hello? Hello. And welcome to the darn good leadership podcast. We all struggle with leading effectively, and this show is going to help you face those challenges. You're going to get ideas, inspiration and practical advice. You can take action on today to become a darn good leader. I'm your host, Emily Holting. And in today's episode, we're talking about asynchronous collaboration. And why you should care about it. Now, if you haven't heard of the word asynchronous or async as I will refer to it in this show. Well, it's just a matter of time. You're going to start hearing it everywhere very soon she is the it girl buzzword of the season but she's actually not new to the game and she has real staying power Async collaboration is any group work that does not require members to be in a meeting or online simultaneously. It does still require active collaboration. It's when group work happens for different members at their own time. So why does this matter and why is async getting such buzz short story? 75% of all office jobs are either fully remote. Or some type of hybrid model. And according to a recent study from Harvard business school employees are attending 13% more meetings than they were pre pandemic contributing to an 8% longer Workday on average. Even with the elimination of commuting to work and not having to spend as much time grooming ourselves to be polished and presentable. People are working longer hours. And they're moving less because they're in back to back zoom calls. If you think you're getting more out of your people with these longer work days, you're not a recent Miro study showed that 57% of workers are multitasking during these meetings. How we're working, isn't working. As leaders we have an important role to play in stopping the madness and starting to influence and model a better more sustainable and more effective way of working and this, my friends is why async collaboration matters. She offers a shiny path forward. And today's show I'm going to discuss the benefits of async collaboration. And share my three favorite async activities to try. And my five favorite async behaviors to model. But first a scenario. Imagine this you're sleeping and your alarm goes off. You've said it early with the intention of having some time for yourself before the Workday begins. However, before you even get out of bed, you decide, oh, I'm just going to pick up my phone. Then you see notifications from your work email and your messenger app. They're taunting you to open them without even thinking twice you click you read, you began responding. This is not wise because now people think you're available and online and they start sending more messages or perhaps even asking you to jump on a zoom call. So your morning is now in reactive mode. Before, you know it the whole time you wanted to allocate for yourself? Well, it's gone. You haven't done the things to make you feel more prepared for the day. And now you're in back to back meetings. And during those meetings, you're trying to balance responding to emails and slack messages. And you're not quite giving your full attention to any one thing. You try to sneak in a break here and there, but even on your breaks, you've got your phone glued to your side and you're still responding to messages as they come in. Your meetings run long, making you late to the ones that are following them. The day is coming to a close and you haven't really had time to do your own work. So you throw in a couple more hours. You look at your watch and you realize it's late and you haven't moved much, but now you're exhausted. You check your phone one more time before bed. And then you run and repeat. Does any of this resonate with you? Does it sound like a sustainable and effective way to work? I don't think it does. So let's discuss how we can get out of this vicious cycle. I want to start by reviewing synchronous work. This is the word people feel typically more comfortable with because it's likely been your most commonly used mode of working. It is simultaneous work between two or more people. This type of work has its time and place. And there are activities like one-on-ones. Urgent messages or escalations that need immediate response, employee reviews, strategy discussions, job interviews, critical announcements, or things that are just more sensitive in nature. Being online simultaneously and meetings for these things make absolute sense. However, there are two types of synchronous work that are becoming increasingly problematic. The first is any activity that involves interrupting someone and having the expectation that you will receive an immediate response back. The second is meetings in person or virtual let's address the first one, if you message someone unexpectedly and I'm not talking about urgent escalations here, but if you message someone email or I am, and you have an expectation that you should get a response fairly immediately. Or if you receive a message unexpectedly and you feel that there is some expectation of you to respond. Regardless of the time of day or what else you may be working on. You've got a work culture that is reactionary and is embracing interruptions. Now, whether this is intentional or not, it's causing massive context. Switching, lack of focus. And it's eating away at productivity because it's preventing people from making progress on the things that matter most. Now let's talk about the second one meetings. I guarantee. If you look at your own calendar, you could easily identify several meetings. You don't need to attend you could cancel or meetings that could be replaced or reduced with asynchronous collaboration meetings are one of our most expensive tools we have in our communication toolkit. So when they aren't high value, it's a problem. And it's a problem. We should all be paying more attention to. HBR reported that employee productivity increased by over 70% when meetings were reduced by 40%. As leaders, we have a responsibility to respond to those numbers when done right. Async work allows members to increase their own productivity. And reduces the average cycle time of their team's output. Companies that embrace ace and collaboration also experienced numerous benefits and so i'm going to list a couple of those for you now One is that companies using async tend to have higher employee engagement and retention. And this is because more and more office workers are demanding flexible work. So these companies are winning the battle for talent. Another benefit. Asynchronous