The Little Things that Undermine Async

To really change how work gets done, whether it's by adopting a new remote work policy or adopting an async-first approach to communication, organizations need both high-level and long-term strategic shifts as well as tactical changes that can be implemented quickly.

Consider what’s needed for an office-based, synchronous-first culture to adopt an async-first approach to communication and work. To make a significant shift to improve the balance of sync and async, you need:?

• Leadership to align on priorities, what the new way of working actually looks like, and allocate resources needed to achieve that vision?
• The processes and tools in place to be able to work asynchronously?
• Everyone (individual contributors, managers, executives) to buy into the new way of working
• Everyone to commit to changing the way they do things individually and part of a collective, through experiments, modeling desired behaviors, and providing feedback

It can be overwhelming to think about all the work that is needed to truly adopt a whole new way of working.?This is where quick wins can be so powerful in generating the momentum needed to sustain long-term change.

In our learning experiences at Workplaceless, we invite learners to identify One Tiny Action, or OTA, to implement immediately to test out new skills.?When implemented, this becomes a quick win that empowers individuals and teams to make additional changes, eventually developing habits that lead to lasting behavior change.

But just as async-first tiny actions can have a positive impact on moving toward a new way of working, tiny actions can also derail your efforts to adopt an async and remote-first approach. Some may be actions you don't even realize you're doing because they are ingrained habits!

Consider whether you or any of the other leaders in your organization are undermining your efforts to go async with any of the following actions:?

Little Things That Undermine Async Efforts

1. Sending a message and expecting an immediate response. Related: sending multiple messages if you don’t hear from someone in the timeframe you’ve established in your mind but haven't shared with anyone else.??Also related: Sending a greeting without any additional context. By sending a greeting, and waiting for a response to say what your purpose is, you’re sending a signal that you want to communicate synchronously, not async.?
2. Making a vague request.?If you don't provide all the details someone needs to respond to your request, you're going to spend a whole thread trying to fully explain expectations.
3. Not asking for clarification and going off of assumptions. If someone sends you a vague request, and you don’t ask for clarification, you’re guaranteed to fail to meet expectations. Clarify those expectations before you get started.?
4. Automatically scheduling a meeting when something comes up.?If your go-to phrase is "let's hop on a call" you're hanging on to the sync-first approach to getting work done. Consider the Placeless Taxonomy when considering what tasks could be achieved asynchronously and what should be reserved for precious sync time.
5. Not following your team’s documented norms, like your communication charter or standard operating procedures.?
6. Not writing anything down. Documentation is key to making async work—if you're not recording decisions, processes, and other information needed to get work done, you're forcing others to rely on access to you.
7. Not reading documentation. Writing is only part of the commitment to documentation. You also have to read and refer to existing documentation for it to serve its purpose.
8. Not completing prework to prepare for meetings.?
9. Not creating an agenda for a meeting you own.
10. Asking someone else for information that you can find yourself.?
11. Not tracking work progress accurately, consistently, or at all. For async-first to work, you need visibility into work progress. If you’re not taking the time to make sure work is tracked in a way that others can see, you’re giving an incomplete picture of what’s happening, and you’re basically requiring others to ask you for updates.?

What are some of the other tiny actions you’ve seen that derail async-first communication??