Balancing sync and async communication in the remote work era — Part 1
Let’s set the stage. In a distributed work environment, getting the balance between synchronous and asynchronous communication is difficult. This post discusses my experience during my career in tech around the nuances of both sync/async communication forms, exploring their benefits, trade-offs, and stating strategies to help optimise meetings.
Sync communication
- ✅ Fast nourishment
- ✅ Perishable
- ✅ Easily digestible (for most)
Async communication
- ✅ Harder to produce
- ✅ Strong and potent
- ✅ Lasts a very long time
A recap
But we’re already using asynchronous communications and tooling
Communication isn’t generally benchmarked in companies and their application and efficiency are not known. Businesses are often so focused on delivering value for customers or stakeholders that the tools we use to do that aren’t scrutinised.
Many of us thought, and correctly believed for a short time, that working remotely would enable us to concentrate, no noise or interruptions we thought! What in reality happened was that the noise and interruptions followed in the form of meetings. It’s a behavioural problem, it’s us.
Let’s recap the tradeoffs and benefits for meetings. This isn’t an exhaustive list but it’s good to remind ourselves of some:
- 👌 Easy: This isn’t a direct flaw, it’s culture / behaviour one, but it’s worth restating. In a distributed company they are the easiest communication option, making them prone to misuse.
- ️ 🗣 Loudness: In decisions we want the best idea to win, not the loudest voice, with the nature of meetings that’s a hard thing to achieve, not everyone wants to voice their opinions due to nature, language, or simply needing to articulate, it’s not conducive to being inclusive.
- 💸 Can be expensive: Does the cost of the time the meeting requires create enough value to justify itself? There’s also opportunity costs here too, is this delaying you from working on something with higher value?
- 🚀 Quick decisions: The quality of our decisions depends upon the quality of our thoughts. When we’re optimising for fast thinking via communicating in a synchronous manner, it’s not possible to ponder and think deeply, we use our experience which is biassed based on what we’ve done before.
- 👥 Inclusivity: Even if you’re not part of a conversation, having to translate what people are saying in a language you’ve adopted whilst trying to put together coherent thoughts is, I have been told, incredibly difficult.
A few benefits for meetings include:
- 🔗 Connection: Working for extended periods in isolation whilst offering focus can be at the detriment of why we’re doing what we’re doing in the first place. Meetings remind us of why, our mission, and wanting to support and achieve outcomes as a collective.
- 🎯 Focusing on now: If something blows up, or a critical decision needs to be made, meetings make an excellent tool to agree a course of action efficiently.
There’s one other large area which has been intentionally missed because it can be both a strength and detriment which is breadth / depth.
Meeting etiquette — evolve meetings
We could immediately descend into async ways of communication and move some of our existing communications to leverage async, however there’s an issue that extends past simply taking action.
Adopting a different communication style isn’t something that’s easy, we need strong relationships in the team, understanding and agreement in ways of working, resolving ceremonies, having conversations with stakeholders and the list goes on. Instead, let’s look at first improving what’s already there.
- ❌ No agenda, no attenda: If you get invited to a meeting which doesn’t have an agenda, this would imply that the objectives and outcomes for this meeting haven’t been thought about. Sure, the creator could have forgotten, but encouraging the habit by asking for an agenda forces the exercise of thinking about the meetings purpose.
- 🍲 Preparation: Share any artifacts such as presentations, documents or video. Rather than the first half of the meeting being trying to understand the problem or scenario, instead it can start with clarifying questions, enabling better, faster output.
- 📚 Start with information: If people aren’t use to reading documents before meetings, Jeff Bezos has spoken about a technique, referring to it as “The smartest thing we ever did at Amazon”. This involves meeting attendees spending the first 5–10 minutes of each meeting reading a well prepared memo, everyone in the meeting does this and then the verbal part of the meetings begins.
- ⏺️ Allow thought recording: Allowing people to write their thoughts in a collaborative document can help those contribute to the discussion that otherwise wouldn’t. There’s incredible benefits for such a simple action, greater inclusion and stronger decision output due to a greater collective.
- 📃 Document the outcomes: This is a no brainer, not only does this have all the async benefits like write once, read by many but it’s incredibly important to give people context of moving forward on a decision if they’re unable to attend. It’s more efficient than recording a meeting unless verbatim of what happened is required.
You may have noticed something about these points, each one leverages async communications in some manner, we’re addressing some of the weaknesses of sync by applying async tools and patterns.
The scheduled meetings
What I’ve observed happening over time is the boiling frog. You’ll be involved in initiatives over your career which lead to scheduled meetings. This slowly reduces the amount of hours available in your working week and before you know it, a third of your working hours are eaten by scheduled meetings! You’re metaphorically boiling alive without realising it, as the number of working hours available for tasks gradually decreases.
It’s an outdated viewpoint that being in meetings therefore means you’re busy, thus in turn being productive. So, how to weed our calendars? Here’s what I’ve found useful:
- 📰 Importance of an agenda: We’ve already covered this above, what exactly is the meeting’s purpose? Is it just transferring information? Well that sound like documenting would be a great fit here or a tool to post and distribute status updates.
- 🙆 Participation: How often do you actively participate in the meeting? Are you just attending the meeting because it’s in your calendar and that’s what you’re suppose to do?
- 👍 Feedback: If attendance is not mandated, are you passionate about the topic? Is it making you better? Give feedback to meeting owner if you’re thinking about removing from your calendar first.
All scheduled meetings are not bad, far from it. However, we need to be objective again. Many long running scheduled meetings lose their impact and deliver marginal value over time, it’s easy to diverge from the initial intent. Many companies do forms of meeting resets to combat this problem.
Next time ⏭️
We’ll be exploring what async looks like for ceremonies and some of the issues around ‘async’ tooling!
