The one about asynchronous communication
When Ross complains about his week of meetings, Rachel teaches him the benefits of asynchronous communication.
Friday evening, Rachel and Ross are sharing a virtual beer on Google Meet.
ROSS: What a week! I spent so much time at work video conferencing that I almost turned down your invitation for a virtual beer.
RACHEL: (Laughing) Thanks for being honest! Why are you spending so much time on conference calls?
ROSS: Because of the Covid-19 situation, everybody is working from home and all the meetings have been turned into online conference calls. Since I have a lot of meetings, I now spend my days staring at people on my computer.
RACHEL: But, why do you have so many meetings?
ROSS: Well, I’ve always spent most of my time in meetings. (Taking a long sip from his beer) I’m a manager after all!
RACHEL: (Laughing) Since these online meetings give you headaches, why don’t you reduce them?
ROSS: I don’t see how I can do my job without meetings. For example, we have daily stand up meetings every morning. Hard to skip those!
RACHEL: Have you tried asynchronous stand up meetings?
Have you tried asynchronous stand up meetings?
ROSS: What do you mean? We use stand up meetings to share information and trigger follow-up conversations. How can we synchronize asynchronously?
RACHEL: In my team, we’ve started asynchronous daily stand-ups by posting our updates on the team’s Slack channel every morning.
ROSS: Really? How does it work?
RACHEL: Well, Joey set up a daily reminder with a bot and everyone shares their updates in a thread. I send mine early because I’m an early bird and I read my coworkers’ after my morning yoga class. And if I have questions, we start a conversation in a second thread.
ROSS: Interesting, I guess it saves time as well. Our stand up meetings have been dragging lately because we wait for everyone to tune in before starting. I’ll suggest this asynchronous format to the team on Monday.
RACHEL: See, you don’t need meetings to synchronize ;)
ROSS: OK, I concede that you don’t need meetings to share information. But you definitely need them to make decisions.
RACHEL: Not really. Have you heard of a decider?
ROSS No, what’s that?
RACHEL: It’s a protocol created by Jim and Michele McCarthy. It’s very useful to move a group discussion towards a decision.
ROSS: Actually, I’ve already used this “rock-paper-scissors” way of voting. And I know that you definitely need to vote at the same time to avoid being influenced by other people’s votes.
RACHEL: You are right, people need to vote independently from one another but recently we’ve started to use a polling application to run our deciders asynchronously. It works pretty well. The proposer creates a poll with a suggestion and a deadline. When everyone has voted, we see the results.
ROSS: What if someone disagrees with the proposal? Don’t you need to discuss?
RACHEL: If someone disagrees, we discuss in a thread and we organize a new decider on an improved suggestion.
ROSS: Since everything is asynchronous, doesn’t it take forever to make a decision? I mean, a meeting would be much faster, don’t you think?
RACHEL: Not really :) First, you need time to plan the meeting. And if you need several participants, it can become a headache to identify a shared time slot. Then the meeting itself, at least 30 minutes if you are lucky. And don’t forget the cost if you add up all the hours spent in the meeting. You know how managers’ hourly rates are pretty hefty ;)
ROSS: You are right, I’ve been in these long costly meetings :)
RACHEL: Asynchronous communication has many benefits, you know. It helps to build longer periods of uninterrupted focus time by reducing the number of meetings, it documents conversations allowing people to catch up when they are available and it works well with a remote work environment.
Asynchronous communication has many benefits. It helps to build longer periods of uninterrupted focus time by reducing the number of meetings, it documents conversations allowing people to catch up when they are available and it works well with a remote work environment.
ROSS: So, no more meetings at your work?
RACHEL: Of course we still have meetings. There are many cases where real-time conversations are better than asynchronous communication.
ROSS: Which ones for example?
RACHEL To meet new people and start new relationships, to celebrate success, to organize retrospectives, to have difficult conversations, and for casual bonding.
Use synchronous meetings to meet new people and start new relationships, to celebrate success, to organize retrospectives, to have difficult conversations, and for casual bonding.
ROSS: (Pausing for a second) That makes sense. Thanks for the tips Rachel, I’ll start to use asynchronous communication more.
RACHEL: You are welcome. But you know you don’t have to respond right away to every single email and message you receive, right?
ROSS: What!? Let me grab another beer, I think I’ll need it…
To be continued in another episode…