is also more inclusive. So, whether you're sitting in an office in New York, or let's say you're working at home from Berlin. Or you decide to go to a coffee shop and work out of there in California. There is no bias to location or time zone. So it's giving all of your members a more equal opportunity. Another benefit. There's less context switching and that's because interruptions and meetings that aren't high value are reduced by employees. And therefore more of their time is allocated for focus work and work that is flow state type work Another benefit. It gets us out of our FireDrill reactionary culture because everyone is more inclined to plan ahead. Because that reactionary behavior is no longer an expectation. So if you don't plan ahead, you're going to be blocked the next day. And finally, the last benefit I will mention is that companies that are embracing async are outpacing their competition from a results perspective. the benefits sound pretty amazing, right? So if I've piqued your interest and you're considering taking action after the show, Well here are my favorite three async activities i'd suggest any leader to experiment with The first async activity to try is for any meetings that do need to remain on the calendar. Figure out. If you can provide pre context materials, bundled with instructions, for people to ask questions and give feedback. The pre context material gives the invitees context for the meeting and better prepares them for the discussion and any decisions that you were asking them to make. Whereas the combined instructions for question and feedback. Actually puts the ownership and accountability back on the people to do the pre-work. It also gives you an opportunity to review their feedback and answer any questions before the meeting and determine if you need to adjust the agenda. You can capture Q and a and feedback and confluence, Google doc, a white boarding tool like Nero. Or you could even set up a workflow using slack. Choose, whatever format you're comfortable with, but ensure you add it in your bundled instructions. The second activity you might want to experiment with is to record short video clips for your teams and communities Instead of trying to find a calendar time slot that works for everyone or having to hold off sharing important information until you have a given meeting leaders can help instill a culture of sharing recorded messages. For example, every Friday I write a weekly newsletter to my team, summarizing priorities, expectations, and things to be excited about for the week ahead. And then I also record a video doing a high level summary of those things. Through many experimentations with my team. They prefer that I do both. It helps those who aren't native English speakers better understand me. And my expression and tone helps convey a stronger message to the entire group. My team also uses short video clips to summarize what they've been working on or to share important updates to each other. I've also used recordings with outside groups, because sometimes when we're trying to answer questions, recording a short one to two minute video clip. Is easier than trying to construct an email or message. Personally, I love using slack for these recordings because one I'm already using that tool. And that's where I'm going to send a message through, but to slack automatically cuts you off at five minutes. So your recordings have to be five minutes or less. And for the information I'm sharing, it's the perfect digestible length for any group to consume. Of course you can record messages through various tools and various lens. And you can also experiment with recording and sharing on a larger scale. Uh, such as with departments or your entire company, but I found a culture of sharing typically encourages further sharing. Which is why i love this activity the third asynchronous activity to try is to turn any working session into an asynchronous working session. This is actually the normal mode in which my team works. Half of them sit in north America, half of them sit in Europe. We don't have tons of overlap during the day with each other to do simultaneous work. And we can't expect to give one another immediate responses to things. It's been important for our team to figure out how to work together, better asynchronously. On a day-to-day basis, we are using a combination of JIRA to track our task and priorities. We put any documentation or reference material into confluence, and then we use mural for ideation mapping, grouping analysis, brainstorming brainwriting And for those of you who don't know what Miro is, it's an online collaborative whiteboard platform to bring teams together anytime, anywhere. This tool is life-changing and I am not being dramatic. Miro has recently posted a blog about the future of distributed teams. And in this post, they created a simple chart to help identify various activities that you can do outside of a meeting. Asynchronously. I will put a link to this blog post in the show notes. As I found it to be incredibly helpful and has a ton of other additional information. You can use as a reference around asynchronous collaboration. So I've called out my three favorite async activities to try, which is one pre meeting context with bundled instructions on question and feedback. To recording short video messages for your teams and communities and three turning any normal working meaning. Into asynchronous working sessions. There are a lot of additional async activities out there. So please don't feel limited to this list, but Challenge yourself to try an async activity out, see how it goes. Be data-driven about it too. So if you do try something, take a poll with your team to see what they think and to find some lightweight success criteria for yourself. So you can actually evaluate if you're seeing the benefits. Now that you're experimenting with async activities. How about modeling async behaviors for your teams as well? Remember. It's not just about how well someone leads when you work together simultaneously. It's also about how will you lead when you work apart. Here are my favorite five async behaviors for any leader to model. The first behavior to model is to set core working hours with your teams These are your core collaboration times or your windows for synchronous work? It should be aligned to common time zones for us the window of seven 30 to nine 30 Pacific time is when we have our core working hours. This is when we're going to have our meetings. And