As more and more companies switch to teleworking and remote working, the concept of asynchronous work is becoming more important. While it’s growing in popularity, you might not have heard of async work before. In this article, we’ll explore the concept in-depth.
We’ll cover what asynchronous work is, what advantages it offers, and how it compares to its traditional counterpart—synchronous communication. We’ll also explore how you can use async work at your business with the help of time tracking.
What is asynchronous work?
Starting off with the basics, asynchronous work is a working style that involves no real-time communication. It relies entirely on the schedules of individuals within a company. Asynchronous working teams have no shared schedules—each of their employees is free to complete their work whenever they wish. As a result, async work requires quite a bit more planning than synchronized communication. But, it can have a variety of benefits compared to its more common counterpart, like enhanced employee autonomy.
We’ll cover the benefits—as well as the drawbacks—of asynchronous work in just a bit. Before that, let’s compare it to synchronous work and explore the key differences between the two.
Asynchronous vs synchronous work
As already mentioned, async work involves no real-time communication. What this means is that there will be no real-time feedback for your team if you use the strategy. As a result, the key difference between asynchronous and synchronous work can be boiled down to one concept—planning. This includes not only how much planning your business will need to do but also how far ahead it’ll have to plan.
Keep this in mind for determining when async work is not the best option, which we’ll cover later on. For now, let’s take a look at a few examples of each, starting with the more common strategy: synced communication.
Examples of synchronous work
Synchronous work can take place pretty much anywhere—both in the office and while working remotely. Examples of it include:
- Video meetings
- Real-time chat conversations
- In-person discussions
Examples of asynchronous work
While asynchronous communication channels can be used for synched work, they generally involve no expectation of an immediate reply. A key way you should be able to identify such channels is to see if they have activity indicators. If they don’t, they’re probably intended for asynchronous communication. Key examples of these are:
- Project and task management apps (commonly with commenting functionality)
- Discussion threads in chat apps
The benefits of asynchronous work for your business
Having explored the basics of the concept, let’s now look at how async work can help your business succeed.
Increased employee autonomy and accountability
Increased autonomy is both a result and a major requirement of asynchronous work. After all, having no real-time communication means that your staff will need to make many more decisions themselves. Otherwise, they would waste time waiting for instructions. This can be a bit nerve-wracking—especially for new hires. But, increasing employee autonomy levels can have many benefits for your firm.
An example of these advantages is increased employee accountability. Your team will be more accountable for their work, striving to do their best more often. This has many advantages of its own, which you can explore in our article on increasing professional engagement.
Improved focus and productivity
One of the effects of async work is that you will need to communicate less often, but more thoughtfully. After all, your emails are most certainly longer and more detailed than your chat conversations. Messages can be distracting for lots of professionals, taking them away from a state of deep focus. Consequently, having fewer messages being exchanged in your team will reduce the chances of staff getting distracted.
Reducing distraction opportunities and improving focus will have one key effect: improved productivity. Team members will be able to keep their productivity up for longer periods—completing more tasks as a result.
Enhanced flexibility and work-life balance
The lack of real-time communication means that your team can work whenever they want. They can take advantage of their peak productivity hours to complete their tasks when they perform their best. Consequently, your employees will also have more freedom to take care of their personal responsibilities—enhancing their work-life balance.
Like many things we explored here, this has positive effects of its own as well. Learn about them in our guide on how employee work-life balance can drive business growth.
Access to a wider pool of talent
As working hours don’t really matter in an asynchronous work environment, you’re able to hire professionals from across the globe. This can open up a world of opportunities for your business—no matter if you want higher-quality or more affordable talent. Offering the perk of flexibility will also make your company more appealing to the best professionals in your industry.
The challenges of implementing asynchronous work
While the concept has many advantages, it doesn’t go without a few negatives. Let’s explore these next, starting with an obvious—yet confusing one: communication.
Communication
While the lack of real-time communication is the main feature of sync work, it can also be a key drawback for certain teams. An asynchronous environment requires a level of communication clarity that can be difficult for some teams to achieve. Unclear communications will lead to misunderstandings, which will then cause delays. As a result, some teams may not be best suited to the strategy.
Management and Trust
Managing a team of professionals with no real-time communication can be a challenge. After all, you won’t be able to provide your team with feedback or determine if they understood your request correctly in real-time.
Another thing that’s closely related to this is trust. After all, you won’t need to manage staff members you trust a lot. Building trust usually takes time, but, it can take even longer in an async work environment.
Interdependent Tasks
Assignments with lots of interdependencies will be more difficult to work on with asynchronous communication. Specifically, these tasks will progress more slowly. Fortunately, you can alleviate this downside with careful planning. Determining as much of what each professional will need to do ahead of time will help avoid unnecessary slowdowns.
