Asynchronous Communication: Running A Company Async-First

While remote work has redefined routines for most workers who once worked in a centralized office environment, one of the most significant changes is the way in which employees communicate with each other and with managers or team leaders. Unlike the spur-of-the-moment conversations that take place in offices where workers can pop in on a colleague down the hall to ask a question, asynchronous communication is more the norm for many veteran remote companies.

Prior to launching Buildremote, I worked at a fully remote company for eight years, and ran the company for the last six of those years. While we weren’t big on the titles and trendy names, we got on the asynchronous work bandwagon early on—before there was a cool name for it. In our company, we communicated primarily through email, Slack, and our project management system. We had weekly Zoom meetings, but otherwise, all of our communication was asynchronous.

I would generally recommend asynchronous work, especially for remote teams—but it’s not all positive and it takes work to do it right. It does come with some tradeoffs. So in this article, I’ll share the positives and negatives from my experience, define what asynchronous communication is, and provide some examples of asynchronous communication.

Use the table of contents below to quickly navigate to specific sections of the article:

1. Asynchronous communication definition
2. My experience running a company asynchronously (the tradeoffs)
3. How to implement asynchronous communication
4. The tools you’ll need for asynchronous work
5. Tips for using asynchronous communication (from those who do)
6. Companies using asynchronous work (who you can learn from)

 

Asynchronous Communication Definition

What is asynchronous communication?

Simply put, asynchronous means “not happening at the same time;” the parties in the discussion are not “in sync” in chronological time. Therefore, asynchronous communication is a form of discussion where the parties participate at different times. Chat boards and email chains are two asynchronous communication examples familiar to most people.

Asynchronous work is when colleagues perform their jobs at separate times, yet the total project continues to move forward. Rather than everyone working from 9-5, people work when it is best for them or from different time zones and still contribute to the success of the organization together.

Example: Have you ever worked with contractors or freelancers? You don’t expect them to be working at the same time as you, but you do expect certain turnaround times. Now picture doing that with your employees and coworkers… that is asynchronous work.

 

We asked a few leaders of companies who run with async-first communication how they define asynchronous communication. Here are some of their definitions:

• Asynchronous is communication “without the expectation of an immediate reply,” says Amily of Vibe.
• “Work happens even if working hours differ,” says Juste Semetaite of Toggl Hire.
• “An asynchronous-first policy is a show-don’t-tell work culture; employees focus on setting and achieving goals rather than routine or busywork,” says Rick Chen of Blind.
• “Async-first communication allows the recipient to determine the time to receive and respond,” says Scott Steward of Hicollectors.

 

My Experience Running A Company Asynchronously

As I noted in the introduction, I’ve been working remotely and communicating asynchronously for more than six years. During that time, I’ve recognized the following positives and negatives of asynchronous work.

 

Positives Of Asynchronous Work

• Flexibility in work schedules for everyone on the team equals time freedom.
• Eliminates (or greatly reduces) the number of meetings, a huge timesaver. Executives at many big companies spend most of their time in meetings, many managers’ days are non-stop meetings, preventing them from doing real work, and for workers, time spent in meetings is time where no work is getting done.
• Increases your talent pool by allowing access to people who have unique scheduling needs, as well as people in all geographic regions.
• Makes the most of employees’ talents; in meetings only the ideas of the quickest thinkers or speakers are considered. The best ideas may come hours later once everyone has had a chance to really think about the problem or question.
• Builds a culture of “process documentation” where knowledge is no longer trapped in the minds of specific people who need to be working at that moment in order to access it. This allows pieces of roles and responsibilities to be viewed as a puzzle; some pieces can be moved from people who can provide more value elsewhere, or transferred to people whose talents are a better fit.
• Creates a culture in which everyone is an entrepreneur and manager of their own domain. They essentially become freelancers, responsible for doing their job well without anyone watching over their shoulder.
• Builds trust by empowering workers to get the work done without being tethered to a specific daily schedule.
• Increases hourly efficiency, because workers no longer have an incentive to “look busy,” as often happens in office settings. If remote workers can complete their work in five hours, they don’t have to continue to sit in front of their computer for another three hours to meet the requirement of being “at work” full time.
• Eliminates wasted time at work, which is draining for workers and wasteful to the bottom line. Rather than being constantly online to show they are working (the remote equivalent of “looking busy”), employees can do other things when their work is done or as their personal schedules demand.
• Eliminates the need to “look busy” and shifts the focus to the quality and value of the work produced, rather than the hours the employee was technically “on the clock.”
• Helps shift the focus from “urgent” tasks to “important tasks,” using the terms of The Eisenhower Matrix. In groups of people working synchronously, there’s a tendency to focus on the urgent tasks—some of which may be less valuable to the continuing success of the enterprise than the important tasks. In asynchronous work, people tend to build their schedule around the important tasks, rather than getting distracted by less important tasks that are not so urgent that they require priority .
• Provides workers with a better work/life balance, where they do not need to ask for time off for a doctor appointment or have to figure out how they’re going to hide taking off time to pick up their child from school.

