Structuring your asynchronous communication

“Open offices” became popular without really studying what affect they would have. Similarly there is a tendency to adopt communication tools without paying much attention to results. Promoting your digital collaboration to first class citizen is more involved than just taking the synchronous communication you were going to have, writing it down in a channel or card and waiting an indeterminate amount of time for a response. That’s because the idea behind most asynchronous productivity tools is too simple:

It is better to concentrate on what you’re doing until you produce results, than to immediately respond to messages.

But what if you can’t make further progress without communication?

In that case, in an asynchronous world, the following is needed:

1. A way to advertise you’re “blocked”

2. A mechanism to approve alternative tasks

3. The ability to quickly see if someone has alternate work they can be doing

In other words, you need structured communication. Structured communication is about having a context for a conversation that can be quickly understood. Typically, the reason everyone wants a response in real time is not knowing or being able to reduce the cost of delayed response. Clearly you can’t say, “Hey don’t worry about responding quickly anymore.” as you’re still missing out on important information.

For instance if you have a process that gives out assignments every two weeks and try to go full asynchronous communication, then its only a matter of time before someone has nothing to do. After that happens a few times a “daily stand-up” is introduced. Synchronous communication isn’t the problem; its the attempted solution.

Whether or not you can take breaks during a long email thread is important but not sufficient. With two or three of those unstructured conversations going at once its more likely your actual work just becomes an interruption from your on going collaboration.

Nor can use one tool for things that need quick response and another for things that can wait. Unless your colleagues have amazing discipline, all things will need a quick response.

There are two realistic solutions to constantly devolving to synchronous methods:

1. Messages to be conveyed with context so that the reader can quickly decide what needs to be done and how soon.
2. Correctly assessing the costs of synchronous communication. Meetings cost time and money, and that cost should be weighed against the business benefit.

Tips for practical implementation

Any scheduled daily or weekly meeting should be seen as a signal that your asynchronous communication is not structured enough. If the task keeps coming up, it needs to part of the asynchronous process plan of record. Synchronous time (meetings) should be used when that plan fails. The best approach is very planned, structured asynchronous communication backed up by ad hoc, unstructured synchronous communication; the opposite of what many teams are practicing.

For example, take a support ticket, where the asynchronous collaboration is first class:

• It has a context at the top including resolved or not.
• It provides some built in workflow for ticket assignment that does not require synchronous communication.
• It usually employs smart notifications to make sure the ticket gets assigned and the right people are kept up to date.
• Synchronous communication, scheduling a quick call, only happens if the asynchronous communication wasn’t enough and even then everything established in structured communication keeps the call short.

Its great that we are now paying more attention to whether communication is synchronous or not but not if we use it as an excuse to over simplify. We invite you to check out Uclusion for free to see a tool with structured asynchronous communication.