We’re not droids, are we?
Work shouldn't feel mechanical. To make asynchronous work effective, you need to punctuate it with intentional, meaningful, synchronous interactions. Here are a few actions I recommend.
- Promote effective facilitation by helping people on your team build these skills.
- Encourage people to build strong relationships during work hours. Leaving it for after-hours puts all the onus on your employees.
- Facilitate connection through team activities and IRL (in real life) meetups. Small avenues like an open gratitude channel on IM, can go a long way.
- Don't let work consume your people's lives. The relationships they have outside work are arguably even more important. Do your bit to support them by fostering work life balance.
“It’s against my programming…”, says C3PO, a droid in George Lucas’ epic Star Wars saga. There are rules and there are rules. While droids can follow rules consistently, humans are noisy by default. Routines make us more efficient, but we don’t mind breaking out of those routines occasionally. If only to lend variety to our work lives.
Asynchronous work gives you quiet, uninterrupted time to do deep work, and has many benefits for employees and employers alike. There are some of us who wouldn’t mind; day after day; to just pick up work from a task board, give it a good hard crack and to close our laptop when the day ends, so we can go back to our lives. And then there are those of us, who crave the sense of connection with other people. These differences exist across a spectrum, of course - from the most reclusive to the most gregarious of us all. That’s what separates humans from droids, doesn’t it? We don’t run from a common program.
When you introduce asynchronous work to your team, you’ll need to respect these differences between people. You don’t want work to feel mechanical and for people to feel like robots. The team should be able to balance efficiency at work with their sense of being human. With that sentiment, let me share three secrets to a productive, async-first way of working.
The team should be able to distinguish between the value they get from synchronous and asynchronous interactions, respectively.
A critical mass of people on the team need to know how to conduct synchronous interactions effectively.
And last, everyone needs to run with “intention and attention”, as my friend Amy Luckey likes to advise.
So, in today’s post I want to take a detour from “async” and talk about the “sync”. To be even more specific - I want to show you how being intentional about synchronous communication can help you build a tightly knit async-first team. Let’s get right into it.
Cultivate effective facilitation skills
Asynchronous work is not anti-meeting. It’s about meetings as the last resort, and not the first option. The communication approach in our teams needs a sense of balance. You’ve also seen the ConveRel quadrants. There are situations where we need to “sync-up”. The trouble is, that the world of work has a poor track record with meetings.
65%
said meetings keep them from completing their own work
71%
said meetings are unproductive and inefficient
64%
said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking
62%
said meetings don’t bring the team closer
Harvard business review survey of 182 managers
So, the key is to make these sync-ups productive and not feel like a drain on our time. That means your team needs to follow meeting best practices, day in and day out. Some of this is harder than it sounds. It needs discipline. There’s also the matter of skill.
When you get intentional about the meetings you have, the stakes for each meeting will be quite high. This may sound like a terrible thing, but it isn't. Meetings are costly activities, so the stakes better be high. Skilled facilitators can handle these high stakes situations and help you make the most of your synchronous interactions.
Now I don’t mean that you need to hire a facilitator for every meeting you have. You can do that for a workshop or two, but otherwise, it’s impractical. You can, however, staff each team in a way that it has at least one or two people who are passionate about facilitation. They don’t need to be experts. Even keen learners will do. Support their interest by helping them learn these skills. Sponsor their training if possible. Find them a mentor if you can. Give them the opportunity to practise their skills by asking them to plan and lead the few team meetings you have. Encourage them to try new patterns and formats for meetings and workshops so they expand their facilitation toolkit.
When people take care to design and run meetings effectively, it has a few effects.
You’ll get the value you expect from these interactions - a sense of connectedness, speed, a broad range of ideas.
Your facilitators will keep raising the bar for what makes up an effective meeting.
People will learn from the facilitators and take away inspiration to build their own facilitation skills.
