It’s 2024 — has remote work taken over yet?
While Gallup found that 27% of full-time employees work fully remote, hybrid work is winning the race for most popular work arrangement. Fifty-three percent of employees work with a hybrid structure or hybrid capabilities. That leaves only 21% of employees working fully in-person.
Meaning, today’s workforce is incredibly distributed.
In most industries, offering remote and hybrid work and flexible schedule options is a must if employers want to attract top talent. But what does it mean for workplace communication?
While a distributed team and flexible work schedules are common now, it also means more variance in the overlapping hours between teammates. Consequently, there are now internal communication challenges that didn’t exist when almost everyone was in the office.
As teams settled into a remote or hybrid structure, the “that meeting could have been an email” sentiment is now reality. In the name of ‘staying connected’, employees spend a lot of time on video calls that aren’t helpful, leaving less time left to get actual work done. In fact, research has shown that meetings are ineffective 72% of the time and can create barriers to achieving goals.
For a better multi-location team dynamic, collaboration needs to shift to a smarter, more sustainable form of teamwork. It’s clear that the success of a remote or hybrid workplace relies on asynchronous communication and asynchronous work.
Asynchronous communication tools (like Microsoft Teams or Slack) that enable employees to communicate and access information when they need to are the key to successful communication and a thriving remote work culture.
What is the Difference Between Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication?
Asynchronous communication is when employees contact and work when they are available. This differs from synchronous communication, which is simultaneous contact in real-time. For a remote team, asynchronous communication is often the most productive way to communicate and collaborate. Especially when teams are spread out across the country or working different hours in the day.
Asynchronous communication can look like:
- Using documents stored on a cloud (Google Docs, Microsoft, etc.) to collaborate
- Emailing different edits of a slide deck
- Sending assignment briefs for others to work on when they are available to do so
Essentially, it’s the collaboration that happens outside of meetings and video conferencing. And much more of it happens today than it did when most people worked together in-person.
Asynchronous collaboration requires a lot of self-serve knowledge. This means people have to rely on what’s been left behind by their co-workers. This can be spread around in tools like Slack, Asana, Click Up, email, Microsoft 365, and other asynchronous communication tools. These tools make asynchronous work a lot easier. And since remote and hybrid work isn’t going away, companies have to think about how to optimize communication for their distributed teams.
But first, let’s chat about asynchronous communication and collaboration benefits.
What Are the Key Benefits of Asynchronous Communication for a Business?
Undoubtedly, some companies and managers have reservations about permanent remote or hybrid work culture. This is understandable, as managing remote teams has its challenges.
However, it’s not necessarily remote and hybrid work itself that causes issues. It’s that many teams don’t have the right tools or systems in place to make it seamless and productive. Instead of throwing out the idea altogether, consider changing how remote work is done. And that starts with your team’s communication style.
Of course, some synchronous communication remains important, like when there’s urgency around a project or a need for an immediate response. Yet there are many benefits to ‘async communication’ that suggest it should be embraced by remote teams.
- Better Output. When remote employees work on their own time, when it works best for them, allowing them to be more focused and engage in deep work. Additionally, fewer meetings mean employees have more time, which often leads to better decision-making, clearer communication, and increased productivity.
- Work-Life Balance. Asynchronous work also promotes work-life balance for employees. When employees can work on a schedule that works for them, they’re more productive. This also improves employee engagement and retention.
- Agency & Ownership. An often overlooked benefit of async communication is that it gives employees a greater sense of ownership of their work. When an employee feels empowered to work on their own time, their sense of ownership over that work increases. This helps develop a sense of trust between the remote worker and their employer as well as between coworkers.
Can You Have Asynchronous Meetings in the Workplace?
Synchronous meetings – whether an in-person live meeting, a phone call, or a video call – with no applicable context or real value are dreaded by all employees. Believe it or not, an async meeting might be the team collaboration solution that you’ve been searching for.
Below are some benefits of async meetings, followed by a step-by-step process of how to set them up at your workplace.
Benefits of Asynchronous Meetings
- Everyone Gets to Contribute. People who might need more time and would be quieter during the meeting can share their thoughts.
- Never Inconvenient. No matter their time zone, everyone can have a look and share their insights on their time without having to interrupt a deep work session.
- More Efficient. Many questions are asked and answered prior to the next meeting directly in the shared document. (Meaning, many times there is no need for a follow up meeting).
- Automatic Documentation. Everything is documented in the process.
Step-By-Step Process for Asynchronous Meetings
- Define the Purpose and Agenda. Create a Google doc (or your chosen asynchronous communication tool) that clearly outlines the purpose of the meeting and the specific topics to be covered. Create a detailed agenda that includes discussion points, tasks, and deadlines, and the “Who” for stakeholders.
