A Practical Approach to Asynchronous-First Work
A group of software engineer managers were discussing the challenges of attracting and hiring talented humans and then how best to integrate them into the work culture. The discussion quickly moved to remote work strategies and tactics for different time zones throughout the world. A lot of experiences were shared, and advice given.
In those experiences, it became apparent to the group that committing to a culture of asynchronous or synchronous work was far more important than any remote hiring strategy or tactic. It’s hard to see this construct when there are so many how-to-hybrid-work messages in the market right now. These messages are missing the deeper change your organization likely needs. How organizations perform asynchronous and synchronous work taps deep into an organization, becoming rooted in the culture. And by the way, in the managers’ conversation, asynchronous work was the winner, albeit as an often, misunderstood way of working.
Synchronous work is not bad, often, asynchronous-first workplaces have some needed synchronous work. Also, maybe you’ve tried working asynchronously in the past, and it didn’t work well with your culture. Whatever the reason or reasons for failure, work was probably getting extended longer than expected, and painfully so. Then working in 2020 changed the outlook of many (not all!) remote work skeptics. For the majority of knowledge workers, there was no other option at the time.
How organizations perform asynchronous and synchronous work taps deep into an organization, becoming rooted in the culture.
Look Beyond Hybrid and Remote Work Tactics to Outcomes and Culture
Like the engineer managers, I invite you to look beyond “tackling” hybrid work and rewriting polices, to instead seek the overall outcomes in the long run. Look past the best multi-time zone combinations or the best golden hours to establish team collaborations. A digital workflow is not necessarily an effective workflow. As a side note, just because California and British Columbia teams work well with New York and Ontario for one organization doesn’t mean it’s achievable everywhere. These decisions are truly contextual and need an inspect-and-adapt approach for best results.
Maybe you’re not experiencing any remote or hybrid dilemmas, but over the last few years, you’ve noticed a drift in your culture of effective collaboration and communication. For example, writing and documentation were once crisp but now our only mediocre, if you can find them at all. If any of these topics caused you to pause, or raise a red flag, you’re invited to read on. You may find some simple effective ways here to revive, or refresh the practices that worked well and possibly build on some new ones.
Specifically, I want to focus on creating the supporting strategy and organization environment changes needed for the culture to adopt an asynchronous-first workplace. Strategy paves the way by gaining some shared understanding about the what, why, and how of the changes you want to make. It may feel like time consuming work, but with an iterative approach, and a little executive sponsorship for any administrative speed bumps, you might be running faster than anticipated.
Some examples of an organization’s environment include: the way workers, prioritize and order work, how people collaborate, how investment decisions are made, how management leads (or commands) teams, how people are rewarded, and types of feedback loops. This environment is where culture grows. Corporate culture, then, is the outcome of its environment. This blog focuses on a few of the most impactful changes to support asynchronous-first work: collaboration and communication.
Just because California and British Columbia teams work well with New York and Ontario for one organization doesn’t mean it’s achievable everywhere. These decisions are truly contextual and need an inspect-and-adapt approach for best results.
Set the Stage for an Asynchronous-First Work Environment (Conditions for Change)
Many organizations make the mistake to hire, and then, after the fact, set up an asynchronous-first environment. Without preparing the work environment, those sought after, talented humans are now feeling left out, and eventually, disengaged. I’m not advocating to aim for perfect conditions before hiring talented humans. Rather, begin with the end in mind, and give your organization time to strategically prepare and use current context to do it. Then, you can work to hire outside time zones. Start with a simple vision. For example, one with asynchronous-first as a reason for flexible working hours that accelerate software delivery and customer value. Maybe include intent about the type of talent you desire and their well-being. Then, create a basic support structure for an asynchronous-first work environment to gain momentum, and then flourish. Work for incremental change, focused on the overall outcomes of the change. This work might sound like a large overwhelming change in the midst of all the other valuable work, you want to deliver, but with a consistent, iterative approach to changing your environment, and a sponsor with the right kind of access to push past road blocks, you will make real progress.
Define what Team Flow, Team Capacity, and Slack Mean in Your Organization
Invite and hopefully achieve a shared understanding of some key constructs about the change, and its outcomes. This work, with the right people in the room, will help you be successful with any change. It will also help management and teams understand the concept of team flow and capacity as part of your asynchronous-first strategy.
Team flow occurs when members are focused and involved in work, generating creative ideas and outcomes, without major or persistent roadblocks. The team feels good, and they are very productive.
The conditions for team flow are optimal when there is open time, or slack, for all the problems and opportunities, a team encounters. Any team of wonderful humans working at 100% capacity will not be able to sustain their pace long-term, maybe not even in the short term. Many teams find success when they plan for 80% of their capacity. A brand new team with brand, new stakeholders, or new product manager may want to be conservative and choose an even lower capacity until they learn how to work together, and begin to establish team flow. In my current job search, I have seen a breakdown of expected job function, and it is loaded to 100%, a very telling sign for applicants.