If you’re lucky, the facilitators you find at the start may not be the only facilitators on the team. As people learn from each other, and as you set the standard for effective meetings, other people on the team will step up and lead. Wouldn’t that be a great side-effect?
Encourage strong relationships
Iwo Szapar - founder, Remote-how
“You want teams spread across the globe to feel like their colleagues are as close as the next desk. That means you’ve got to prioritise efforts to build and maintain those personal connections.”
What are we, if not for the relationships we have in the world? Many of us seek these relationships at work. To tell you the truth, I found the love of my life at work! As did many of my colleagues. While I’m not for a moment suggesting that everyone needs to experience workplace romance, I just want to say that work is the focal point for many of the relationships we have.
When I used to go to the office, I’d sit at a large table with my teammates. It was noisy and distracting, so I admit I wasn’t very efficient with my work. However, I ended up getting to know other colleagues in this setting without a conscious effort on my part. In a remote setup, I’ve had to be intentional about how I cultivate relationships. Each of us has probably crafted their own strategy around this. For example, I enjoy catching up with people 1:1. These are mostly freewheeling, agenda free meetings. I’ve also met many of my colleagues in person, for lunch or dinner or a coffee. My wife and I often invite our colleagues home - and some of our co-workers have even stayed over at our place. Your comfort level and your strategies will vary. What’s helped me, is to know that my employers encourage these relationships. They see the value in building camaraderie.
If you too value such camaraderie amongst your team members, then don’t just leave everything to after-hours. That’s a copout, and it puts the entire onus of relationship building on the employees. Remember, when we worked together in the office, we didn’t spend all eight hours on heads-down work. We punctuated work with small talk, banter, humour, coffee breaks and whatnot. No one accounted for that time or the time we lost to an interrupted workplace. Let’s recognise that going async gives you time for deep, uninterrupted work. The corollary to that is that most people can’t sustain over four hours of deep work each day. That’s a maximum of 20 hours each week! It’s ok then, to leave some slack in your system so people can use it to build relationships. Encourage it explicitly.
Facilitate connection
It’s not enough to just encourage people to build relationships. You and your team must create the context and the opportunities for people to connect with each other. Managers can, for a start, set an example by conducting regular 1:1 meetings. Peer 1:1s will be different, but when managers pay attention to their 1:1s it legitimises the value of such interactions.
Think about other ways to bring the warmth back in your work. We’ve already discussed the value of team activities. Figure out a regular cadence. By now you also know why you should sponsor such activities including IRL(in real life) team retreats.
And don’t forget to facilitate the tiny interactions that can put a smile on people’s faces. For example, one of my clients had a “rock stars” channel on their Slack instance. If you noticed anyone do anything nice at work, this was the place to thank them openly. Guilty as charged - it’s the one Slack channel I couldn’t stop scrolling through. A channel such as this takes little effort to set up. When you make it open, the warmth is infectious. Take the lead by thanking and recognising people on these channels. No contribution should be too small to recognise, if it reiterates your values and your purpose.
Having said all this, it’s worth recognising the tension between work and life. Many years back companies in the valley started the trend of creating fancy offices with many facilities - from massages to bowling alleys and from free food to fitness centres. Inviting as they were, these perks had a hidden purpose - to encourage employees to stay at work longer. So yes, people built great friendships at work, but often at the cost of relationships outside work and at the cost of their personal lives. It wasn’t about work life balance anymore. It was about work-life “integration”- a concept I find rather insidious, albeit in hindsight.
The pandemic changed that. Many people have re-evaluated their priorities in the last few years. To some of us the value of our friends outside work, our family, our neighbourhood, our community; has become clear. Several of us want our job to fit into our life more than the other way around. Everyone doesn’t need to or even want to seek social connection just at work. That’s ok. Encourage people to build connections at work and facilitate this all you want, but also encourage them to build friendships and relationships outside work. We may choose not to see it, but people’s jobs usually last just a few years in their lives. The relationships they build are more long lasting. We don’t want to be droids at work. But we sure don’t want to be droids in our personal lives either.