Asynchronous work is when people in the organization can get work done on their own, without relying on immediate communication with colleagues or managers.
In my tenure at Amazon. I heard him say many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. When you view effective communication across groups as a “defect”, the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones
– Working Backwards, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Even office-based companies have come to value uninterrupted stretches of time for focused work, often implemented through policies such as meeting-free days. Many have also experienced how communication delays between offices or even between different office floors can hurt productivity. Remote work makes effective asynchronous work even more essential and unlocks strengths uniquely available to distributed organizations.
Benefits for remote organizations from effective asynchronous work include
- Enables having people in a wider range of time zones to make hiring and team composition eaiser.
- Support commitments are easier to meet when teams are distributed across time zones. Instead of phones waking on-call staff in the middle of the night, someone working different hours may be able to respond to incidents.
- People plan their hours and communications better. A delay in a reply does not as easily waste the remainder of a work day for the sender.
- Teams with irregular hours become more productive. Many employees will enjoy more flexibility in structuring their days. Effective asynchronous work means teams do not get blocked by parents that pick up children in the afternoon and put in hours after the children have been put to bed.
Overlap
Many companies prefer some overlap between work hours for members in a team. Remote enterprises that have yet to adopt asynchronous work may require team members to work during office hours in time zones that are +/- 1 hour from each other, which limits recruiting and team composition and does not increase availability to meet support commitments.
Companies with greater emphasis on asynchronous processes often still expect 4 or 2 hours overlap in employee work days, though in practice this tends to become less rigid as teams decide how and how often they need to communicate directly.
Overcommunicate
A key to effective asynchronous work is to overcommunicate, make as much information as possible available for when people are working on their own.
Use asynchronous communication channels like Slack or E-mail and plan your communication around not expecting immediate responses. Provide more context and clarity than one would in an office conversation. Never send Slack messages consisting only of “hi!”, always include the question or topic you want to discuss and any necessary context to enable a later response.
Also make plans and materials widely available to all employees at the enterprise so people know where to find them and have the appropriate access permissions.
Focus on output
It has long been a lazy management practice to measure office presence over actual output, but moving to remote and especially asynchronous remote work makes it even more important to focus on what gets done. This often requires more knowledge of the work by the managers, or at least greater clarity around goals.
While this may sound challenging, it’s a worthy goal for any organization as managers with greater domain knowledge lead to higher employee satisfaction. Adopting remote and asynchronous work can sharpen the productivity of stale organizations by challenging weak points that often get overlooked in co-located office settings.
