How did we shift to asynchronous communication… through baby steps?
😱😱😱 Async communication won’t work for us!
I often see established companies struggling to transition toward asynchronous communication.
Remarks are always the same: “What do they have at Alan or Gitlab that we don’t have?”, “Async culture is just not for us, we won’t be able to skip meetings” or even “The team won’t play the game, they don’t want to lose human contact”.
Sometimes, the benefits of asynchronous communication are not even clear: “I prefer to have meetings. This way, I know that my day is all scheduled and I can fix problems one at a time”.
Sooo… Let’s address all these objections!
I share below our playbook to transition smoothly towards async communication though baby steps. Don’t worry, it’s not that complex 👶🍼
Why should you move to async now? 🔥⏰
It’s all about efficiency.
When you discuss a problem with someone else, efficient communication is important. When you discuss a problem with a team, efficient communication is critical because each inefficient minute is multiplied by the number of people in the discussion.
Meetings are the least effective way to scale decision-making because they make hard to lead efficient discussions in large groups.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Inefficiency strikes even before meetings: team is forced to find a slot in crowded agendas, blocked in its progress while waiting for the meeting, and interrupted in its deep work. And after meetings: fluffy consensus and weak commitments lead to follow-up calls to re-align the team.
Almost more problematic, meetings are usually poorly organized, without a clear agenda or minutes. This fosters a lack of transparency at the company level. We all experienced the FOMO not to be in a meeting where things happen.
On the other side, asynchronous communication comes with many benefits. It protects focus time. It promotes transparency. It even lets you pick your child when you need to, without paralyzing the rest of the organization. Well, asynchronous communication is the secret weapon of distributed teams relying on distributed ownership. On the other way around, it’s the kryptonite of opaque top-down organizations relying on the good old endless chain of command.
How to maintain social interactions in an async culture? 🤖👽
Still, meetings come with a clear social benefit since teams share a moment together.
Asynchronous communication, on the other hand, is heavily focused on project management. It is terrible at creating and preserving this personal link. If you simply turn all your meetings async without reinventing routines to let your team spend some time together, you’re heading to a dead end.
But honestly, moving async is a unique opportunity to rethink and improve your culture. Instead of hacking project discussions with personal catch-ups, you’ll dedicate clear slots in your team’s agenda.
As usual, better to list your problems and act on them specifically, rather than to keep the status quo. Active culture beats passive culture.
At Claap, we are working full remote. We realized how important it is to keep some time to catch up and grow as a team — not as a list of individual contributors. We have online syncs, offline events, small culture hacks to strengthen the team on a daily basis while most of our project discussions are async. If you are interested in our full asynchronous culture playbook, let me know! I’ll follow up with a dedicated article 🤓
How to avoid endless async threads? 💬🗯️
Working async requires clear guidelines to cut through the noise. Everyone suffered from Emails or Slack’s intrusive notifications, especially when all your day is focused on Inbox 0.
Inbox 0 is great, but it doesn’t mean you should maintain Inbox 0 all day long. Asynchronous communication is… well… asynchronous. Whenever someone raises an issue, ask them to clearly indicate a deadline, to let others organize themselves. And please, reassure your team that no one is expecting instant answers from them.
All this is not that easy though. Few tips can help you guide the group in this process.
🗺️ Map your communication tools
First, map your communication tools (Emails, Slack, WhatsApp, Notion, Google Meet, …) depending on the urgency and importance, so that everyone understands how to route their issues to the right discussion channel. We built an extensive mapping at Claap, I can share it on demand!
🎯 Promote context and precision in discussions
Second, make sure that people are as clear as possible in their communication. Context is king. Precision is queen. To this extent, Async Meeting platforms like Claap can help to bring clarity with video recordings, when write-ups are messy.
How to find the right asynchronous system fitting your needs? 🎯⚖️
I heard a lot of people complaining that their company would never manage to move to asynchronous communication. That the step is too big.
No one asked you to transition to a fully asynchronous system straight away. Just like most of the companies won’t opt for a full remote or a full colocated set up, most companies will choose a hybrid communication model. Yes, even branded full asynchronous companies keep some meetings around 🙈🙊🙉
Synchronous communication works like a charm under some conditions. When a discussion requires brainstorming. When you are dealing with people’s issues. Or when you want to energize the team. In these cases, you might prefer to keep your sync updates and it’s perfectly fine! For the rest, async comm will probably be a better fit.
Long story short, your best move is to rely on a mixed system. It’s up to you to find the good balance that will suit your organization, ranging from sync first to async first communication. It’s all about test & learn: you’ll start your async journey and decide when it’s time to stop.
How to smoothly shift to async through baby steps? 👶🍼
Imposing a new process to a group can be draining. Below is our step-by-step recommendation to be “async ready”.
🎬 Start recording key meetings & make them available async
Start recording your key meetings, get out of them all the persons that are not fully contributing to the discussion and invite them to watch the meeting async. It will instantly reduce the meeting FOMO in the team while promoting transparency.
Pro tips: make sure to flag key highlights in your recording to make content easier to scan. Solutions like Grain, tl;dv or Claap do a perfect job here.
🗺️ Prepare your meetings with a clear plan
Write up a draft listing the issue and proposal ahead of the meeting. Send it to the attendees in advance and discuss it sync.
Pro tips: ensuring that the team checks your draft prior to the meeting can be a challenge at first. In this case, here are two solutions to smoothen the transition. Option 1 is to follow Amazon’s internal process for the first 2 or 3 meetings, allocating the first 10 minutes of the meeting so that everyone can read the document and get up to date before the discussion. Option 2 is to record yourself while going through the draft as sharp video briefs boost engagement.
❓Ask meeting participants to list down their questions ahead of the meeting
After a couple of meetings, require all participants to write their questions and updates in the document, prior to the meeting. That way, the team will identify in advance the areas of discussion.
Pro tips: make sure not to accept new topics during the meeting that were not raised in the document in the first place. This will avoid digressions.
🔁 Answer questions asynchronously on the document
Lead discussions asynchronously in the document prior to the meeting. Keep the meeting as a safety net to address remaining complex discussions that could not be tackled asynchronously. After a while, you’ll realize that you won’t even need this safety net and start cleaning your agenda 🧹
✅ You’re ready. You have probably removed the need to attend 80% of your meetings
All these steps will make your meetings way more efficient, not only saving time for everyone in the group but also improving your decision process overall.
At Claap, this gradual transition smoothly enabled and sensitized the team. We now lead most of our discussions async and track them in Notion.
Everyone raising an issue or a discussion must now fill a template, including:
- The context & problem
- All resources related to the discussion
- The question
- A suggested solution
- The deadline and stakeholders following RAPID system
- A short video brief going through the discussion, so that anyone can consume it the way they want (either written or video)
When no agreement can be found asynchronously, we set up a meeting to have the final call. Yes, it still happens sometimes… 😊
I’m happy to share a template of this tracker if it can help you along the way.
Again, no-one asks you to go as far as we did. It’s your own journey: first steps might completely suit your own context and objectives. And it’s great, stop there!
Last tip of the day, note that alternatively, another approach is to mix sync and async in your different meetings. At Claap, for instance, we host roughly 70% of our All Hands async, but still keep 30% of them sync (and we record them!). This way, we combine the best of both worlds: team motivation and efficiency.
Time to conclude this article, I hope this will help you to define your own way toward asynchronous communication, and most of all, realize that beyond branded concepts, it’s all a question of test & learn.
By the way, I’m happy to hear about your personal experience in the comments, still happy to enrich our way 🙏
