The way we work is changing, and with more and more teams being distributed, the value of asynchronous “async” collaboration is becoming increasingly clear. Now, this isn’t rocket science…async collaboration is simply a way of working that allows team members to get things done on their own schedule without another meeting. It’s a way of sharing information, feedback, and ideas that don’t require immediate responses or constant availability. It helps distributed teams become more productive and work more efficiently without sacrificing work-life balance or feeling like they’re constantly interrupting or being interrupted.
If you’re looking to encourage your organization to adopt a more async approach to collaboration, here are a handful of benefits you can share to help make your case:
Improves Flexibility
For starters, async collaboration gives team members flexibility. Working async means that everyone can work on their own schedule, which is especially important when working with distributed teams across time zones. My team is dispersed across three different continents and four time zones, so collaborating more async allows us to maintain alignment without the need to meet late at night or early in the morning. It also allows team members to focus on individual tasks and projects without interruptions, which leads to increased productivity and creativity.
Enhances Teamwork
A misconception of async collaboration is that it’s just working alone, which couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, async collaboration a great way to encourage teams to become more intentional with how they work as a team. When you know that you’ll be working on shared deliverables and won’t be able to meet with each other, you must set clear expectations on how you want to work as a team. A great way to do this is by creating a Team Working Agreement. In the working agreement, the team outlines how they want to collaborate asynchronously, what they expect of each other, and how they want to use the tools they have to ensure that the team will thrive in a distributed world.
Creates Better Meetings
Wait… async collaboration makes my meetings better? Yes! If you’re tired of those meetings that run way too long, or are ones that you find yourself saying “this could have been an email” then using async collaboration practices can help. One way to do this is to combine async practices with your sync meetings. You could use a collaboration tool like Confluence to have people add ideas and comment on content before a meeting. This way, everyone can come to the meeting prepared with ideas and questions, making the most of your time together.
The evidence is clear; async collaboration is a superpower any team can unlock. But of course, async collaboration is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Every team is different, and what works for one team may not work for another. That’s why it’s important to experiment with different approaches and tools to find what works best for your team.
If you’re looking for some help to kickstart async collaboration on your team, here are some tips to get you started:
Start small
Don’t try to overhaul your entire team’s communication and collaboration practices overnight. Start small, and gradually introduce async practices and tools as your team becomes more comfortable with them. Try changing one thing this week, such as moving one sync meeting to being an async update, and then check in to see how it went. The goal is to experiment and find what works for your team!
Use the right tools
By using tools like Confluence, Teams, and Slack, team members can collaborate on shared documents, provide feedback, and maintain conversations without having to connect at the same time. I personally like to use tools like Loom to send video messages to my team because sometimes it’s easier just to say something than it is to write it down. There are a lot of tools out there for async collaboration, but not all of them are created equal. Make sure you choose tools that fit the way your team wants to collaborate.
Hit reset on your meetings
To help identify which meetings would be great candidates to go async, run a ritual reset. Running through this exercise can help your team identify opportunities to replace low-value sync meetings with high-value async collaboration (think status meetings and brainstorming). Doing this improves the value of your teams’ sync meetings because they become way more efficient and effective.
Start with an async mindset
Ultimately, the key to making the most of async collaboration is to always start with an async-first mindset. This means getting in the habit of being a good example of async behaviors for others; send out necessary information before a meeting, start with an async chat vs setting up a meeting, and so on. Before sending out that next meeting invite, ask yourself… “could this be done async?”
