Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

It’s time to embrace asynchronous-first cultures and unlock true team productivity.

In contemporary corporate culture, there is a tendency for teams to default to synchronous communication. In reality, this leads to engineering leaders’ calendars being booked with unnecessary meetings. 

Asynchronous-first cultures are the answer, while leaving room to start migrating to sync when required. It can be challenging to maintain the balance between the two, especially coming out of periods where synchronous ways of working have dominated due to necessity. Finding ways to buy people back into async isn’t linear, but applying the right strategies can help your teams keep their focus time and encourage productivity.  

What are the benefits of asynchronous working

If this is the first time you’re considering introducing async-first approaches, then its advantages might not be entirely clear to you.

Benefits of asynchronous working

• Work flexibly: contribute during peak personal productivity hours.
• Enable deep focus: remain in deep focus undisturbed.
• Empower autonomy: manage individual workloads and priorities effectively through self-management.
• Broaden input: gather perspectives from a wider, more diverse audience.
• Document automatically: create persistent records of work and decisions.
• Boost inclusivity: provide equal opportunity for thoughtful contribution while working in public.
• Collaborate globally: overcome time zone barriers seamlessly.
• Reduce meeting fatigue: decrease reliance on constant real-time calls.

When do I know asynchronous working isn’t working?

It’s important to look for signs when async methods aren’t working, revealing a need for greater synchronous efforts. The following are signs to watch out for:

Team morale drops and conflict increases

If you notice through metrics (e.g. engagement or pulse surveys, feedback, retros) or instinct that team morale seems to be dropping, or that there is a higher level of conflict in a team, it could be because the team doesn’t feel “close-knit” – though there may be other contributing factors as well. This can be a downside to asynchronous working if you don’t introduce a regular social aspect. To offset this development, introduce more sync meetings, workshops, or whatever it takes to get them solving problems and working directly together more often.

Rule: if you notice retros are getting a bit more confrontational, or team members are seeming more isolated, introduce a group get-together to try and rebuild those relationships.  

Discussion threads with no end in sight

We’ve seen those conversation threads where the participants have either got themselves stuck in a misalignment loop, or someone has dropped in and derailed the conversation from the original point. If you catch these moments early enough, you can still keep it async by either bringing the conversation back on track or introducing clarity and alignment. But if it seems that the conversation is not going to conclude or has a high amount of friction, then it’s worth setting up a quick sync meeting to close off the topic. Anyone can do this: the person who raised the point, one of the participants, or a third party who has just noticed that the conversation doesn’t seem to be concluding.

Rule: If a Slack thread has exceeded 10 messages, that’s usually a sign to get involved and close off the discussion with whatever method works best.    

Pulling back on communication

If you’ve been messaging an engineer and they’ve stopped responding to a few attempts to gain their attention, it might be time to put in a sync meeting. This is especially true if they are a bottleneck for something. A meeting could help realign expectations around messaging as well. 

Scheduling a synchronous meeting out of the blue is probably going to annoy people, but that’s also the point: make sure they understand the reason it’s necessary in the first place – the async approach wasn’t working. If you demonstrate the consequences of not contributing to asynchronous activities, this will most likely help revive engagement.  

Rule: if your async requests have been ignored three or more times, you’ll need to go synchronous. Highlight that the reason you’ve needed to lean on synchronous methods is due to a lack of engagement to demonstrate impact.

Urgency outweighs flexibility 

If you’re on an urgent deadline, you may feel the need to default to a meeting. However, I advise against this. While it may feel productive, oftentimes it invites the opposite. 

Why can urgent, reactive meetings be counterproductive?

1. Increased risk of missed requirements: in a rushed meeting, there’s often insufficient time for participants to fully prepare, think through edge cases, or consider all dependencies. The pressure focuses discussion on the immediate fire, not necessarily the complete picture. Verbal agreements are easily forgotten or misinterpreted later, especially compared to documented asynchronous discussions where points can be carefully considered and recorded.
2. Lack of clear documentation: asynchronous work naturally creates a written audit history of discussion and decisions. Urgent meetings often end with hasty notes or just verbal agreements, leaving no easily referenced record of decisions, context, or specifications. This makes it difficult for the team to remain aligned accurately throughout the life of a project delivery.
3. Higher chance of bugs or incorrect delivery: when developers work from incomplete requirements or ambiguous decisions stemming from a rushed meeting, the likelihood of introducing bugs or building the wrong feature increases significantly. Fixing these issues downstream inevitably takes longer than investing time upfront in clearer, async-first planning, even if that initially feels slower.

