Some experts tell that asynchronous communication is the future of the work. Other leaders say that we can’t refuse synchronous communication. Who’s right? 

In this article, you will find a complete guide on different ways of team communication and practical examples. 

Here are the main topics of the article:

• Communication challenges for remote teams
• Synchronous vs Asynchronous communication
  • What is synchronous communication?
  • What is asynchronous communication?
  • Pros and cons of synchronous communication
  • Pros and cons of asynchronous communication
• Best practices for synchronous communication
• Best practices for asynchronous communication
• Tools for synchronous and asynchronous communication
• How to use both types of communication

The main goal of this article is to give you best practices and examples of effective communication to increase productivity in your team.

The story about Mike

To understand better what should you use, let me tell you a short story. 

Meet Mike – a software developer in a tech company. He is a nice guy who loves to solve interesting projects.

He should deploy a new feature today – create a new onboarding process. He started to work on it in the morning. He is closed to complete the first piece of work – creating a database structure. 

At that moment, Mary is calling him.

She asks Mike to extend the plan to one of the clients who want to test their product before payment. It doesn’t take a lot of time and Mike helps. Mary is happy. 

Mike comes back to his main work. It takes some time to remember his last step and the main issue he tried to solve. 

He doesn’t manage to finish the first part of work because of the team meeting at noon. He jumps on a Zoom call to discuss current challenges with the engineering team.  

The meeting takes more time than he expected. He plans to continue his work after lunch. 

Fortunately, he finishes the database structure after lunch. It’s time to write backend logic for the new feature. 

Suddenly his manager Derrick is calling him. Their main clients requested to develop the new feature and it’s the main priority now. Erick explains to him how it should work and asks him when Mike will finish the current task to start working on this new feature.

Mike has a new deadline to finish the initial task. Anxiety is growing because he understands that he will not deploy the new onboarding in a time-bound manner. He is still working on the second part of this feature.

He tried to learn more about time management but it didn’t help him. He often doesn’t complete his work in a time-bound manner.

The end of the story. 

Communication challenges for remote teams

The real problem with Mike is not his time management skills. It’s about communication. 

Remote teams are facing main communication challenges:

• Loneliness and lack of human interaction. It’s not a direct communication challenge. However, it’s important to mention that if you don’t have a lot of friends or family members, it’s easy to feel isolated. 

How to solve it? 

If you feel lonely, try to work from cafes or cowering spaces. Also, participate in different evening events to meet new people. 

• Interruptions: coworkers, family, pets, etc. 
  It’s mostly the problem of synchronous communication. And we will talk about it later.

• Misunderstanding. 
  Remote work requires extra communication. It’s easy to misunderstand what your coworkers said in a messenger.

How to solve it?

Clarifying everything. Be proactive in speaking up. And make it a habit in your team.

• Wrong communication processes 

Marcelo Lebre wrote a great article on why companies should be working asynchronously 

Usually, companies work synchronously where you do everything step by step. The main bottleneck of the waterfall process defines by the weakest part. Total speed depends on the speed of the slowest process in the workflow. 

It’s the waterfall way of product development. To finish the work, a team should complete 3 projects step by step (A, B, C).

He showed that by separating tasks A, B, and C in (A1, A2, A3, B1, etc.) they achieved three times as many deploys as in the previous example. This methodology allows them to multiplex tasks, combining them to produce results faster.

And the communication was a crucial part of their improvement at work. Meetings are one of the expensive tools in the company and you should use them wisely. 

And here is the common way of communication in a remote team. Developers are distracted in the meeting and real-time communication. As the result, their productivity is low.

In this example, communication is based on good documentation and text answers. It increases efficiency.

Let’s talk about 2 types of communication.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous communication

In the world of remote work, there are 2 types of communication: 

• Synchronous communication
• Asynchronous communication

Let’s talk about each of the ways of communication.

What is synchronous communication?

Synchronous communication – real-time communication when you expect to get an answer at the same moment in time. It’s a usual way to communicate for many companies. Think about meetings and calls. 

Synchronous communication examples

• Live meetings
• Phone call
• Zoom, Skype, etc
• Messengers when you reply in real-time

What is asynchronous communication?

Asynchronous communication – when you send the message and don’t expect to get an immediate answer. Think about email. 

Asynchronous communication examples

• Email
• Ticket in help desk system
• Project management tools: Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc
• Messengers: Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc (the worst example for async communication because people still is waiting for a fast answer in the messenger)
• Focus (for status updates, stands, 1:1 meetings, etc)

The main difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication is the response time. 

Pros and cons of synchronous communication

Pros

• Fast replies. Real-time communication allows us to get answers almost instantly.
• Deep communication. You can communicate deeply and understand better your partner.
• Build emotional rapport. Messages and emails can’t build strong connections like a real-time conversation.

