedule and rhythms, and timezones complicate things even further. So how can you maximise the benefits of remote working, and minimise the challenges of working in distributed team globally? Let me introduce you to working asynchronously, or simply ‘async’.<<
Remote working has fundamentally changed the way we interact; with our bosses, with our team mates, with our environment. The concept of asynchronous working (or communication) is not new, it had it’s place in the days when we all worked in offices, but it’s certainly accelerated as more of us moved to remote, or even hybrid roles. So what is async, and how can you make it work for you?
Async simply means work and communications that aren’t real time. That’s simple enough, but it’s more difficult in practice especially when collaboration or timely actions or responses are needed.
Although it is an older article - published in 2021 when we were still getting to grips with new ways of post-lockdown working - the BBC article ‘How asynchronous communication could change your workday’ by Bryan Lufkin provides a great primer on what it means to work ‘async’ and provides some excellent tips to make async work for you, and your colleagues and boss.
Given the international nature of my roles I’ve worked async for most of my career. I had team mates and direct reports in different timezones and there simply wasn’t a time when all of us were online, or at the end of a phone at the same time. To overcome this potential constraint, we shared a lot of information through email, or shared documents. The key to working async is being clear about boundaries, recognising the working schedules of others, and at its essence acknowledging that you need to trust your team and set expectations about turnaround times for actions or responses.
New ways of working don’t naturally evolve in a team, so it’s best to be very clear about expectations. The key is finding a way to communicate that doesn’t require synchronous; phone, meetings, etc. Often this means more writing and documenting as much as you can. Written work ensures everyone has access to the same information, in the same format, at a time that works for their schedule and timezone. This has additional advantages when working in global teams when your company’s working language - for example English - isn’t the native language for all team members. Writing gives them your team mates time to read and absorb the material and messages. Verbal communication doesn’t.
Ultimately successful async teams are built on a culture of writing (and of course reading). Recorded video or audio - shared in messaging channels like Slack or Teams - are also great substitutes for writing. But sharing a written document is better for collaboration and collaboration tools like Office365 and Google Docs are critical foundational tools for async teams.
My previous company (G-P) was a remote first company, which meant our teams were distributed geographically, so async working was a powerful tool for us to deliver as individuals and as teams. It wasn’t the only way of working, phone calls and meetings still have their place, but the more of our work that was async, the more we saw the benefits of remote working compound.
In future posts I’ll be sharing some further tips in the W2P Remote Playbook. Your how to guide for maximising the power of remote working for you.