 

Negatives Of Asynchronous Work

• There may be days—or multiple days in a row—where workers aren’t in communication with anyone else on their team. For company leaders, this can cause anxiety wondering if everyone is heading in the right direction, and for people who like a lot of interaction, there isn’t nearly as much of it.
• Tasks and projects can easily drag out too long if they aren’t being tracked and managed. Especially for projects that need to pass through several workers’ hands consecutively, asynchronous work can add a day at each step of the process, if the next employee in the flow isn’t at their desk when the project is handed off to them for their part of the work.
• Company culture will default toward a model of independent operators rather than a team. If this is what you and the people on your team want, that’s fine, but if you want something different, it can be a downside.
• A true state of fully asynchronous communication does not exist. All teams need to meet sometimes to discuss problems, issues, or new projects. Everyone needs to be online at certain times for events like product launches or meetings with clients. Accuracy is important for building trust; while your company may be “async first,” it’s better to describe it that way than to claim to be “fully asynchronous,” since there will be times when employees need to meet in real time.

 

Overall

Synchronous work is like old-school television—CBS offers one show for the entire country to watch at one specific time. Async is like Netflix or Hulu; viewers can watch whatever they want whenever it’s most convenient for them.

Which one is better for the individual? In my opinion:

• The positives far outweigh the negatives.
• Asynchronous work unlocks a great life and lifestyle for each employee, allowing them to build their days the way they want.
• Operating asynchronously forces you to be more organized and to create better processes (basically, to operate a better company).
• At the same time, it’s not without downsides and it takes a lot of work to do it right (it takes years—or maybe the effort to build an async company never actually ends).
• I loved it as an employee at the company (and I know everyone else did too). As the manager, I wondered/worried if we were all working toward the same goal.

My recommendations:Keep some synchronicity in place for camaraderie/culture/relationship building, and do all of your actual work asynchronously. Have regularly scheduled meetings for your team to just chat. No work, just an opportunity to get to know one another as people. Set up general Slack channels so employees can talk to each other—if they wish—about non-work related topics such as shared interests or news about their family. Schedule standups and goals/results meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page. Then, do all of your work asynchronously as a team.

 

How To Implement Asynchronous Communication

If you’ve been operating in a remote yet synchronous environment, it will take some time for everyone to adjust to communicating asynchronously. The following are my suggestions for making a smooth transition to an async-first model.

 

Step 1: Communicate new cultural expectations first. That’s all you’ll do for a while.

Perhaps your policy for years has been for everyone to be online or available during certain times of day. Employees might have been expected to keep a Slack window open in case anyone needed to ask a question or so people could book meetings on their calendar. Everyone met in chats in the morning and to say goodbye at the end of the day. Employees who responded quickly to emails were praised for being there to help.