Cons

• Continuous distraction. Any brainwork requires high concentration and focus. There were a lot of researches on this topic – how much time do we need to get back to work after distraction. Numbers are different, but the result is the same. It takes a lot of time and our energy to get back to work and repair the previous level of productivity. 
• As the result, it increases stress. The person achieves less when teammates distract him/her during the workday. We spend more energy to make up for a lost time. Usually, it increases the level of stress. And it leads us to burnout.
• It takes a lot of time. Meetings are an expensive tool for a company. Especially, team meetings with 4 and more participants. 
• Reducing the quality of conversations and answers. During a call or a meeting, sometimes you don’t have enough time to think deeply about the best answer. As there result, you make not the best solutions.

Synchronous communication works great for:

• Brainstorm or creative work. Synchronous communication is great for teamwork when you need to brainstorm new ideas.
• Strategy sessions or problem-solving sessions. Meetings with rapidly changing context where you need the full attention of all participants at the same time.
• One-on-one meetings. It’s crucial to build an emotional connection to understand all unclear moments on one on one meetings. And synchronous communication is the best way to do it.
• Sales calls. 
• Onboarding new employees.

Pros and cons of asynchronous communication

Pros

• No distraction. Nobody calls you and you can do more focused work. Nobody distracts you during eating another “Pomodoro”. Increase productivity. You better plan the work. Reduce stress.
• Better answers. You can better formulate thoughts in the written mode. Also, it helps to document processes. Mike would like it.
• Communication is saved. You can think more before answer. As the result, you get better answers. And it’s written answers that you can use in FAQ then.
• Better goals. Asynchronous communication requires thinking twice and better formulate goals or tasks. 
• You can work from different time zones and it’s not necessary to be in the same place.  

Cons

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

Asynchronous communication works great for:

• Daily check-ins and weekly updates
• FYIs and process documentation
• Meeting about meeting
• Status updates
• Feedback requests
• Polls 

Best practices for synchronous communication

Prepare agenda

Good agenda is 50% of a successful meeting. Align everyone before the meeting by created a clear agenda. Everyone should be on the same page and understand why you meet and what you want to achieve at the end of the meeting.

Ask feedback

Ask for instant feedback after the meeting. What can you improve? It’s a good time to understand what you can improve by asking for feedback. 

Build personal connection

Focus on personal connection. Real-time communication allows building strong emotional rapport. Use it. Don’t waste your time and build strong relationships with your team.

Best practices for asynchronous communication

Plan and prepare

Urgent tasks and things that should have done yesterday are not compatible with asynchronous communication. It’s ok if you have a rush job. However, it’s not good, if you are always in rush. That’s why it’s crucial to be organized.

Bad example	Good Example
Hey, are you here? Help! Please send me analytics of the Product that you showed a month ago at the marketing meeting.	Hey Mary, I’m creating a presentation for partners about the Product for SMB.  I’m looking for Product analytics in 2019: – unique visitors – amount of orders, average check Could you please send me it until tomorrow evening?

Communicate clearly

Formulate each request clear. Your coworkers should have a minimum amount of questions. Add important details. Describe the goal.

Formulate meeting summary and be responsible for results

These tools we use to not distract each other in the team:

• Focus: for goal setting, daily check-ins, weekly updates, and 1-on-1s meeting
• Github: to maintain the software
• Dropbox: for documents and files
• Google Docs: for documents and spreadsheets
• Slack: for urgent communication 
• Zoom: for video calls

How to communicate?

How should you run communication now? You can’t do only synchronous or asynchronous communication. The right answer is the balance.

You should identify things that you want to keep running synchronously. We recommend you keep only these type of synchronous meetings:

• Sales calls.
• Brainstorm or creative work.
• Strategy sessions or problem-solving sessions.
• One-on-one meetings.
• Onboarding new employees.

Other things you can run asynchronously.

The ratio between synchronous and asynchronous communications should be 20/80.

How we do it in Focus

Here is our communication workflow in Focus. Quick note, we eat our own dog food and use Focus for several processes. You can use any other tools. The main goal of this example is to show you how you can organize communication in your company.

Quarterly meetings:

• Setting objectives: Zoom + Focus
  We run several real-time meeting on Zoom to create OKRs and use Focus to save them. You can read more about OKRs here.

• OKRs Retrospectives: Zoom + Focus
  The same process

• Quarterly team recaps: Slack
• Strategy session: Zoom

Monthly meetings:

• Monthly team recap and announcements: Slack (+Zoom, if it’s necessary)

Weekly meetings:

• Weekly updates: Focus
• 1-on-1 meetings: Zoom + Focus
• Sales call: Zoom

Daily meetings:

• Daily check-ins: Focus

Occasional meetings: 

• Brainstorm session: Zoom
• Urgent meetings: Zoom
• Onboarding new employee: Zoom

In this article, you can get more guidelines on how to run asynchronous meetings.

Conclusion

Building the right way of communication in the company is crucial. It allows you to achieve more and don’t feel anxiety because of unaccomplished things. Distraction and the lack of the right processes affect not only team productivity but also employee burnout. 

