Is Your Team Struggling with Remote Work? Try a Synchronous Sandwich!

Is your team struggling to stay focused during hours-long status meetings and presentation read-outs?

Are you inundated by hundred-message “quick question” email threads that could have been resolved with a five-minute conversation?

When it comes to making the most of remote work, many of us are getting things completely backwards. And it’s making our lives both stressful and boring.

The anatomy of a synchronous sandwich

Over the last five years of working remotely, I’ve been finding that many of the most successful team discussions I’ve facilitated fall into a similar pattern: an asynchronous pre-read to set expectations and encourage participation, a synchronous conversation to make decisions together, and then an asynchronous follow-up to capture outputs and align on next steps. For teams struggling with remote work, this “synchronous sandwich” approach provides a simple way to better utilize and unify both synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication.

You Survived another (Zoom) Meeting that Should have Been an Email — and Another Email that Should have Been a (Zoom) Meeting

Even before the widespread transition to working from home, many teams struggled with the proliferation of unnecessary meetings and the absence of necessary ones. Aside from spawning a cottage industry of novelty merchandise, these challenges left many of us wondering why we feel so burnt out after seemingly accomplishing so little. Simply put, most of us don’t have the energy or capacity to sit through bad meetings — nor do we have the energy or capacity to solve problems by responding to 10,000 “quick” emails.

Too many teams do the work asynchronously and share status synchronously — rather than collaborating synchronously and then sharing status asynchronously.

In this era of widespread remote work, as many of us find our energy and capacity stretched thinner than ever, these challenges are even more pressing. Our attention spans are fraying, our inboxes beckon constantly, and our boredom and frustration only seem to be magnified by the world-flattening aesthetics of a Zoom call. Simply put, we need a better way to structure our synchronous time while still providing people with the opportunity to prepare and digest information asynchronously. Enter the synchronous sandwich….

Mmmmm… Synchronous Sandwich

The idea behind a “synchronous sandwich” is simple: if you have important work to do that involves multiple participants and perspectives, break it down into three steps:

1. Send an asynchronous pre-read in advance of the meeting. This encourages participation from people who might need a little “offline” time to get their thoughts together, and orients the entire group to the questions and tasks at hand.
2. Have a time-boxed, synchronous meeting where you work together to make a decision or solve a problem. This allows you to work though both planned and emerging questions and decisions together.
3. Send an asynchronous follow-up with next steps and action items. This keeps the momentum going and makes sure that everybody who participated in the synchronous meeting sees and understand its outputs — even if they were distracted in the moment.

Here’s a template you can use to begin mapping out your own synchronous sandwich.

You can use this template to plan out your own synchronous sandwich!

Note that both the synchronous meeting and the asynchronous pre-read and follow-up are deliberately time-boxed. This has proven to be a key ingredient in a successful synchronous sandwich: making sure that you tell participants exactly how much of their time you are asking for, whether you are asking them to attend a meeting or to pre-read a document.

Your Sandwich May Vary

Here are a few things you might want to keep in mind as you begin experimenting with your own synchronous sandwiches:

• If you find that participants are not engaging with those asynchronous pre-reads, consider adding some time-boxed quiet reading time to the synchronous meat of your sandwich. Some teams I’ve worked with, for example, make a point of including 10 minutes of “pre-read and jot down questions” time at the beginning of their synchronous meetings.
• Note that well-facilitated synchronous meetings — especially well-facilitated remote synchronous meetings — take time and practice. Many organizations default to asynchronous communication precisely because synchronous meetings can be so challenging to structure and facilitate. Don’t give up if these meetings seem awkward and uncomfortable at first!
• Try breaking up long meetings (like yearly planning or quarterly roadmapping) into a set of smaller synchronous sandwiches, each with complementary inputs and outputs. For example, try starting your roadmapping session with a single, hour-long session to identify the mission-critical business milestones you must achieve in the next three, six, nine, and twelve months. Use the outputs of that section to plan and structure another hour-long session where you identify the different product or service offerings that might help you achieve those milestones, etc.
• Customize this approach to fit your team’s tools, roles, and cadences. Remember that the placeholder copy in the provided template is just that — a placeholder. Work with your team to customize both the content and the form of the template to suit your own tools, roles, and cadences. For example, many teams have chosen to use Slack or Teams as their primary channel for asynchronous communication. As with any other communication practice, the synchronous sandwich will be most valuable when you collaborate with your team to make it your own.

I’ve been finding myself structuring more and more of my remote meetings this way, and I hope you and your team find it helpful. I’m excited to continue experimenting with this format as on-site work resumes as well — after all, those unstructured day-long planning meetings were never much fun, even if I could distract myself with stale bagels and lukewarm coffee.

Happy sandwich-making!