Before transitioning to asynchronous work, you need to change cultural expectations regarding communication:

• Instead of encouraging employees to have a Slack window open at all times, now you’ll discourage people from being green on Slack.
• Rather than praising people for immediate response to emails, you’ll discourage them from interrupting their work to respond to routine emails right away.
• You’ll encourage employees to build repeatable steps for recurring tasks.
• You’ll encourage people to replace Facebook breaks with walks, personal tasks, or anything else. (The idea is to get them away from the computer when they need a break.)
• You’ll encourage employees to sign off early when they’ve completed their work for the day.
• You’ll discuss and encourage deep work and time blocking to help employees take advantage of the benefits of asynchronous work.

This transition phase will take some time. But before you do anything to build an asynchronous company, you have to allow some time for employees to adjust to revised cultural expectations.

 

Step 2: Cut the amount of time spent in meetings.

The main difference between synchronous and asynchronous work is meetings. Basically, you are trying to fight the temptation to fill up full days of meetings by going asynchronous.

My recommendations:

• Shorten all of your existing meetings by half right away. Instead of an hour, cut the meeting to 30 minutes. Instead of 30 minutes, cut the meeting to 15 minutes.
• Assess each of your regular meetings one at a time, and determine which ones are absolutely necessary. Can this meeting be handled via an update on Slack or in a project management tool? Is there anything specific that needs to be discussed at this time, or could it become a discussion thread? Does positive change come from this particular meeting? If not, cancel it.

 

Step 3: Assess your core values and change them as needed.

As you transition from synchronous to asynchronous work, you’ll notice that the async-first model requires different skills and attitudes. This is likely to have an impact on your core values, those guiding principles that help you determine who fits on the team and how decisions are made.

My recommendations:

• Have a team discussion about your core values (including the founders, or management, or the full team if the company is small enough), and discard the ones that don’t fit with an asynchronous environment.
• After you’ve revised your core values, rework your hiring practices to align with them. Interview questions can determine whether a prospective employee is in sync with a core value or not.
• Pair an employee benefit with each core value to reinforce the value and incentivize employee alignment with it. If learning is a core value, buy a book each month for every employee. If personal leadership is a core value, give employees a stipend to pay for leadership courses.

 

Step 4: Build a process manual.

The absolute key to asynchronous work is documentation. Create one document that everyone can access. It can be as simple as a shared Google Doc, or more robust like Almanac.

My recommendations:

• Assign one person to manage the process manual—particularly the table of contents and the document format.
• Teach managers to identify when a process needs to be created—and to create it.
• Conduct monthly reviews to assess processes that need to be created, updated, or retired.
• Create a process for each repeatable task that is performed in the company. For example, for a marketing team:
  • How to write a blog post
  • How to post a blog post
  • How to deploy an email
  • How to update a monthly reporting dashboard
  • How to run an A/B test

 

Step 5: Reassess your software stack.

Asynchronous tools give people the ability to work as a team, asynchronously. If all you have now is email, Zoom, and Slack, you have only synchronous tools that will limit you.

My recommendations:

• Assess your current tools—which ones are for synchronous work? Do you still need them?
• Consider and evaluate new asynchronous tools against your specific needs (see the next section for recommendations).
• Define the use for each tool. For example:
  • Email is for filing weekly reports with managers, but not for designing a new process
  • Slack is for discussions about needed processes and designing new processes
  • Loom is for providing project briefings for other team members

 

Step 6: Switch from an organizational chart to a responsibility chart.

The accountability chart comes from the book, Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business. It drastically changed the way we ran the fully-remote business I managed, and paved the way for our four-day work week operations.

• The org chart shows titles and who reports to whom
• The accountability chart includes the key business functions that each role is responsible for

I think of it like a puzzle. Each piece is a specific function that is required for your company to thrive, with a person assigned to each.

If you’re missing a puzzle piece, something critical isn’t getting done.

If multiple people are assigned to the same responsibility, it likely won’t get any attention.

The accountability chart will help you move to managing output instead of hours. When that switch is made, you can easily cut time at your desk.