Using tips and examples from this guide, you will be able to improve processes in your company. Set the right habits for synchronous and asynchronous communications to work better. And join Focus to try async check-ins, updates, and other forms of asynchronous communication. 

P.S. All names and events are fictitious. Any coincidences with characters and facts from real life are pure coincidences.

The post Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication: Complete Guide For Remote Teams appeared first on Focus.

Stop wasting your time on team meetings. Asynchronous communication is one of the core principles why remote work is effective. 

A growing number of remote companies last year proved dozens of reports about remote work. Employee productivity increases during work from home. For example, Stanford’s research and Cisco’s study told the same.

Why?

Asynchronous communication.

In this article, we will talk about the most important things that make teams’ communication productive:

• What is asynchronous and synchronous communications
• Benefits of asynchronous meetings
• Why you should focus on asynchronous meetings (and should you do it?)
• When you should use synchronous communication (and why you can’t eliminate it)
• 3 steps how to run effective meetings 
• Examples of meetings for asynchronous and synchronous communication
• How to balance both types of communication: status meeting example

Seems a lot? Yeah, true. However, it’s a short guide on how to build communication in your team to increase productivity.

Let’s start with the basics.

What’s asynchronous communication?

Asynchronous communication is a way of communication when you don’t expect to get an immediate answer to your message. For example, email is asynchronous communication.

As opposite, synchronous communication is communication when the recipient is waiting for an immediate answer. The real-time meeting is an example of pure synchronous communication.

However, digital forms of communication might be synchronous too. For example, real-time answering in a messenger becomes synchronous. 

If you want to learn more about both types of communication, you can read our article What is Asynchronous Communication?

Benefits of asynchronous communication?

Better control of the time. As the result, employees are more happier and productive. Employees have almost full control over how to plan their day and schedule. Some of them prefer to work at night, others like to work in the morning. Also, it helps to find a better work-life balance because employees might spend mornings with their children and do work later.

Better quality of communication. Asynchronous communication is slower. However, many companies admit that the quality of communication is higher. People learn to discuss the topic without empty conversations. They have time to think about a question and give a deep and thoughtful answer. 

Better planning = less stress. People learn how to plan like a pro because now they can’t do everything at the last minute. They can’t send ASAP messages to co-workers because response takes time. It leads us to more effective scheduling to complete everything according to the plans. It reduces pressure and the job is done in a better way.

Deep work by default. It’s not necessary to jump on Slack or another communication tool to check messages each hour. Co-workers can check messages 1-3 times per day and get more time for focused work which increases productivity.  

Why should you focus on asynchronous communication?

The benefits of asynchronous meetings speak for themselves. Add to it the cost of synchronous communication and you will get the combo.

According to an article on Inc.com, more than $37 billion is spent on unproductive meetings every year! 

The cost of update meeting

The monthly cost of a weekly status update meeting for a team of 8 people is near $1k.

Duration: 30 minutes
Team: 8 people
Salaries: from $50k to $120k (1 – $50k, 1 -$60k, 3 – $70k, 2 – $90k, 1 – $120k)
The total cost of weekly meeting: $217
Total monthly cost: $868

It means that the cost of weekly update meetings for a team of 8 people is $10k per year. But let’s be honest, this meeting can go more than 30 minutes. 

It’s the main reason why you should eliminate the amount of real-time communication. Peter Arvai, a CEO and Co-founder Prezi, also tells that the async meetings will be the future of work.

Downsides of asynchronous communication

However, asynchronous communication is not ideal, and here are several downsides:

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

It shows that you can’t remove sync communication in your process. However, you can balance these two types of communication to be more effective and reduce the amount of stress. 

3 steps how to run meetings in a better way

Step 1: Identify when to start async first

The first step is an understanding type of meetings that really important to keep in real-time mode. And what’s better to use in an asynchronous way. Here are recommendations from GitLab, which we completely agree on. It’s best to avoid real-time meetings for the following items:

• Status updates
• FYIs and process documentation
• Meeting about a meeting

Step 2: Set the agenda and talking points

If you don’t have agenda – you spend the company’s resources to empty meetings. “Jump on a quick call” without agenda might sound good for the participant but it’s counterproductive. 

Always set agenda and talking points that every participant understands the reason for the meeting.

All meetings must have an agenda and a documentarian, enabling everyone to contribute asynchronous regardless of time zone or availability.

Darren Murph, Head of Remote in Gitlab

At Focus, we realized that it’s not necessary to do each morning video standup call. It’s more efficient to run daily check-ins in an asynchronous way. Here is how it looks.

It takes few minutes to answer the main questions. For daily check-ins, you can ask the next items:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• Any blockers?

Step 3: To document takeaways 

If you run real-time meetings, don’t forget to document highlights after the meeting. If you do it in an asynchronous way, you have already documented it. Congrats!