Instead of defaulting to a meeting, try to understand where the time pressures are coming from and why they are being imposed. You could find that there is either room to push back on the deadline, or that if you zoom out from now until the deadline, you can still map out a more async approach.

Rule: when there is a tight deadline, find out what’s driving the urgency. Then, work backwards from the deadline to plan clear instances where synchronous and asynchronous activities are needed. 

How to reintroduce asynchronous habits 

If you do find yourself in a scenario where synchronous working has taken over, then there are a few ways to bring the focus back:

1. Plan async before acting: block specific time to gather all requirements, look at the priorities, and map out the delivery plan. Document these details and share asynchronously for others to adopt and deliver.
2. Be selective with synchronous meetings: check the meeting agenda to determine if your presence is necessary and decline if an asynchronous contribution is sufficient. If participation is required, speak with the facilitator to understand the requirements beforehand and determine if elements of asynchronous work can be accommodated.
3. Redirect ad-hoc chats to asynchronous channels: instead of attending a quick call or a face-to-face meeting, ask for an asynchronous sync in a public chat. Tell others you are protecting your focused time and that the communication is better shared with a wider group.
4. Schedule and protect focus time: block out time in your calendar for deep focus and asynchronous tasks, protecting your time and showing others to respect that time. Treat these blocks of time seriously, opting to decline any meetings that clash with other priority-focused tasks.
5. Document outcomes of necessary sync activities: during essential synchronous meetings, take notes, document actions and decisions, and share these publicly. If possible, use an AI tool to do this for you. Make sure all sync activities are well documented to keep the benefit of an asynchronous audit history of meetings.

Where is synchronous work most useful?

Let’s look at some specific examples of where synchronous working could be more beneficial.

• Gain quick feedback: achieve rapid responses and make fast decisions.
• Engage interactively: facilitate dynamic workshops and group sessions, getting feedback from people in real time.
• Build team bonds: foster relationships through direct interaction.
• Brainstorm creatively: spark spontaneous, collaborative idea generation through real-time feedback and quick ideation.
• Align swiftly and solve urgently: ensure clarity and shared understanding quickly, solving critical issues that require immediate attention.

There is frustration and misinterpretation in communication

It’s harder to spot frustrated communication in text unless you have a good view of how an individual usually communicates, and once you spot it, you must act immediately. 

Before jumping to synchronous means, first try to solve their frustration through detailed messaging. This will hopefully give them the information they need. If this doesn’t work, a quick sync will usually solve the problem. This is usually a more helpful tactic if you’ve noticed a pattern of frustration between two people. Here, organize a sync and act as a mediator to resolve the issue, returning to async practices once resolved.

As a leader, it’s important to keep a focus on communication to highlight these issues and resolve them before they snowball into situations that require longer meetings to fix. 

Maximize the impact

To help maximize the impact of synchronous work, consider the following: 

Live docs

Having a living document for projects, features, or any items of work is a huge time saver for synchronous discussions. These documents should contain the most up-to-date information and decisions so that everyone can quickly get aligned. 

Agendas

Having an agenda in a meeting is the most important aspect of it. It keeps everyone aligned and also helps outline expectations on how stakeholders can prepare.

Pre-reads

The pre-read is an accompaniment for the agenda, and it helps give more context so that most of the synchronous meeting is not spent on gaining alignment. When providing a pre-read, give plenty of time before the meeting for people to digest it; some send reminders before the meeting. It’s vital that people realize the purpose of the pre-read is to give attendees time back.

Core hours and how they help with async working

Core hours are a concept that involves a set period within a flexible working arrangement during which all employees are expected to be present. Though it may seem counterintuitive to the ethos of asynchronous working, it’s in fact very helpful.  

By setting these parameters, you signpost a time period where synchronous working is acceptable. This helps give engineers a ball-park understanding of when they can expect to have meetings and organize themselves around it. 

Try this: either as a leader or advocate for async working, suggest setting core hours within your team. These should be agreed upon by everyone. 

You can choose to make the core hours flexible day-to-day, or even reserve one day where there are no “core hours,” making it a fully asynchronous day.

Now you have your core hours defined, start moving meetings around to match this, and make sure that any outside stakeholders know what you’re doing so they can also help support the team’s way of working.

Final thoughts 

There are benefits and drawbacks to both synchronous and asynchronous working, and it’s important to know when to rely on each. 

Using tactics like “core hours” and supporting documentation can be a life raft for asynchronous cultures, and helps keep the team’s momentum going.

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