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.

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.

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