The main point is to make takeaways after meeting to sync the team. It will help to be more accountable and productive in the next steps. Paul Axtell recommends doing these 2 things to recap meetings.

Examples of asynchronous and synchronous meetings.

Asynchronous meetings:

• Daily check-ins
• Weekly status updates
• Weekly announcements
• Monthly updates
• Quarterly team results recaps and celebrations
• Project sprints and milestones
• Backlog refinement
• New team member introduction
• Missed deliverable retrospective
• Alternate times for recurring scheduled meetings (for people who can’t attend synchronous meetings because of different timezones)

Synchronous meetings: 

• Sales calls
• Direct reports (1:1 meetings)
• Celebrations and retrospectives 
• First-time meetings with external parties
• First-time meetings with team members who have not previously worked together
• Difficult decisions for important topics (e.g. when stakes are high)

How to sync a team (daily check-ins case)

Let’s talk about specific use cases. 

How can the team use asynchronous daily standups to sync the team? There are 4 ways of running updates: 

Synchronous

1. Video calls. You can use Zoom, Google Meets, or another software. 

Pros:

• The main benefit of this way of updates is face-to-face communication. You get real-time statuses in the morning and then go back to work. 

Cons: 

• You don’t document your current statuses, which means that you don’t have a history of what you did last week. Don’t have history – you can’t analyze your productivity and find points for improvement. 
• You spend more time compare with async meetings. Everyone should wait until the end of the meeting. Compare it with async check-ins when everyone answers 3 questions (2-3 minutes) and reads the answers of coworkers. Usually, it takes few minutes because speed reading faster than speed talking.  
• Less quality of information compares with written updates.
• Not good for co-workers in different timezones

Asynchronous

2. Manually gather updates in Slack or any other messenger. 

Pros:

• Free
• You have written answers, which is much better than only conversations.
• High quality of answers

Cons:

• You should remind co-workers who haven’t sent an update
• Resources for managing it
• Don’t have analytics (only text answers)
• Still not good for different timezone because someone should manage this process

3. Special standup bot. It’s a bot that runs standups in Slack or MS Team.

Pros:

• Hight quality of answers 
• Written answers
• Integration with Slack and MS Teams
• Automate notification and reminders
• Have analytics
• Good for different timezones
• Reports

Cons:

• Using the whole tool only for this specific process

4. Team management pulse software Focus. 

Pros:

• Hight quality of answers 
• Written answers
• Integration with Slack
• Automate notification and reminders
• Have analytics
• Good for different timezones
• Connected with 1:1 meetings and goals
• Keep a history of goals’ progress and daily check-ins
• Connected with employee development plans
• Get feedback from employees
• Running all kind of async meetings
• Email reports

Cons:

• New tool (even if it’s simple)

Daily check-ins in Focus

How to balance both types of communication for daily check-ins?

Some teams don’t want to run async check-ins because they don’t want to lose personal communication. But status updates meeting is not designed for personal communication. 

How the hell should we run all meetings asynchronously now?

And you will be right – it’s not healthy to stop running synchronous meetings because of 3 main struggles of remote work: disconnecting, loneliness, and communication. You should keep using synchronous meetings but do it wisely.

Here is the better way of running asynchronous daily check-ins and team synchronous meetings:

1. You run daily check-ins asynchronously (choose one of three methods above you to prefer more)
2. And now you set group calls for solving key issues and questions if you want to keep the personal connection. Otherwise, you can use async communication even for solving problems. 

In this case, you don’t waste your valuable time gathering updates. You run asynchronous check-ins to gather this information. And now, you spend your time in synchronous meetings for making an important decision or solving problems. This is the most convenient and cost-effective way to run meetings in this case. 

Conclusion

Asynchronous communication still is not a common process for businesses. Many teams prefer to jump on a call to discuss their current statuses or sharing weekly announcements. It’s a legacy they have from the pre-COVID time when inefficiency was a frequent fact for many businesses.

I’m sure that more success will get companies that are ready to change and be more effective in processes. Teams that don’t require employees to be always in touch, allow asynchronous communication, increase the time of focused work. And create self-organized teams where employees are responsible for results. 

We are happy to invite you to this journey.

The post Asynchronous Communication: How To Run Meetings appeared first on Focus.

Asynchronous Communication is a key element for team productivity even if your team is not remote. Maybe you’ll be surprised – asynchronous communication is not only more effective but also helps people to complete the most important work and feel fulfillment. Let’s check how it works and how to build effective asynchronous communication.

Different studies show that productivity is not deterred by the shift to remote work. Why?

Let me tell you a short story. Meet John, who is a software developer in a tech company. He is a very nice guy who likes to help people. 

Right now, John tries to understand why Sylvia can’t export reports from their CRM. He is close to solving this issue…

At that moment, Ann is calling him.

John is a nice guy and loves to help other people. He postpones his job and answers the call: “Hey John, could you please help me change the button on the website…” Of course, he can. It doesn’t take a lot of time. A few minutes later, John solved this thing. Ann is happy. 

