How to set up an asynchronous work environment

If you keep your company’s size, different personality types, and ways of working in mind, moving to an asynchronous environment can have lots of advantages.

Getting started with asynchronous practices in your organization can be a behemoth task, especially when you fact in different company sizes and personality types. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, so the best approach is to implement small changes with regular cycles of reflection to amend these practices and get the most out of asynchronous working.

Working with others to implement an asynchronous environment with functioning processes is an exciting journey, starting with the basics.

There are some key areas that will help us in our async journey: company size, personality types, and ways of working. Each of these areas is required to set yourself up for success. 

How the size of the company affects async work

The size of your company can have a big impact on how you set up async work. The below outline is a rough guide that you can use to decide what works best for you.

Start-up (1-50 employees)

Async working is easier to set up in a small company but harder to justify. In start-ups, everything is about getting things delivered quickly, which means that a lot more sync discussions are likely to happen. However, instilling async best practices, such as writing everything down and asking the question, “Does this need to be a meeting?” is important nonetheless.  

Start-ups want to move fast, but there are always going to be conversations people miss out on, so making sure everything is either written down or recorded means you’ll get clearer alignment. 

It’s also still important to have focus time, so engineering leaders should think about having a day in their week where there are no meetings, allowing others to just focus on the delivery. 

Scale-up (50-400 employees)

As the company scales from a start-up to a scale-up, it’s crucial to evolve its ways of working. This is the ideal time to embed async working practices as you onboard new people. Setting working practices and expectations early as the company grows makes it easier for others to embed them into their daily work.

Enterprise (400+)

These companies are huge, meaning that it’s the hardest to make large-scale changes. Even if changes are made, it will take a while to adapt. It’s about starting small and then demonstrating the value to others. This could be starting async practices in one team and demonstrating the benefits to other teams. Or choosing a subject like ” no meeting day” and having this spread across either a tribe or the whole company, being a spokesperson for asynchronous working. Collaborate with others to understand their approach to working and, if there are gaps, to introduce async practices.

Personality types

No matter where you work there are always going to be different personalities to take into account, and some of those are more likely to adopt or resist async working. For a lot of these personality types it’s important to build a relationship with them first, you may need to show them the benefits of async working before they trust you. Come from a place of empathy as well as being setting clear expectations of your intent. Below are some character archetypes and how you might best “convert” them.  

• The one where meetings are everything: These individuals like to have their answers quickly. For them, if the entire day is full of meetings, then it is a productive one.
  
  These are the hardest to switch to the async side as it removes the one thing they love, meetings. To combat this, the first thing is to build a good relationship with them, understand what they get out of meetings, and then work with them to remove some meetings from their calendars. 
  
  Try this: Look at their calendar with them and all their meeting agendas for the week, and pick one or two that you will both make asynchronous. Then, look at their to-do list and swap those meetings out with focus work for them.
   
• The one where deep work is everything: this personality type loves async working as it plays to their greatest strength, focus time. You won’t need to convince them to adopt it, but you will need to work with them on introducing a level of sync working into their lives.
  
  Try this: If they have any investigations they are working on encourage them to organize more sync collaboration exercises, pairing with others and shifting some investigations away from pure deep focus and more ideation exercises with others.
   
• The one where everything has a place:  this personality type has the whole week mapped out in their calendars perfectly. This personality is either good or bad for async working, and it depends on how they organize their week. If it’s too organized then there is no room to fit in the async tasks. 
  
  Try this: Encourage overly organized individuals to add “buffer times” so their week isn’t so packed. Guiding them on best practices for prioritization may also be helpful. 
   
• The one with the chaotic energy: these are usually the personalities that live in the moment. They often ask questions sporadically and quickly, perhaps adding you to last-minute meetings with no agenda.
  
  You may be super worried about this personality type with async working, but I have often found these are the ones who adapt to it the best. The first part of solving the issue is understanding why they are so disorganized and then focusing on that area to help them move through it. It might be slow at first, but once they start seeing the benefits of async working, they will start to become more organized.
  
  Try this: let’s imagine this individual has come to you with a “quick question.” This could be because they don’t know where to find the information they need, or it could even be they don’t realize the impact of a quick question. Work with them to identify what is causing the need for the question and help them improve their ability to find the information themselves. This may throw up secondary problems like making your documentation easier to work with, but that should be regarded as a plus.  

Ways of working

When introducing async working, it’s important to have a focused plan on where to start. Don’t make everything async; instead, encourage a general “ways of working” shift towards more async working. 

Here are some starting points:

Remove a meeting

Look at your current calendar of regular meetings. Is there one that can be made into an async event? Review the agenda and expected outcomes in a document. Share the document with those who would be present in the meeting and ask for feedback within a specific time frame. Then, set a point to review and close the topic.

Async stand-up

Stand-up ceremonies are the perfect async candidate. You don’t have to make every stand-up async, but three a week is a happy medium. Your async stand-ups can start as written message updates to common questions, with a defined window to complete them in. Make sure it’s visible to the whole team.  Use feedback to find out if this is working as expected and tweak it.

From my experience, this approach has often led to better conversations and alignment between the team. 

Async a project

If you want to go big, then making a project async is the way to go. This has a lot of parts that make it complicated. In order to do this successfully, you may need to juggle both async and sync styles to get the most out of it. 

Have a central document that acts as the source of truth for any information on the project. This could include an overview, recordings of any meetings, key decisions that were made, and even the communication approaches (for example, Slack channels). The key to the success of an asynchronous project is always referencing the document in any communication or planning and encouraging people to review it before setting up any meetings.

Asyncing a project involves more than just documentation; but it’s a strong starting point. It helps people understand your goals and fosters alignment across teams. This approach also makes it much easier to onboard others in the future or, at some point in the future, understand why a decision was made.

Feedback cycle

The most important part of introducing any change is to check it’s working and to ensure that others see a benefit. The more often you do this the easier it is to course-correct and make changes to get the benefits you’re aiming for. 

This doesn’t need to be a huge amount of work and could be included as part of the feedback sessions you already have, like 1:1s and retrospectives. 

Asynchronous working can take some time for people to adopt, based off of their working personalities, so give things time (like a week or two) and then adjust. Don’t throw it away; find out what isn’t working and why, then tweak it.

Checklist 

Let’s take a moment to validate all the things we need to do in order to set up async working:

• 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 

You should now have everything you need to get started; reflect on where it’s working and where it needs improvement. 

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