Estimated reading time: 26 minutes

Building a reliable async culture as more and more companies recall their workforce back to the office is easier than you think.

As companies increasingly push RTO mandates on engineering teams, it can be easy to revert to synchronous working patterns. Some might even believe that in-office and asynchronous work don’t align well together. But sharing an office space doesn’t negate async work; in fact, they can complement each other wonderfully. 

It’s important to understand that asynchronous work does not equal remote work. While remote work is a matter of location (working from somewhere other than a central office), asynchronous work is a philosophy of communication and collaboration where team members don’t need to be online at the same time to get things done.

So, how exactly can you build a strong async culture in an RTO world?

Async advocacy requires people skills

Building trust in others

Async working is all about trust: trusting your reports to be autonomous, to get their work done, and to manage their time effectively.

When advocating for async working in your company, you will need to make sure the levels of trust others have in you – your trust battery – is full with as many people across the company as possible. This makes the job of influencing peers and other teams a lot simpler. 

Identify those who have a strong influence in the company and start building a relationship with them. I’m not saying make friends with the CEO, but maybe your manager’s manager is a good place to start. Try to understand them as a person; maybe they’re enthusiastic supporters of async working and were just waiting to endorse a champion. 

Building a pitch

When advocating for anything, you are essentially selling your idea.

As you do so, try to think about: 

• What you’re offering.
• Why would someone want to buy it?
• What value does it bring to them? And the company?

Each person will have their own values you’ll need to navigate, but getting to the root of these questions will guarantee easier adoption by others. The sales pitch needs to be customized to your organization’s size, including the general pros and cons of async cultures. At all points, try to relate your pitch back to the bigger problems faced by those you’re advocating to. Try to find spaces where they can apply async working to them. This will take time because you will need to experiment, reflect, and tweak until you have it in a strong position. 

Async promotion

You are not going to capture and build relationships with everyone (especially within a larger organization), so you need to radiate the information out. The type of information you need to share is “what” you’re doing and the “benefits” to the company. Use successful examples of async working to show others the advantages and how they could apply it to their own challenges. As you introduce more async practices to your team, encourage them to advocate to others. Additionally, if your company holds regular town halls or cross-department meetings, this is an ideal opportunity to request a platform to share these examples and discuss the async work being done in the company.

In an office environment, promoting async work patterns can be somewhat easier to achieve, as discussing the approaches and benefits can be as simple as mentioning them to someone during a coffee break or hosting lightning talks on async working. You can also use this opportunity to notice when something could be async and walk over to offer your support, again making sure you are working with your pitch. 

The “hard” skill element

Navigating relationships with people and influencing is only half the battle. Creating documentation and points of reference are equally important. 

I always start by documenting the expectations of communication within a team, writing down ways of working, and understanding how best to interact with team members. This is so that anyone working with the team has a clear understanding of how it functions, with the added bonus of helping new team members onboard quickly. 

The next early steps are to reflect on what other areas you can document best practices. This could be meeting culture, how actions should be documented and followed up, and how to ask questions in a public space.

Build a knowledge base

Even in an office environment, a documented knowledge base is crucial to the success and long-term investment of the company. Building a strong knowledge base is also fundamental for advocating and successfully implementing async working, as it directly supports the underlying principles of trust, autonomy, and efficient information retrieval. 

While the advantages and approaches to building documentation are vast, two scenarios are the most common when in this situation: creating documentation from the ground up or improving what already exists. 

Starting from the ground up

When building a knowledge hub from scratch, there are some important elements to consider: what information are most people after? What are the most important questions to answer? How much time are they spending finding information today?

Once you understand team and business needs and where to start, it will be on you to find the information, write it down, and spread the knowledge to get others to work with it. 

Giving people somewhere to find information and encouraging them to use it will instantly start you on the async journey. Importantly, it will also give you a starting point to share in your pitch when advocating for async working, as you will have a document with examples you can share with others.

Building this knowledge base will be the foundation of your advocacy, as it sets the stage for good async practice. Without it, others may struggle to know where to start. 

Improving what already exists

If you already have a documentation procedure, with a somewhat developed knowledge hub, your task looks a little different. Think about: how easy is the knowledge base to work with? How well structured is the information? How many people use the knowledge base versus contacting people directly?