John is trying to remember what he worked on before the call. “Why we can’t export reports? Okay, let’s start from the beginning to find the reason for this problem.” 

Meanwhile, the team lead has created the new tasks for John recently. The to-do list is growing. John begins to feel nervous: “Why can’t I finish everything in a time-bound manner?” His anxiety becomes stronger. However, he is still a nice guy who likes to help other people. 

Suddenly Slack channel burst with dozens of messages. Users complain because they can’t log in to the system. Something wrong with their authentication. John is watching logs now to find out what happened and fix this problem. 

An hour later, everything is fixed. He is glad and wants to take a small break. But Monica is calling him at that moment. 

“Hi John, my client is tortured me. He wants to get more time for trying our product. Can you extend him a free plan for few days?” John is tired and without thinking accepted this request. He spends some time doing it. Also, he remembers that their tech side in pricing is not good and he should find the time to improve it. 

John gets back to the task manager and sees that he has 3 new tasks. And he still hasn’t solved the problem with reports export.

This is how it goes day after day. John often has to answer the same questions. And he still doesn’t have enough time to complete everything in a time-bound manner. 

He even read the book about time management to be more effective. However, the result is the same. He still doesn’t have enough time for effective time management. 

The end of the story. Sounds similar?

The real problem

This story is not about time management. It’s about effective communication. Communication might be 2 types:

• Asynchronous communication – when you send the message and don’t expect to get an immediate answer. Think about email. 
• Synchronous communication – real-time communication when you expect to get an answer at the same exact moment in time. 

Asynchronous communication examples

• Email
• Ticket in help desk system
• Project management tools: Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc
• Messengers: Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc (the worst example for async communication because people still is waiting for a fast answer in the messenger)
• Focus (for status updates, stands, 1:1 meetings, etc)

Synchronous communication examples

• Live meetings
• Phone call
• Zoom, Skype, etc
• Messengers when you reply in real-time

Synchronous communications have several big downsides:

• Continuous distraction. Any brainwork requires high concentration and focus. There were a lot of researches on this topic – how much time do we need to get back to work after distraction. Numbers are different, but the result is the same. It takes a lot of time and our energy to get back to work and repair the previous level of productivity. 
• As the result, it increases stress. The person achieves less when teammates distract him/her during the workday. We spend more energy to make up for a lost time. Usually, it increases the level of stress. And it leads us to burnout.
• It takes a lot of time. Meetings are an expensive tool for a company. Especially, team meetings with 4 and more participants. 
• Priority on communication instead of focus on what matters the most. I often heard from people: “How can I turn off my phone, so people will not able to reach me?” However, if someone turns off a phone, people who REALLY want to reach the person will find the way how to do it. 
• Reducing the quality of conversations and answers. During a call or a meeting, sometimes you don’t have enough time to think deeply about the best answer. As there result, you make not the best solutions.

The benefits of asynchronous communication

Another way is asynchronous communication. And you get opposite results: 

• No distraction. Nobody calls you and you can do more focused work. Nobody distracts you during eating another “Pomodoro”. Increase productivity. You better plan the work. Reduce stress.
• Better answers. You can better formulate thoughts in the written mode. Also, it helps to document processes. John would like it.
• Communication is saved. You can think more before answer. As the result, you get better answers. And it’s written answers that you can use in FAQ then.
• Better goals. Asynchronous communication requires thinking twice and better formulate goals or tasks. 
• You can work from different time zones and it’s not necessary to be in the same place.  

Downsides of asynchronous communication

However, asynchronous communication is not ideal, and here are several downsides:

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

It shows that you can’t remove sync communication in your process. However, you can balance these two types of communication to be more effective and reduce the amount of stress. 

How to balance both types of communication?

It’s hard to imagine how you can achieve your goals when everyone can distract you every time.  

On the other hand, asynchronous communication is respect for your time, plans, and focus. 

The right answer is balancing both types of communication. Avoid meetings and discussions that require much time. It’s important to identify topics that might wait and really urgent questions. For example, Hailley Griffis wrote how they communicate asynchronously at Buffer. And I agree with her:

Most things aren’t urgent. Knowing the difference between urgent and important communication is crucial.

Hailley Griffis

Anne-Laure Le Cunff recommends to document everything. If it’s not documented, it doesn’t exist. 

GitLab wrote Async 3.0, which is a great article about communication in their company. They share examples of asynchronous communication on GitLab teams. 

When to start asynchronous first

Our experience and GitLab shows that it’s crucial to avoid meetings and calls for the following events:

1. Status updates
2. FYIs and process documentation
3. Meeting about meeting
   

It’s better to use asynchronous communication. For example, you can gather daily check-ins instead of daily calls to align your team. In Focus, it takes only a few minutes to complete the form and see what’s going in your team.  