this is when we expect to be able to respond more quickly to one another. Outside of this window is when the work is more asynchronous. My team knows they have more flexibility outside of that window to get their work done and get to results in a way that suits them best. I recommend you document your core work hours as a line item in your team, working agreements. The second behavior to model is don't respond in real time when it's off time. I will be the first to admit I have been a repeat offender on this one. I have to check myself quite a bit. But when you were sending slack messages, emails, or posting things on the weekends late at night, early morning. It is sending a signal to your teams that you're always working. And then they feel the pressure, whether you intend to, or not to do the same and always respond even in their off hours. It's also likely they will begin modeling that same behavior. And pushing out things at various off times to other people. And this is when we get into the reactionary fire drill culture that we so desperately need to get out of. The good news is if you are a person who likes to look at things late at night, or over the weekend at a time that suits you best. It's perfectly fine to do that, there are now so many tools that you can preset. When to send out emails, slack messages, and when to post documentation. So take advantage of those things and convey the right behaviors to your teams. The third behavior to model is to take breaks. It is not sustainable for people to feel like they always have to be in work mode. They need to be able to take breaks during the day. And if you set your core working hours, it's much easier to line. And when you need them to be super responsive, being in a reactive fire drill culture is a hard thing to break. So you've got to demonstrate as a leader yourself that you are taking breaks. I use slack personally to show my status updates and I ping my team slack channel to let them know I'm taking a break. So, if I decide to do a 10:00 AM Pilates class or to walk the dog from one 30 to two, or take a longer lunch or run an errand, I tell them and I let them know when I'm back. Now that I've been doing this, I actually have one person on my team who messaged. They were going for a run in the middle of the day. And when they got back, we had a one-on-one and they told me they felt like a brand new person, much more energized and focused. This is a high performing individual. And if going for a run in the middle of the day makes them feel better and makes them perform better. Why wouldn't we encourage that? It's not about butts and seats. It's about results. The fourth behavior to model is Marie Kondo, your meetings. Does this meeting spark joy. If it does keep it, if not dispose of it. If you don't know who Marie Kondo is, Google it. Cause you're missing out. She's incredible and very wise, but she is renowned for the art of tidying up. So lead by example and tidy up your meetings. Go through the ones in your calendar with fresh eyes and a real focus on what value that meeting is adding. And if there are activities that you can do instead, a synchronously. Then reduce the client or cancel as appropriate. The fifth behavior is to always default to action. I have to admit, this is a mantra that remote and get lab use, and I'm officially making it one of mine too. This means that if you need to do something and it's during an async time when no one is there to help you or point out what to do next. Then just use your common sense and pick something out yourself. Hopefully your people have a backlog. Or they can reference some sort of documentation. On your department or team's highest priorities with ease. If they can't make progress on that item, then they can go to the next one and so forth. However, if they are truly stuck and just don't have enough direction or context, they should use their best judgment on where they can add value. Sometimes this could be low hanging fruit, but the team just has been meaning to get to, or perhaps there's reading they can do with their own professional growth, or maybe their time is just best spent taking a break and feeling refreshed versus doing work that will have to be redone. Recap time, my five favorite asynchronous behaviors for any leader to model R one setting core work hours with your teams to don't respond in real time when it's off time. Three take breaks for Marie Kondo, your meetings, and five, always default to action. I want to share one more scenario with you. Imagine this you're sleeping. Your alarm goes off. You've set it early with the intention of having some time for yourself before the Workday begins. You feel absolutely no pressure to check your work, email or work messenger app because you know, your team's core working hours. Your morning is yours and you do the themes you wanted to do for yourself. You decide to do some focus, work before your core hours kick in, and then you attend your first meeting of the day. It's very productive because it's only 30 minutes and the host send out pre context material with bundled instructions on how to do Q and a and give feedback, making the discussion during the meeting much more valuable and easier for the group to come to a decision. After the meeting, you decided to take some emails and then spend another hour on focused work. You messaged your team that you're not taking a break to do an errand. And when you get home. You do some asynchronous work, adding your thoughts and ideas to a shared workspace. You look at your watch, you feel proud of the amount you accomplish for the day and you log off to enjoy the rest of the night with your family. How does that sound sounds like a pretty great way of working right. As Grace Hopper once said the most dangerous phrase in the language is we've always done it this way. As leaders, we can't just keep doing things the same way. It's time for a different way of working. It's not about the hours your people put in it's about the impacts and the results they are producing. It's not about having employees set an endless zoom calls all day long until they're a zombie. It's about empowering a different approach and making a much happier and productive workforce. thank you so much for your time today. I hope you found this episode useful and that you are inspired to take some sort of action based off what you heard. Stay tuned. As new episodes will be dropping every Tuesday. Be bold, be bright. Be a darn good leader. See you next time.