Async Makes Vacation Prep Easier

I’m preparing to go on vacation next week and I was struck by how much simpler it is when you have an async-first culture. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had the experience of frantic preparations for vacation or the overwhelming feeling of having to catch up after being out of the office.?

My team is fully distributed, small but global, delivering both sync and async learning experiences to clients around the world. While we have some core shared working hours, we all have very different schedules.?

Add on a generous vacation policy and it may seem like things would get a bit chaotic or work might just pause completely if one or more team members go on vacation. And yet, that hasn’t happened.?

This is in large part due to our team-wide commitment to and individual practices of asynchronous communication.?Location independence and schedule flexibility is at the heart of who we are and what we do at Workplaceless—powered by continually optimizing the balance of async and sync communication. Here's how async helps make vacation prep easier:

Documentation

Team-wide commitment to documentation means all the information needed to complete work tasks (regarding both context and process) are in a central, accessible location, or a single source of truth. This is crucial to have in place when someone needs to delegate tasks to others when they’re out of the office.??

Meetings

Our team is very intentional about the meetings we have. Synchronous time is reserved for times we truly need to be in the same place at the same time. prioritizing connecting and complex discussions. Usually, there are also async steps that accompany these live sessions, further limiting the time we have to spend on Zoom. Minimal meetings = minimal rescheduling because of vacations.

Decision making

Clear ownership of decisions, and knowing what decisions can be delegated and to whom, allows decisions to be made even if certain team members are out of the office.

Transparent Workflows?

All our work is documented in our project management tool, so everyone has insight into what’s going on and what’s on track versus what’s not. These transparent workflows allow all of us to be more aware of what might be needed in the future, and helps us proactively plan for what might be needed when team members are out.?

Autonomy and Trust?

Team members have the ability to do their work on their own terms, and we trust each other to get the work done. That means if a supervisor goes on vacation, we don’t worry about whether the work gets done or not. If we’ve set the right expectations and provided access to the right resources, we don’t need to be around just for work to get done.

Finding the right balance of async and sync communication is an ongoing process—it takes constant work to identify what is working and what is not, and refine processes accordingly. Commitment to documentation, specifically, takes time, and depending on where you are in the process, can be overwhelming.

But that feeling of calm before heading out on vacation is absolutely worth it.