The async-first starter kit
A modern approach to distributed work!
The async-first starter kit is a set of facilitated exercises that the distributed teams can go through together. The goal - to shift to a more asynchronous way of working.
The starter kit has five stages. Each of them will take you a few steps further in your "async-first" shift. Consider these stages and steps as sensible defaults. You're welcome to tweak these steps to your team's context. Use the links below to understand how to use the kit, or scroll down and read.
All the best!
The resources
First, let's familiarise you with all the resources in the kit. The most important of them all, is the Mural template you see below. Make a copy of it for your team. This is what you'll use to facilitate all your exercises.
Second, you'll need tools and templates. Keep these handy, because you'll need them at different stages of implementing your async-first shift.
This sheet will help you analyse your baseline results
These methods will help you go async-first, in small steps
These'll help you design your own baselining survey
Stage 1 - Align on goals
Before you decide to go async-first, you and your teammates must align on why to make this shift. As you do this, you must also discuss and agree on your most immediate goals. Here's what you'll do together in stage 1.
Figure out which benefits of being async-first matter to your team and why.
Agree on your 30-day goals. This is how you'll know you're making progress.
Decide how you'll celebrate if you achieve your goals. Celebration matters!
Reassure yourselves that you'll make this shift in small steps.
Stage 2 - Assess baseline data
In stage 2, you'll take take a stock of your team's maturity with distributed work. To do so, you'll use a maturity survey.
When everyone fills out the survey, you'll be able to:
assess your team's maturity using our score calculator;
reflect on your team's work practices and identify areas for improvement.
The starter-kit app, will help you with most tasks in this stage. You can provision a copy of the survey for each team you're responsible for, and you can also generate maturity scores in the app itself. We encourage you to try it out.
If you want to use a tool other than Google Forms, use the survey questions document to recreate the survey in your tool of choice. You'll find an example of a live survey here.
Stage 3 - Agree on the fundamentals
Stage 3 focusses on agreeing some basic conventions, so your team can collaborate effectively. Here's what you'll do together.
Sign up to the Ulysses pact - "Meetings are the last resort, not the first option".
Decide the response times for each communication channel. We've provided a sensible default to modify to your context.
Agree on the rules for meetings that you'll never break.
Stage 4 - Defrag your calendars
Async work is impossible if your day runs on a packed calendar. So in step 4, you'll do a clean up job.
Free up your personal and team calendars so you have large blocks of uninterrupted time, to work in a state of flow.
Classify all the meetings your teammates engage in, using the ConveRel quadrants.
Identify meetings that can move to being async either in part or in full.
Stage 5 - Plan your next steps
By step 5 you'd have achieved many of your 30 day goals. Here's all that you'll do in this last stage.
Divide and conquer tasks to create your team's handbook.
Craft your team's collaboration charter.
Identify potential next steps in your async-first shift, using the method stack.
You'll find our sample collaboration charter handy at this stage. Make a copy for yourself and use it if you need a starting point.