When to keep synchronous communication

At the same time, it’s clear that you can’t avoid sync communication. It allows building rapport faster and quickly delivers context to a group. Here are the main activities that it’s better to keep in a real-time way.

1. Sales calls
2. First-time meetings with external parties
3. First-time meetings with new team members
4. Important decisions (when stakes are high)
5. Supporting your direct reports (e.g. regular 1-on-1 meetings with documenting highlights of the meetings)

Tools for asynchronous communication

These tools we use to not distract each other in the team:

• Focus: for goal setting, daily check-ins, weekly updates, and 1-on-1s
• Github: to maintain the software
• Dropbox: for documents and files
• Google Docs: for documents and spreadsheets
• Slack: for urgent communication 
• Zoom: for video calls

It makes sense to say that we turn off notifications in most cases. Especially, in a messenger. You know, it’s hard to focus when you see the bunch of new messages in Slack.

Conclusion

We believe in the future of work in smart balance in asynchronous and synchronous communications. Use tools that increase transparency and avoid distraction. Set an emergency mechanism for how to connect in the case if you reduce the amount of real-time communication. And join Focus to try async check-ins, updates, and other forms of asynchronous communication. 

P.S. All names and events are fictitious. Any coincidences with characters and facts from real life are pure coincidences.

The post What is Asynchronous Communication? appeared first on Focus.

So you’re managing a team and you need some help with synchronicity. Need to know what’s going on with everyone in your team? Daily Stand-ups sound like just the thing you need! Learn about daily stand-ups or daily scrum. These meetings are not just a status update, it’s an essential tool.

Read for our tips and suggestions with team development.

There are three main parts that we will cover:

1. Defining Daily Stand-up
2. Why you need it as a leader
3. Implementation
4. Why you need Focus

Defining the Daily Stand-up

Daily stand-ups, daily scrum, daily meetings or whatever name you know them as are all the same thing. They are daily check-in meetings you have with your team.

Daily Stand-ups are timely, informal, and get to the point. No need to prepare presentations or rehearse, just go down a list of critical information you need to share. Your team should provide information on their obstacles and possibly what they’re doing to mitigate these problems.

The advantage to daily scrum is that you can give your input right away. Give some criticism or share some helpful tips.

You can even shut down ideas and help narrow down what your team should be doing.

These meetings originated as a tool for development teams-Agile development teams that it. Agile teams are defined by the Harvard Business Review here: Agile at Scale. They’ve grown since then and should be utilized by all teams, non-technical or otherwise.

Why you need it (as a leader)

These daily scrum are vital for team coordination. They are an effective form of communication that help you stay on task.

When your team is in sync, you can achieve more. Get better results, faster results more efficiently.

For example, you want to have your team post on the company’s social media everyday. Creating a calendar and delegating the tasks is the first step. If someone misses a post or creates something not to your liking, a face to face meeting, even over video call is the best way to communicate your message. A quick call can aid in overcoming misunderstandings.

Daily stand-ups prevent critical issues from growing.

These frequent stand-ups don’t allow for issues to fall through the crack. Because problems can be address easily as they appear or even before they’re noticeable, they can be tackled on the spot.

Daily Stand-ups are not just individual reports.

The benefit of doing daily stand-ups is its notable difference from a normal meeting or report. If you treat these daily stand-ups like a a report meeting then you lose it’s value.

Here are some examples of how you can stay in sync:

1. Write a mini agenda/list so that the team can view
2. Don’t go off topic in daily stand-ups
3. Stay active in group chats
4. Use Focus (more details below)

At Focus, our main goal is to help teams achieve the most! We want to share our technology and OKR guides so that no matter how big or small your organization is, it can reach it’s full potential. We believe in daily stand-ups and that every leader should give it a try!

Implementation

So now that you’re ready to start having these daily scrum with your team, here’s what you need to know.

Rule #1 is to know your team’s schedule. Find a time that works for everyone and that means everyone. Having expected attendance and participation gathers respect. You show respect for your team and take time to check up on them, so they should share their honest thoughts and comments in return.

Rule #2 is to keep it short. This is not the time to have long, deep in-depth conversations. These daily stand-ups can delve into personal topics, but should ultimately stay light and focused. You want to understand what’s going on and any obstacles. Any “blockers” that need more than 15 minutes to explain should be saved for a later meeting, which you can plan during this daily check-in.

The length of daily stand-ups are a great advantage. Each party has to equally participate and the limited time helps everyone stay focused to not only talk about their plans but also actively listen.

On a side note, these meetings are short, so remember to be on time!

There’s no space for uncomfortably in daily stand-ups.

Rule #3 is to always address impediments. If your team never has any issues then it’s because they don’t feel comfortable diverging information. As there are always ways to improve, there will always be obstacles to your goal. Leaders should aid in teamwork, meaning your team should not be too intimidated to let you know what issues they face. Be wary of this secrecy. Even if your team is at their peak performance, have them share their impediments and how they can address them.