If there is already a knowledge base, then be the force to improve it. Find the areas that frustrate people and iterate. I always like to think of the phrase: “If you can’t answer a question by pointing to a document, then write it down.”

Keep a constant focus on utilizing the resources. You could have the best knowledge base in the world, but if no one is using it, then it becomes outdated, and you don’t gain the async advantage of it. After encouraging others to adopt, showcase how the system enhances information retrieval by sharing testimonials and examples of improved productivity. 

How to encourage async when communication is synchronous

In a synchronous environment, “watercooler” moments, or in-person meetings where no notes are taken, are common. Your role is to identify and encourage others to think async when these moments happen. 

I like to use the following questions in a synchronous moment to see if I need to async-rify it:

• Have any actions been identified?
• Does any of this information need to be shared?
• Would someone else benefit from this information?
• Have any decisions or assumptions been made?

Let’s explore some specific ways of working that tend to occur in office settings and look at how they could be asynchronous.

Example: Making decisions at a desk

You are walking past someone’s desk, and they stop you to ask about an upcoming project. They had a great idea and wanted to run it by you. After a discussion, you both agree that the idea would really help deliver the project much faster, and so you return to the team and start actioning changes. 

If we ask ourselves, “does any of this information need to be shared?” the answer is probably yes. This would avoid, for example, two people working on the same thing. Or imagine that someone has context that meant the decision you made was not the right approach to take.

A successful example of this would have been that during the discussion, any decisions, actions, and important notes were taken. This is then shared with the wider team for feedback, in case any additional context could enhance the overall delivery.

Example: An insight into team culture

Some managers find office culture helpful because they can listen to their team as they work together and solve cultural problems (such as disagreements) through the conversations they hear. But this can encourage a team to rely on their manager’s eavesdropping to help identify issues. It can also lead to a team that holds back on conversations, or a manager that spends most of their time distracted, losing their own focus.

An alternative to this is to continue to intentionally encourage a team to reach out for support. Maintain an “open door” policy or re-establish more open communication through 1:1s or team meetings.  

When it comes to helping your team maintain an uninterrupted focus, you can set rules around how focus is demonstrated in public channels. For instance, you can use emojis like flags,  headphones, or something similar next to names. Using this informs others that you are not watching messages, so they would need to find another way to contact you.

Example: Meeting culture

In an office (or even remote) environment, you can easily be dragged into a culture where you spend more time in meetings than delivering value. 

Meetings aren’t inherently bad, but if they’re used haphazardly, without agendas, a list of people involved, or documentation, your time is being misspent. Among other things, this approach can lead to a huge silo of information and a misaligned outcome with no documented actions.

There are a lot of ways to make meetings more impactful and productive, but for the advocacy of async work, the first thing to ask people when they book a meeting is if it could have been async.  

Really question if the meeting needs to happen. Look into whether the answer to the meeting’s purpose can be found in the knowledge base already. If not, it could still be a question or decision that is discussed in a Slack communication thread. 

Final thoughts

It may seem daunting being the advocate for async working, especially as people return to the office, but once you get into the flow of it and build trust, adoption starts to advance more organically. 

In an office-based environment, it’s about being intentional in how you help others adopt async working: identify the challenges, and help solve them. Remember, while synchronous working has its place, it can result in a space where flow is constantly interrupted, knowledge is siloed, and cross-team collaboration is stunted. 

The benefits of async working are vast because not only do you help dispel some of the negative side effects of synchronous culture, but you also build your network (and trust battery). This is always advantageous as it can lead you to new and exciting opportunities.

Final checklist

• Create a central knowledge base with sections for standards, policies, and other useful onboarding areas.
• Document and share the company vision and goals on a regular basis.
• Establish a clear communication setup that is driven from the top down.
• Document all decisions.
• Identify the size and needs of your org for async working.
• Understand the personality types within your team.
• Implement one async way of working.
• Keep consistent and gather feedback over time.
• Build a pitch to “sell” async working to others.
• Understand the challenges people are facing and how async could help.
• Celebrate and share widely for others to adopt.

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