Taking advantage of asynchronous work with a time tracker
Having explored the challenges of async work, we can now cover how you may overcome them. We’ll use a productivity tool you’re likely using at your business already: time tracking software.
Ensure productivity with time and activity level tracking
As async work is done remotely, both it and remote working arrangements share the same key concern for managers: productivity. More accurately, many leaders are worried that their staff may start working less than they’re supposed to. However, ensuring this doesn’t happen is simple with time tracking apps. In general, they’re invaluable for any flexible working schedule—regardless of communication style. A variety of tracked data, like time and activity levels, will also help you build trust with your staff.
Manage projects and tasks in one place
Many high-quality apps allow you to manage projects and tasks in the same place you track time. This can be excellent for ensuring your workspace members are aware of what everyone else is working on. As a result, they’ll be able to prioritize their tasks correctly to maximize efficiency.
Keep track of completed work
Continuing on the topic of assignments, a task management system will also help you track what work has been completed. Using a high-quality app that offers customizable statuses, you can even organize completed tasks. For example, on WebWork, you have the ability to create separate task statuses for assignments that are:
- Fully completed
- Waiting on further info
- Waiting for another person’s work
- Waiting to be reviewed
Besides tasks, another excellent way of keeping up with progress is daily stand-ups. If you’re not aware, a stand-up meeting is a short gathering that has one distinct purpose: catching up with progress. A stand-up, meanwhile, is the virtual version of such meetings. A few high-quality time trackers offer automatic stand-ups that you can set up with a few clicks. For example, WebWork can send several stand-ups to each division within your company on WebWork Chat or Slack. Check out our integration with Slack to learn more.
Detect and eliminate distractions
One of the main advantages of asynchronous work is that it helps cut down on distractions. A high-quality time tracker will help you take this to the next level. As an example, WebWork lets you set various apps and websites as either productive, neutral, or non-productive. As your employees work on their computers while the tracker is on, it’ll detect non-productive platforms. WebWork will then warn your team to not spend time on such websites and apps—helping avoid the negative effects of distractions.
Improve communication and set up emergency channels
You might not have thought about this, but time trackers can be excellent for enhancing collaboration. Some higher-quality ones offer built-in communication tools like chat and video meetings. But, some of the best time trackers, like WebWork, offer even more functionality with multiple chat channels.
A key reason why you should have different chat channels is to be prepared for emergencies. In such situations, you’ll need your team to be able to respond quickly. This leads us perfectly to our next point of discussion—cases in which async work is not the best.
When is asynchronous work not the best option?
In some cases, real-time communication cannot be replaced by anything. Fortunately, there aren’t many examples of these. The ones we’ll explore now are:
- Emergency situations
- Difficult conversations
Emergency situations
If an emergency is taking place at your business, you’ll need staff to act immediately. Unlike almost all other tasks, emergencies cannot be planned for ahead of time. This highlights the importance of dedicated synchronous communication channels—even though you should only use these rarely.
Difficult conversations
If you need to have a difficult conversation with an employee, doing so in person is probably your best option. This can be a conversation about poor performance, behavior, or another nuanced situation. The real-time feedback of synchronous communication—especially in terms of emotions—is invaluable in such cases.
Setting guidelines to ensure effective asynchronous communication
Before closing off this article, let’s explore one last thing that can help make async communication better: guidelines.
Response time guidelines
While asynchronous work isn’t immediate, it shouldn’t be delayed for too long either. When implementing the strategy at your firm, set guidelines for how long it is acceptable for replies to take. Of course, this will depend greatly on how spread out your team’s schedules are. If you have people working from opposite sides of the globe, something like 8-12 hours could be a good start. If all of your employees are in the same time zone, you could try 4-6 hours or less.
Contextual guidelines
As mentioned earlier, async work involves fewer but more thoughtful messages. If you forget any necessary details in your messages, you could cause major setbacks. The severity of these will of course depend on your response time guidelines, further highlighting their importance. Because of this, it is wise for you to create rules on how much info everyone should include in their messages. Generally, however, overcommunicating is the preferred option.
Concluding thoughts
While synchronous work is widespread across the globe, async communication has a lot of potential. For many businesses, it can offer a variety of advantages—helping speed up their growth.
However, the concept is not without its flaws. It can be challenging to integrate, with workforce management being one of the most difficult parts of the switch.
But, using the right tools and an effective approach, you’ll be able to take advantage of it for your business. High-quality time tracking apps will be invaluable if you want to make the switch. They’ll provide you with lots of additional benefits at the same time, making them a worthwhile investment—regardless of how your team communicates in the long term.
