Asynchronousity

It’s true that the mark of a good team is how effective they are in working together. But today, I’ll posit that once the team is working well together, the mark of the great team is how well they work apart!

It happened again the other day. We’re all on Zoom and the only order of business left before we can end the meeting is scheduling the next working meeting. “Tuesday—no… Wednesday—no… Next Monday? John, how important is your 11 o’clock next Monday?” You get the drift. The voice of reason piped up, “Hey, what if we do agenda items 1, 3, and 4 asynchronously? Then we can have a quick conversation if we aren’t in alignment.” The team likes the idea, cuts the working meeting in half and can move on.

What happened? The suggestion of asynchronous work reframes the working session conversation. In our rush to get meetings on calendars, we often overlook the work itself, and fall back on old habits. Group work is expensive, and can take even more team hours than individual work, as groups can tend to spin a bit. I’ve found that great teams find asynchronous work to be “good enough” and rarely quibble—especially when some of the team didn’t do the homework anyway. Remember, “good enough” is usually great, so keep moving.

Asynchronous work also corrects for the “focus group” effect. In group work, some team member’s ideas are overlooked or go unheard. Working individually is a little like when the US Senate and House of Reps must reconcile their different passed versions of the same legislation; it’s unavoidable that both sides will be heard! The nice thing is that the reconciliation usually doesn’t take long (on the team, not Congress).

Once a team is getting comfortable with working apart, a great tool to exploit this new skill is a sprint cadence with a prioritized backlog. Using a board to organize and prioritize the work and a Kanban-like board to move the work will get the team focused on what’s most important, now. Adding some Scrum ceremonies like daily standups, backlog refinement, and sprint demos in a two-week timebox will help them focus on regular value delivery and prevent overbuilding or building the wrong thing. What I’ve found is that teams don’t want to go back to the old way, once they’ve tasted the instant gratification of sprint work. Trust and ownership are the behaviors to measure as you coach the team. Watch as team members take accountability because they care about the quality of the work—not because a superior forced it upon them.

It’s still OK for teams to get together periodically for business and non-business purposes; they are a team, after all. The spontaneous social situations that used to occur in the office are gone and need to be replicated. Make sure teams allow for this. You may need to show them by playing a game, hosting a brainstorming session, or something else that would be fun. I had a nice experience by hosting a twice-monthly session where team members rotated giving a lunch and learn about something cool or unusual that each had done in their past. It gave everyone a chance to show off in a fun, social setting, and the rest of the team came to appreciate the unique talents of the members.

Getting your team to right-size their working sessions will take some time, but the team will feel the difference in their productivity as they focus group time on things that help them move faster asynchronously. Outside of the planning sessions, they may still collaborate in small groups, but it will be a different type of collaboration driven by intentionality around skills, not on old habits.