The value of async communication

Before the pandemic, I used to work with someone who had a style of meeting where he would invite all the potentially relevant people to the meeting, get them in a room together and figure out what we were doing in the meeting itself with a vague goal of what the outcome would be.

When I was first invited to this type of meeting I’d felt a bit too embarrassed to put my hand up and say ‘I don’t think I bring value to this meeting’ so I’d sit through the entire meeting wondering why I was invited. I tried my best to be present in a meeting with little relevance to me, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much this meeting actually cost per hour - the hourly rate of all of the people involved, the opportunity cost of the productive work they could’ve been doing, and the cost of the context switch. These weren’t just meetings with a lot of people, because there wasn’t a clear direction; they were fairly long meetings too.

When the pandemic hit, video chat became core to how people conducted meetings. Suddenly, the absence of ad-hoc and watercooler style meetings meant it was harder for people to communicate and the solution was to make even more meetings. For a brief period of time, my life was wall-to-wall meetings going from one zoom meeting to another with little time to take a break. I felt absolutely overwhelmed, I also felt like I couldn’t seem to get any work done, causing work to creep into my home time and affect my mental health.

The experience set off a spark in me to rethink not just meetings, but rituals we do in our day-to-day at work and how to perform them effectively and with purpose.

Meetings should be intentional

I valued the importance of these meetings and rituals as a communication tool, but when meetings were wasteful, they were a productivity killer. The answer wasn’t to ‘stop doing meetings,’ it was to conduct more effective meetings and make the information easier to digest.

When my life became an explosion of meetings and home-schooling (due to lockdowns), I got frustrated enough to make a change to how rituals were conducted by my own team.

The core philosophy was: Better respect each other’s time while still communicating effectively

Offload meeting content

One of the biggest changes we brought to how we conducted ourselves was the introduction of making meetings and rituals more ‘asynchronous,’ finding ways we could offload the majority of the content of meetings into content that could be written on our own terms, and in our own time (at any time). On top of reducing the load of meetings, this also had the added benefit of working better with flexible work schedules.

We moved most of our stand-ups to be asynchronous with twice-daily update threads on slack to communicate progress, intent, and blockers. The change meant we were always aware of what everyone was working on, and when they were blocked as soon as it happened. The communication came at little time cost, and freed us up to work more productively.

We also found the asynchronous approach could enhance other types of meetings too. In the situation I mentioned earlier about not putting my hand up about an irrelevant meeting; having clearly written backgrounds and agendas meant that anyone could opt-out before the meeting; while those in the meeting weren’t starting at zero, could ask questions early, and had the opportunity to better contribute.

Examples

Some of my favorite ways I’ve experienced making meetings async have been:

• Surveys and pre-meeting boards for retrospectives (you save the time of everyone trying to think about what to write).
• Pre writing standup notes so the standups go faster.
• Estimation sessions that were against a google doc with discussions on things that could blow out the estimate and then refining that conversation face-to-face.
• Collaborative prototyping with designers.

My experience of making this shift has meant that most meetings have been shorter and more laser-focused, and the feeling of being inundated with meetings has mostly subsided.

We now have so many asynchronous tools available to make meetings and work-related rituals more engaging, and in my experience, changing that mindset has been much better at giving teams the space to produce better quality work and respect each other’s time.