Team capacity can be a really difficult concept for stakeholder or management to accept; be proactive, and make the time to have strategic conversations about team flow and slack. And in those conversations, it’s best to also establish a common understanding of the word capacity. After all, this person or persons are likely the people with the positional power to make and appeal decisions about the team. Expect this topic to be a continual conversation.
Evaluate Synchronous Work
Review your organization’s synchronous work. Explore the environment in two ways: look for large parts of the organization that rely heavily on synchronous collaboration, and then also look for specific roles in need of synchronous work. This approach, and the data from it, will help you be more strategic. Looking for hotspots, and focusing on them first is more strategic than considering the entire organization, or mandating a sweeping change that won’t make sense for everyone. Once you have a view of the synchronous work, you can explore asynchronous-first work with a more strategic view.
This is the point where you are beginning to lead change, and can and should invite others to join you. While this blog it won’t specifically cover the topic of invitation based change, it’s worth calling out here as an important and effective approach. Try to keep the work lightweight and hypothesis-driven, focused on flow.
Look to prior data. Use a synchronous work lens to review feedback that has already been collected from recent surveys and retrospectives. Some findings will be obvious, but most are nuance, and will need more context and exploration.
On leading change, it will take some repetition of what you are doing and why, including expected outcomes. Don’t be surprised when you have to repeatedly define synchronous versus asynchronous work, how they are part of the culture, and the context of them in your organization.
Design Onboarding with Asynchronous-First focus
Make time for a quality on boarding process and experience that supports the asynchronous-first context. The approach and tactics will vary by organization, but one practice shines through for most: help the new talent, feel connected to the purpose and the people they will work with. Beyond the usual on boarding, checklist and documents, aim for intentional, human interaction. For example, hold a weekly retrospective for 3 to 4 weeks with the new person to get feedback on how things are going. What do they need? What would improve things for you right now? Make this time more about the experience of feeling a part of your asynchronous-first organization, and less about completing the on boarding checklist.
Use this momentum from the on boarding efforts to continue connecting teams to the vision and intent of the work. Our client experiences have shown us that there is usually room to improve this practice. The result of continually connecting people to vision include better decisions about the work, customer value, and more engaged people.
Design an Asynchronous-First Environment: Intentional and Frequent Documentation
Ensure all meetings have written documents that include agendas a meeting notes. Designed this documentation for easy consumption. The second and more important part of documentation is encouraging people to use it: anyone who didn’t attend can and should read the document to stay relevant. The messages to support this work or less about rules, and more focused on team, flow and better, valuable software delivery outcomes.
Consistent methods of collaboration and communication:
Be extremely consistent with when and how you collaborate and communicate, so that people know what to expect from collaboration, and where to look for documentation. For example, people need to know what to use for regular collaboration versus a point of escalation. While having some trust in collaboration and communication systems is needed for any kind of work, the stakes are far higher in asynchronous work. Invest in the best collaboration and communication practices, and invite people in those systems to support it in their daily work.
Take another look at your existing meetings (you do this at least annually, anyway, right?) What about collaboration does the team support? Why? Management often get added to legacy meetings from their predecessor, and over time these meetings lose their relevance. Meetings, and the value of them, are a separate topic! And, it is entirely connected to changing the environment to asynchronous.
Build it (or revise it) right. The vision for excellence in teams and software delivery and performance needs a modern workflow environment and asynchronous-first culture to support them.
Summary of Practical Asynchronous-First Ideas
Documentation and the use of it strongly supports team flow in the asynchronous-first environment. For example, one time zone or team begins their day with the notes that ended on the other time zones day.
Collaboration shouldn’t be all work. Make time to talk about regular life. Try coffee rooms, chats with a topic of the week, for example. All are organized with respect for culture and people.
Meet twice a year as an organization and as a team. Make it strategic and done in a way that provides momentum to team flow rather than interrupting it.
Pair team members and encourage them to figure out how to work together. Pairing and mob programming are examples of proven collaboration, in all kinds of context. The hard part is getting others to see the value in consistently delivering it.
This is where sharing vision repeatedly can help.
Also, look to your feedback, loops, such as a team, retrospective, and make asynchronous-first improvements are recurring topic.
Conclusion
To remain competitive and relevant, in the market, software delivery demands more than just excellence and what you deliver. The vision for excellence in teams and software delivery and performance needs a modern workflow environment and asynchronous-first culture to support them. An asynchronous-first culture done well gives organizations an incredible advantage in talent and delivery strategies. As with any change or all-out transformation, the hard part is the transition to get there
Changing a work environment to build an effective asynchronous-first culture will take persistence and time, and, it is entirely worth it.