There’s no time for passivity.

The last major rule is to stay committed! Don’t give up on these meetings. Daily means daily. As casual as they may be, your team should treat is an a important part of their day. The more you value these stand-ups the more your team will as well. Lead by example and you’ll soon enjoy the benefits of daily stand-ups!

My personal tip is to thank people for their time! As quick as these meetings are, it’s always polite to give a “thank you” to the person for their time. It’s better not to assume what your team’s schedule might be. Last minute changes can happen to these meetings, and you might not know what plans they had to move to make it on time. Take advantage of this time to recognize your employee’s hard work and build your professional relationship! It never hurts to be polite and friendly. This relationship can translate into work and in turn improve your team’s commitment.

Daily Stand-ups go a long way.

Read our tips on one on one meetings:

9 One on One Meeting Tips

What are One on One Meetings

Why you need Focus

At Focus, we pride ourselves on being communication-oriented and solution driven. Our use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) helps our team to stay on task and figure out creative solutions.

Read more about these OKRs on our blog:

What are OKRs

We use many forms of communication to let our team know our status. Focus had daily check ins where you share your actions and tasks as well as meaningful insight. Every member of the team can see what everyone else is doing. To make this process even more convenient, we have a Slackbot for these daily check ins as well. Weekly team meetings and one on one meetings are a must for our team. Our blog serves as evidence of this synchronicity!

We post about the changes Focus has gone through on our blog:

Focus Update

Daily stand-ups, check-ins, and OKR are growing in popularity so you and your team should give us a try! Don’t lag behind all the teams and start-ups. With Focus, you’ll find ease in fostering clarity and teamwork across all types of departments and projects!

Schedule a meeting with our CEO and team at Focus.

Let me know what you think about my article and share your experience with daily stand-ups below! Follow our Facebook and LinkedIn!

The post Daily Stand-ups are a Must! Here’s Why. appeared first on Focus.

Teams often lose focus on top priorities for a multitude of reasons. At Focus, we believe that staying concentrated on what “matters” is one of the most important skills for product teams.

Here are some sources of distraction your team may face:

1. The team works on a hard project for too long. Instead of validating the main idea in a month, the team had developed the project for half of the year, which is quite a long interval of time.
2. The team created a new project, but it doesn’t fit the company’s vision and strategy. However, the project is so cool and motivating that the team finds themselves enjoying it.
3. Stakeholders from different teams can’t agree on strategic questions or concepts, resulting in a lack of progress for the project.
4. The team makes a product that’s designated for a non-target customer or the product’s value proposition doesn’t fit the company’s vision.  

How can a product team stay focused?

I talked with many companies and found that there were two main problems when the team struggle to stay focused. Either they don’t know the company’s vision or teams set the big objectives but forget about them in daily routines. We, admittedly, struggled with this issue too and that’s why we decided to build Focus.

We also discussed the reasons why it happens and how a company can fix it. Based on these conversations, we found 3 main pillars that a company should have for staying on what matters the most:

• Clear vision. CEO and CPO should describe a clear vision for everyone. What’s most important for the company? Why does it matter? ‘Why’ is the core question for any company. Learn more about why it matters with Simon Sinek, who explains why you should start with why. Without establishing and communicating your vision, it’s hard to identify if a new project or initiative is a good fit or not for the company on the medium to long-term.
• Right OKRs. Setting right OKRs that fit the company’s vision is the next step to marry strategy with tactics. 
• Constant processes. The challenge is staying focused on OKRs in daily operations. We see that a lot of companies forget about them because of routines and different unimportant but urgent tasks. You know this, it’s called fighting fires. The only way to stay on top of your priorities day-to-day is to create a workflow that enables your team to be more focused. Daily and weekly check-ins where you discuss your OKRs should be a fundamental processes in your company. 

How to stay focused?

Lead by vision

Vision is an inspirational story about a new future when your company achieves new goals. And how your customers and the team will live better when it happens. 

Why should you talk about vision?

Because people love a good story.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his books ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’ that humanity evolved because of the ability of humans to come up with memes – stories that make people change their behavior and distribute them to others.

During product development, all systems (product, code, architecture, client segments, contexts, etc.) are becoming ever more complex exponentially. However, teams’ competencies increase linearly. It explains why a company changes teams three times on average during this journey:

• First there’s the team that launches product
• Then the team that scales it
• And the team that builds processes for the main market

This has less of an impact on founders because they work mostly with the company’s vision, which is not restricted by complex systems and product architecture.

According to research on presentation methods, messages delivered as the stories can be up 22 times more memorable than just facts.

Great vision, which inspires the team and fits the company’s purpose increases motivation and helps to stay focused on the most important things. It works even for making a small decision because the team will remember the vision and think about how the new decision impacts on the ideal future the company is building towards.

Vision leadership works not only for founders. In this Product Leadership book, authors advocate for each Product Manager to work on creating and delivering the vision for product hypotheses.