 

Open-ended tips for implementing asynchronous work

Now that I’ve reviewed the steps for transitioning to asynchronous work, there are a few general tips that are helpful to keep front of mind throughout the transition and beyond:

• Make constant improvement your goal. Gitlab has a great primer on their model for constant, iterative improvement.
• Think of asynchronous work like a sport. You will never play a perfect game, but all of your work is geared to that goal.
• While you may constantly improve your systems, things will never be perfect or purely asynchronous—and that’s ok.
• Encourage learning and sharing.
• Buy everyone a copy of the book Deep Work, and have someone who is expert at timeboxing (a more efficient version of the to-do list) create a presentation or process on how to use the technique to manage workload.
• Teach your managers how to manage teams asynchronously.

 

The Tools You’ll Need For Asynchronous Communication

Asynchronous work requires a different set of tools than synchronous work, though you’ll want to continue to use some of the tools used for synchronous work as well. Here are my recommendations for the tools you’ll need for both types of communication:

 

Asynchronous

• Email, documents, storage: Google Drive/Gmail
• Project management: Monday.com
• Payroll, HR: Gusto
• Video messaging: Loom

 

Synchronous

• Meetings: Zoom
• Phone system: Grasshopper

 

Both:

• Chat: Slack
• Hiring: Workable

 

Tips For Using Asynchronous Communication

I reached out to people with experience for their tips for working asynchronously; the following are some of the best tips they had to offer.

 

Set Clear Communication Guidelines

This includes creating guidelines for when communication channels, such as email, chat, or video conferencing should be used. For example, guidelines can specify that urgent or time-sensitive matters should be communicated through a real-time chat platform. Additionally, guidelines can include expectations for response times, such as expecting team members to respond to messages within a certain timeframe.

Roland Alexander of DomainConvo, an async-first company

 

Provide Well-Rounded Training And Resources

Obviously, your team must receive the necessary training in using tools and technologies such as project management software, virtual meeting platforms, and collaboration tools. But don’t forget soft skills! Cover the guidance on managing time and staying productive when working asynchronously, such as tips for creating a productive work environment at home, managing distractions, and maintaining work/life balance.

Vincent Luca of On Demand Pest Control, an async-first company

 

Set Relevant Metrics

While asynchronous team members can set their own work hours, managers must set relevant metrics to ensure successful outputs. I’ve been working with remote marketers and writers for more than five years, and I give them the freedom to work flexibly anytime as long as they submit their output on or before the deadline. I’m very strict with meeting the metrics, such as content quality, scoring articles based on the tone, grammar, format, relevance, etc.

Simon Bacher of Ling App, an async-first company

 

Set Clear Deadlines

The best way to work as a team is working around clear deadlines. This is a crucial step for streamlining internal and external communication. It’s always best to inform your team member when a project is expected so that they can start working on it accordingly. If a project is completed before the deadline, a new one can be assigned.

Mafe Aclado of Coupon Snake, an async-first company

 

Encourage Team Members To Disconnect After Work Hours

In an asynchronous work environment, it can be easy for team members to work longer hours, leading to burnout. Encouraging team members to disconnect after work hours promotes a healthy balance and gives your people a chance to recharge. They will return to work feeling refreshed and energized, which can lead to better job performance.

Laura Adams of Happiest Camper, an async-first company

 

Say Goodbye To A.S.A.P.

To embrace asynchronous communication in your team, do away with the A.S.A.P. (As Soon As Possible) mindset and set clear deadlines. The good thing about this is that you can allow more time for a person to think and process the information they receive, and they can also prepare a well-thought-out response and submit better output. Although this lacks immediacy, it allows team members to be more accountable for using their time in accomplishing work responsibilities.

Matthew Roberts of My Choice

 

Establish Clear Communication

For working asynchronously, it’s good to establish clear communication protocol, such as designated times to check in or channels for different kinds of messages. By doing so, everyone is on the same page and information is not missed. It is also helpful to set clear deadlines and use project management tools to keep the team organized.

CJ Xia of Boster Biology Technology, an async-first company

 

Assess Importance Of Messages Before Sending

Consider the importance and urgency of your message before sending it. Keep in mind that the message needs to be actionable if it is to be deemed crucial.