- Set a Timeline. Determine a timeline for the asynchronous meeting, including the start and end dates that determines the timeframe in which members should contribute. This could be hours, days, or even weeks, depending on the nature of the meeting.
- Distribute Resources. Share the meeting document and all other relevant materials, documents, and resources with participants. Ensure that everyone has access to the necessary information to understand the context and contribute effectively.
- Assign Responsibilities. Clearly assign responsibilities to team members. Specify who is responsible for what tasks, deadlines, and any follow-up actions.
- Document Discussions. Encourage team members to document their thoughts, comments, and contributions in the Google doc.
- Allow Time for Responses. Set clear expectations for when team members should respond or provide input. This allows everyone to contribute at their own pace while ensuring progress.
- Review and Summarize. Once the defined timeline has passed, review all the contributions, comments, and outcomes of the asynchronous meeting. Summarize key points and decisions.
- Follow Up. Send a follow-up message, meeting invite, or document that highlights the key takeaways, decisions made, and any action items. Ensure that everyone is aware of the meeting’s outcomes and next steps.
Organizations are beginning to see the value of async work like the kind of meeting detailed above. As organizations adapt, it’s clear that the success of remote or hybrid work environments hinges on effective asynchronous communication and collaboration.
Accordingly, asynchronous communication tools have emerged as key facilitators of effective collaboration. And with these emerging and evolving tools comes an increased need for better access to self-serve knowledge.
How Can Asynchronous Communication Be Improved?
Access to Self-Service Knowledge
Preparation is the key to a successful asynchronous workflow. Using asynchronous tools that make knowledge available across the organization is a best practice for ensuring successful async communication.
Without as much real-time communication with colleagues, it’s vital to provide everyone with better access to self-service knowledge.
When employees can efficiently find what they need on their own when they need it, project management is easier. Teams keep projects moving forward even when teammates are away, rather than requiring an immediate response from a colleague. This allows individuals to contribute to projects during their working hours – whether their teammates are available or not. This type of async work may take getting used to. But it can greatly enhance productivity if teams are committed to making it work.
Better self-service access can also increase employee satisfaction. If knowledge is more readily available, employees spend less time chasing down answers, and more time actually working. Plus, when they can find what they need easily, employees are less frustrated and more confident in their work. This supports productivity, frees up their time, improves team communication, enhances team collaboration, and supports a healthier work-life balance.
Effective Knowledge Management in the Digital Workplace
Self-service knowledge only becomes available to employees when there is an effective knowledge management system. The first step to creating an effective knowledge management system is capturing knowledge. Doing this across an organization can be challenging. Yet, there are AI tools that can improve knowledge management by extracting unstructured data and making it retrievable in real time.
With today’s advancements in machine learning, AI can easily bring knowledge together and simplify knowledge discovery. This requires creating an intelligent connection between project management tools, intranet portals, and other knowledge hubs within your organization. Only then can self-service knowledge truly become accessible for all and allow for successful asynchronous communication.
However, for these tools to do their job, there needs to be a top-down commitment to creating a knowledge-sharing culture. This includes digitally documenting processes and employee knowledge and moving any information that lives on paper into the digital space. Then, employees must get used to seeking out information on their own. This might require training and reminders. But this is important to encourage them to move away from hopping on a call with a coworker when the information is available digitally.
This kind of commitment means more time spent in tools like Slack. Which also increases the need for knowledge to be retrievable in these siloed platforms.
Support Asynchronous Communication by Indexing Knowledge Inside Slack
As we move toward a more asynchronous workplace, its important to optimize the digital channels your organization uses to ensure effective communication. To increase your teams’ success with remote work, you have to start with the right tools. This helps create a cultural norm that promotes and celebrates async work. This will encourage and enable employees to communicate and work at their own pace. In the long term, it reduces the constraints of real-time interactions and fosters productivity, work-life balance, and ownership among team members.
If your organization uses Slack – likeover 80% of Fortune 500 businesses do – there’s a need to facilitate better collaboration. You can do this by serving data within these tools, making knowledge easily retrievable and shareable within Slack channels and conversations.
It’s a tall order to expect team members to dig through conversations to find necessary information. Instead, the Coveo Slack Connector makes it easy to find and share knowledge. And when knowledge is findable, your teams will be better equipped to meet their goals and move your organization forward.
Dig Deeper
Employees expect more from their workplaces. Not just better pay, benefits, and a more flexible work schedule… Even before hybrid work models brought new challenges, workers were bombarded with information from multiple SaaS platforms daily.
Here’s how you can bring disparate knowledge together into a unified workflow for all employees across your organization.