Remote Work for Humans

The Future of Work is Asynchronous

In 2021, Atlassian, the parent company of Trello, declared that the future of work is asynchronous and highlighted companies that were already leading the way in async first work culture. The benefits of async first work are numerous, from more deep focus time (due to decreased meetings and disruptive chat pings) to better work life balance. As great as all that sounds, the term asynchronous communication has never really felt right for me. With so many people using asynchronous communication tools synchronously during their workday, we need a reframe.

Defining Asynchronous Communication

Asynchronous communication is any communication that takes place at different times. Examples of asynchronous communication include (but are not limited to): email, chat, comments in shared documents, and voice messages. Synchronous communication is communication that takes place at the same time such as phone calls and meetings.

Now, simply having the tools to communicate asynchronously does not mean that you will have a thriving, async first, remote work culture. A lot of the blogs I read online from async first companies go beyond communication tools to communication and work strategy. That’s where my rebrand comes in. The async first language used by tech companies works well for their context and culture. In my public sector context, it just doesn’t quite land the same.

The Rebrand: From Async First to Workflow Centered

I found it really difficult to communicate with my supervisor and peers about why async first is such a valuable way of working. With the term async first, the emphasis becomes the timing of your communication. It almost sounds like, yes, you still have a mountain of chats and emails, but now you check them when you want to. That’s definitely not how it’s supposed to work. The real benefit of async first is that you have built your workflows in a way allows for true asynchronous communication.

I’ll give a real example of how we set up workflow centered communication in a previous job of mine that made our lives easier and leveraged the strength that is having a distributed team. This is just one workflow and one example but the overall principle for this approach is: connect, clarify, centralize, standardize.

In 2020 I was working as an epidemiologist at a local health department during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just know that I was BUSY. I was located on the West Coast, but we were completely remote by that point and had colleagues on the East Coast as well.

One thing that we needed to do regularly was report up data to leadership each morning about cases reported to us for our sector (a sector being hospitals, work sites, prisons, schools etc.). We knew that we needed to get the data to leadership first thing each morning so we set up a workflow that allowed us on the West Coast to wake up to clean, shareable data, thanks to our East Coast colleagues.

Here’s how we did it:

Connect

• We had trust and accountability
• We used synchronous communication to build our team connection and rapport
• There is an element of trust and releasing control with this type of work that I don’t think is talked about enough
• So basically, when my supervisor needed to send to the higher ups each morning, she didn’t need to ping “Is this ready to send?”. She just knew it was ready for her to send thanks to our established process

Clarify

• We understood what our workflow was
• The project requests can be vague – “Leadership needs numbers”
• Using our expertise as epidemiologists, we’re able to carve out a workflow that provides a reasonable summary of what’s going on for leadership
• There are generally some patterns related to your field you can fall back on for vague requests. For epidemiologists it’s “Person, place, time” – if you can answer those questions you’ve satisfied like 75% of requests that come in
• It’s perfectly ok to ask clarifying questions – try not to let it be a work stopper
• Ideally you could find another aspect of the project to work on or brainstorm about a different project while those answers are being found

Centralize

• We kept all work related to this effort in a centralized place (in our case, a Microsoft Teams channel).
• We created a shared excel file as a tab in our Teams channel so that each contributor to this effort could check in on updates without pinging specific people
• Since the file was on Teams, it was cloud based, so multiple people could edit at the same time, in real time
• If any clarifications were needed, we used the tab chat feature to talk about the file (a little easier and more visible that leaving comments in excel cells at the time)
• I’ll note that side chats were pretty limited and there was not an expectation to respond immediately

Standardize

• We documented our process in a standard operating procedure (SOP)
• Every step of the process was well documented and easy to reference and the SOP was in the same Teams channel as the excel file
• This created an opportunity for continuity (there was such high turnover and rapid hiring during this time) and consistency
• The SOP evolved over time as we refined our process and updating the SOP became part of our workflow as well

I’ll stress here that I chose to call it workflow centered but I don’t just mean something project specific. It’s really just how you would like your work to flow. So, if you work on a team with many different projects (as often happens), workflow centered could mean thinking of a way to centralize information about those projects in a way that eliminates that weekly status update meeting for your team.

The Future of Work is in Flow

I hope that this reframe (or rebrand) of async first work helped clarify the important elements needed for a truly asynchronous workflow. Creating work in flow is creating work where the work itself is driving progress forward, not just chats, emails and meetings.