Tia Campbell of Practice Reasoning Tests

 

Encourage Continuous Learning

I think this is the best tip I could give: Encourage employees to take advantage of online courses, webinars, and other resources to expand their knowledge base and keep up with the latest innovations in their field.

Kim Leary of Squibble, an async-first company

 

Write Work Instructions That Actually Help

Good work instructions save time. A good trick for making sure everyone is on the same page with a task is to write up good WIs, not just a so-so explanation. It should be the centralized knowledge source that everyone can refer to if they need clarification on a task. This way, everyone will be able to understand the task and complete it with minimal back-and-forth communication.

Justin Thomas of JourneyEngine, an async-first company

 

Introduce Some Form Of Virtual Water Cooler Conversations

Introduce some form of virtual water cooler conversations. This can be done by having interactive group chats like coffee snobs, pet lovers lounge to discuss pet stories, or movie night to chat about the latest films. This will give employees much-needed breaks to chat and socialize with their teammates during the day.

Ryan Mckenzie of Tru Earth, an async-first company

 

Create Async Ways To Connect Outside Of Work

When using asynchronous communication in a remote setting, make sure to find fun ways to stay connected outside of work. Out team has a team Spotify playlist and a remote business book club. People can drop in and out of these activities on their own time, but we’re building connections through the music and reading.

Jeanna Barrett of First Page, an async-first company

 

Make An Idea-Sharing Wall/Board

Have a brainstorming board or wall where everyone on the team can share their ideas and suggestions. Anything from short-term goals to long-term projects or even extracurricular activities. This will help everyone stay on track with their tasks and foster creativity among members, and it could lead to new ideas or collaboration opportunities within the team.

Bruce Kramer of Buttercup Venues, an async-first company

 

Be Agile In Your Approach

Being agile means being open to change and adapting quickly to different situations. Always review feedback from team members and be willing to make changes if needed. This will ensure that the team works as efficiently and productively as possible.

Balaram Thapa of Nepal Hiking Team, an async-first company

 

Be Mindful Of Holidays And Time Zones

Make sure to be aware of other countries’ holidays and time zone differences when communicating with your team asynchronously. For example, Golden Week for Japan-based employees, Chinese New Year, or US Thanksgiving for Americans. You can even convey to the whole team a short detailed announcement about how these cultures and holidays are celebrated for inclusivity and understanding.

Emma Williams of HIGH5, an async-first company

 

Synchronize Strategically, Work Asynchronously

Usually, at the C-level, we develop a strategy for the coming three to six months and set the main directions the company will follow. Team leaders create transparent and exhausting tasks in Jira, and we leave it to our specialists to focus on the work, communicating mainly in Slack. This way, everyone can enjoy a lack of interruptions and work deep, spending their time only on meaningful activities that can create real impact.

At the same time, it would be wrong on my part not to mention that we still sync departments and across departments and hold Q&A sessions with the whole team every month to share news and updates within the company. As a small tribute to our great love for asynchronous communication, we record the Q&As for all absentees to view, and we publish a monthly newsletter about the most important events in the company.

Yehor Melnykov of Lawrina, an async-first company

 

Establish Deadlines Well In Advance

Asynchronous work models come with a lot of responsibility. Colleagues must ensure that they complete their share of tasks on time to avoid delaying their team members. However, timelines can easily get lost in translation when there’s no physical reminder available. This is why it’s important to set deadlines from the start of the project. It will allow employees to plan their schedules in advance to help streamline the team’s overall workflow. Consider sending digital reminders a day or two before each deadline to ensure everyone is on track with their duties.

Stephan Baldwin of Assisted Living Center, an async-first company

 

Companies Using Asynchronous Work

Here is a list of asynchronous-first companies you could turn to for learnings:

See Also:

• 100 Companies With The Best Work-Life Balance
• How We Implemented The Four-Day Work Week

 

Want to add an async-first company?

We will update this post whenever we discover a new company that has announced its new policy as an async-first company. Think we’re missing an important async-first company? Fill in the form on this page to make a suggestion to our list.