‘Async’ explained: Why you should embrace asynchronous work, and six ways to get started

If you’ve been googling work trends in 2021, chances are you’ve come across the term ‘async’ — that is, asynchronous work.

Slack recently shared how it’s helped Canva save 63.75 hours per week with asynchronous standups. GitLab and Dropbox both describe async as vital to the success of their all-remote teams. Atlassian found most knowledge working teams only need about four hours of synchronous work time.

It’s clear asynchronous work offers some real productivity and staff-retention benefits. 

But don’t worry — this isn’t something only a big tech company can pull off. The benefits of working async are well-founded, and the transition may be simpler than you think.

Async explained

Asynchronous work is not a new concept. But, as businesses refine their remote and hybrid-working systems, the topic has never been more relevant.

Here’s the scenario: you’ve made great progress on your project, but it’s time to get others involved. You need approval from finance, input from Joe and Franco in sales, and you’d better invite the CTO as an FYI. You scan the calendar for meeting times, hoping for a 9am slot. 

What you don’t realise is that Sam from finance was up late last night pitching to that overseas prospect. Joe’s daughters are homeschooling, and there won’t be bandwidth to spare. Franco needs more research time before providing input. And your CTO only needs to know the final decision, so she’d rather sleep in.

Yes, you still need to engage with your team. But going async empowers each team member to decide when — and how — they meet your needs.

Five reasons to embrace async

1. Save time

   As Canva found, meetings are not an efficient way to solve most problems. If you need more convincing, Atlassian has a great infographic showing how many of us daydream, do other work and even sleep during meetings. 

   By working asynchronously, team members can choose if, when and how to engage with your problem. That choice enables greater efficiency because a meeting organiser can’t know and account for all the factors that determine each team member’s productivity. 

   This doesn’t mean just swapping a one-hour meeting for a one-hour read/write session (though there can be real benefits in that alone). Instead, async means each team member will average less than an hour on your problem. That frees up time for another high-value activity.

2. Show trust

   Without a meeting, you can’t look someone in the eye and know they’ve been informed. You can’t demand an instant answer. Instead, it requires trust — and that’s a good thing.

   Research shows that work autonomy supports feelings of productivity, which in turn correlates to job satisfaction. Empowering your team to make choices and own the outcome will pay off in engagement and reduced attrition.

3. Work at your best time

   Working with people around the globe? Asynchronous work reduces the need for teams to abandon their own routines to align with those in another time zone. 

   And even if your time zones are aligned, your body clocks are not. You probably have a sense of your chronotype (whether you perform best at analytic or creative tasks at certain times of day or night). The ebb and flow of your energy throughout the day is unlikely to align with all of your teammates’, meaning you won’t all be at your best at the same time. And the wider these chronotypes spread, the more likely that your meetings will be held up by misunderstandings, tangents and circular arguments. While a surgical team would have trouble addressing this risk, research shows knowledge workers are well-placed to leverage chronotype diversity. 

   Share your best times with each other to help manage expectations for each other’s contributions. Greater empathy for varying chronotypes can mitigate biased perceptions of team members’ performance.

4. Enable work-life balance

   As more of your work becomes async, there’s less need to conform to traditional work hours. And questioning the 9-5 routine opens up a huge range of alternate activities. Suddenly, you can volunteer in your kid’s classroom, or have afternoon tea with your grandparents. You can relocate your morning run to the mountains, followed by a leisurely brunch. 

   Adding these activities to your week are not just beneficial on their own accord. Satisfaction with your leisure time and work-life balance is associated with greater job satisfaction and productivity, and lower absenteeism and attrition. 

   It also enables inclusivity, as team members with different care responsibilities, health or situational challenges are more likely to integrate work with their personal lives.

5. Prioritise high-value synchronous time

   You may be concerned that an asynchronous default sacrifices the benefit of human connection, relationship building and creative collaboration — but it’s far from it. Instead, it enables you to prioritise the highest-value activities for the synchronous time you have.

   Host an off-site team building event. Gather creative minds for a well-structured brainstorming session. Unify your team with a company values and culture workshop. 

   Any of these will do more to support your team as a whole than a weekly status meeting.

So how could you get started?

Establishing asynchronous communication as the default is a culture shift, but don’t let that intimidate you. Small steps can help you explore how your business can benefit from asynchronous work, and can go a long way to improving productivity, work-life balance, and ultimately job satisfaction.

Try some of these suggestions: 

1. Learn from others

   Those big tech companies have kindly made their learnings publicly available. Reading up on how GitLab and Dropbox do async can help you explore the practicalities for your own business.

2. Talk about it

   Explain to your team why you’re interested in exploring async. Listen to their perspectives so you can address any concerns with how you implement and measure success.

3. Set up the experiment

   Approaching change as an experiment takes the pressure off getting it right the first time. Discuss some boundaries: which meeting(s) will go async; which teams will participate first; how long will you try it for; and what metrics will you measure to judge success?

4. Choose your tools

   Where will your async communications happen? Chat, email, shared documents or workspaces can work well, depending on the size of the team, purpose of the communication and the level of collaboration you’re expecting.

5. Set some guidelines

   How should your tools be used? And what circumstances would justify a synchronous meeting? Get your team on the same page, write some guidelines and be prepared to iterate as you test what works best.

6. Go ahead, cancel that meeting

   Like everything, it may feel a but awkward at first. But with clear expectations and open feedback channels, you should finish your trial with a good sense of how you can access the many benefits of async.