In Amazon, all employees learn to talk the vision language. After you have written a document, you read the press release one more time and ask yourself: is it an ambitious idea to work on it? Should we do it or it doesn’t matter so much? It allows us to work and make decisions guided by the vision.

Principles to create a vision for product teams:

1. It is necessary to know your market segment and do customer validation with MVP. The vision should describe the future of target markets with the solution to their current and future needs.
2. The product teams’ vision should be aligned with the company’s vision. Stakeholders should be involved in crafting it.
3. You should find the best vision for your team after several iterations talking with stakeholders and coworkers. By the way, Working Backwards by Amazon embodies this approach.

Set the right OKRs 

If the CEO or CPO doesn’t have the right goals, then nothing will work. Of course you don’t want that. But how to set goals in the right way?

OKR is the most proven tool for setting goals. 

Different teams depending on their sizes might have different OKR cycles. Small startups and companies with few stakeholders often use 2-month intervals. Large companies prefer quarterly OKR cycles. 

Companies usually don’t set OKRs correctly in the first cycles. Using OKRs is a continuous process of improvement. The team runs retrospectives and analyzes what works and what doesn’t. It’s an ongoing learning process. Implementing the framework is hard, however, OKR is the best tool to stay focused.

If you had tried OKRs and it didn’t work, it doesn’t mean that OKR doesn’t work. It means that you haven’t found the right way how OKRs could work for your team.

You can read more about how to use OKRs in this article.

Processes that help to stay focused

1. One on one meetings are a great way to reiterate the vision and tie the employee’s personal development to the goals of the company. It’s the one on one meeting where you can elaborate on what the company is building towards and how each individual team member can contribute to it in their area of responsibility. It’s also a great place to get feedback on any activities that you thought would tie into the vision and the goals set but the rest of the company either doesn’t understand or just thinks it’s not aligned.
2. Automatic daily and weekly reminders of what the team has accomplished. It’s short messages with new updates for a specific channel or chat, which is visible for founders or executives. It helps founders to realize current status and ask the team if something went wrong. 
3. Public channel for check-ins where everyone publishes daily achievements. It’s like daily standups but in written type with outcomes that the person achieved the day before and what they plan on doing next.
4. Ruthlessly say no to ideas that don’t fit the company’s vision and goals.
5. The CEO and CPO should strictly follow their goals and stay focused on it every day. If they run some side projects, everyone would see it. People might start to do side projects too. Leading by example is the best way to show the team that focus on top priorities is crucial for the company. 
6. There is a Weekly Business Review (WBR) at Amazon. Every Product Manager updates key metrics of the team and marks objectives with the colors green, yellow, and red (like OKRs). It explains where they did well and where they fell short. In your company, you can gather all WBRs in Focus or any other software where managers will analyze it and give feedback.
7. Monthly Business Review (MBR) and Quarterly Business Review (QBR) are the same as for other timeframes. It’s analyzed one time per month and per quarter.

What is the focus?

Imagine you changed your vision twice and you are working with the last vision now.

It’s Q2 2020 now, and you set the company’s OKRs and teams’ OKRs to achieve your vision.

You move forward but you see that some teams are doing something that doesn’t fit the company’s vision. You are beginning to close these projects.

In the daily check-ins, CPO should: 

• Correlate team’s route if it moves in a different direction
• Stretch the team for achieving larger goals

Some tips to stay focused for product teams

1. If everything is top priority it means nothing is priority. Limit the number of items you work on at the same time. It depends on the team, but 2-3 maximum is a good golden rule.
2. Having a good manager/mentor in the company who has an incredible way of splitting the product vision into a set of core values.
3. Transparency and clarity of what’s important to achieving the mission are an absolute necessity.
4. Start your day with the most important item that day, finish it. Don’t stop or get distracted by anything.
5. Next move to routine items that should be done daily. This is a boring list that you deal with which contains daily/weekly/monthly tasks. Take them on one at a time and complete as many as your psyche will allow.
6. Lastly, intermittently switch from routine to your ‘bonus list’. The items that are fun but lightly affect the trajectory. This will make your day more fun.
7. At the end of each day ask yourself “What were the 1 or 2 important items completed today that I’d be proud of at the end of the year?”
8. When you get overwhelmed and struggle to focus, you might ask yourself what you should do if you could only do one thing that day.

Summary

Staying focused is the permanent process that starts with the CEO and CPO. Here are 3 main pillars that any company should have to stay on what matters the most:

• Clear vision
• Right OKRs
• Continuous processes

It’s a continuous process that takes full attention of all people in the team, especially C-level managers. There is no silver bullet here. However, to stay focused on what matters is a crucial skill for any company. 

We built a focus management platform to help companies be more effective and stay focused on top priorities in daily operations. You can try Focus for free to automate check-ins, one on one meetings, and OKRs. Start working smarter with Focus today.

The post How to Stay Focused for Product Teams appeared first on Focus.