Getting the memo right: remote working and asynchronous communication

The effect of remote working and the decrease in real-time communication is obvious. Employees no longer need to worry about missing updates, crucial conversations or decision-making.

When COVID-19 cases were soaring and disrupting our ordinary working schedules, remote working became necessary for companies wanting to ensure their staff were happy.?

However, at Suvera, we've always been a remote-first company. This has given us a unique opportunity to find the best talent, regardless of where they are in the world. This is where asynchronous communication really comes into play.

Asynchronous communication is simply any communication that doesn't happen in real-time. In our case, it means we're not tied to in-person or zoom meetings to work collaboratively together.

For example, our engineering team spans countries and time zones, so asynchronous communication is key. We don't expect our team in Japan to respond to messages outside of their working hours just because it's within ours.?

Gergana Minova 宇野 and Ifkar Arifin , two of our product engineers, discuss how they maintain good communication with their colleagues and adopt asynchronous communication in their working lives.

Gergana Minova

Gergana lives and works in Japan. She shares,"luckily, as a product engineer at Suvera, I'm working entirely remotely, all the way from Japan."?

"I never thought as a child that someday I'd be working with so many people distributed across the globe, with employees in London, Ghana, Italy and Singapore, to name a few."

"Firstly, working in any team begins with good communication, lots of planning and articulation of ideas and information. The time overlap with the team in London is only 2 hours, so I prepare well for all meetings in advance.

"However, throughout the day, I communicate with my team asynchronously. This includes writing daily stand-up updates on what I've been working on, what I plan to work on today and any blockers I'm struggling with, and requesting updates I need from others on specific topics."?

She goes on to say, "secondly, I message specific people individually on slack or email, as well as via comments across various services and platforms that we use for managing our work."

"This way of working has enabled me to have more productive focus time as I can reduce context switching, interruptions and unplanned work coming my way at short notice. Therefore, I can focus entirely on my work. I have flexibility over the planning of my work throughout the day leading to greater satisfaction with my job."

"My days are planned much better, so I have little or no interruptions, I feel less stressed, and there's less pressure on me to constantly stay alert to other people's sudden requests or messages."

"Suvera has a culture of good documentation where meetings get recorded frequently, and written summaries are shared across the team, so we all get the memo!"

Ifkar Arifin

Ifkar splits his time between London and Indonesia. He shares, "I'm incredibly lucky to work at a company that fully advocates remote asynchronous communication. This gives me the flexibility to plan my work tasks accordingly."

"I'd consider myself a naturally conscientious person with a huge sense of ownership of my work. Suvera's asynchronous approach has allowed me to flourish and explore new challenges in a way that aligns with my values and personality."

"Imagine working on a really important feature branch that needs to be released to production the next day, and you get a dreaded error on the console. You frantically look at Slack to see who's available to help out. But it's already 6pm, and people are offline."?

"Work-life balance is something that is highly valued at Suvera. So people don't often work past their hours which could be tricky in other workplaces where asynchronous processes aren't clearly defined."

"This is where the beauty of how Suvera works comes in. I'll open a ticket (set priority to urgent) along with the details of the bug. I'll assign this to my colleagues in Japan or Singapore. And voila, they can pick it up when London is sleeping. We work as one team, even though we're spread worldwide."??

"We can continue to live life to our fullest whilst providing a fantastic healthcare service for our patients. Life is too short to be slaving away at code without fulfilment outside of work."

"At Suvera, I'm fortunate to work with amazing conscientious individuals committed to making a difference."?

"A big credit to Ivan Beckley, MD , Dr Will Gao and Ryzard Akita , who have all worked tremendously hard to put the processes in place for asynchronous communication to work well. They definitely embody the saying, 'the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war'. "