Asynchronous communication: sounds fancy, but it is one of the simplest ways to remove chaos from your business.
Picture this: an issue erupts from one of your clients. You don’t use async communication, so you start chatting at people, trying to get the important stakeholders on a meeting. Everyone has free time today, but none of it overlaps. You’re scrambling, trying to chat through it, meeting up with one of the people involved, reporting back to the rest, sending emails, checking your project management tools, starting #channels, and generally cosplaying as a hamster on a wheel: running around a lot, but not getting anywhere. Worse, so is the rest of your team, each in their own hamster wheel silo. Cute, but inefficient.
If you and your team are asynchronous communication pros, this story goes a lot differently. The issue crops up, you add it to your existing Issue list. If it’s super urgent, you ping your people with the Issue, and ask them to add context directly in a threaded discussion that notifies subscribers with each comment. You take steps toward resolution without even meeting. Anything that remains to be discussed is organized and contextual, so you can get through it quickly when you’re able to talk live. Everyone is calm, and everyone knows what’s going on.
This calm, cool, and collected approach to issues (and everything) in your business is easily accessible through the magic of async communication. This is why we are diehard async communication people at Strety, and one of the big reasons we get so much done as a small team.
The problem with traditional communication
Traditional business communication makes it so much easier for things to get lost in the sauce.
Email: where important info goes to die
Are you a fan of endless email chains? Who is?? Important info gets lost in threads that are almost impossible to search, takeaways and action items disappear into the digital ether, and context gets lost forever.
Chat: fun but not very practical
We love to chat with each other occasionally throughout the day, but it is not where we do our most important communication. Chatting is for quick questions, celebrating wins, pings to look at something in Strety, memes, and ridiculous AI images. If something important comes up in a chat, we immediately make that chat into an Issue, To Do, or Headline in Strety (you can do this with the click of a button from Microsoft Teams or Slack through our chat integrations). Otherwise, we know that chat will get buried just like an email.
Meetings: soul-crushing when done wrong
It is so common for people to get into the habit of confusing being busy with getting stuff done. Meetings are notorious for keeping people busy without making much forward progress. That’s why you need asynchronously managed agendas and context for every meeting. No agenda, no attend-a!
Synchronous onboarding: dependent on human brains
Don’t get us wrong, we love human brains. We even use them sometimes! But if your onboarding process is completely reliant on your best and brightest taking time to hand-hold your newest best and brightest, you’ve got problems: your senior employee loses momentum, and your newest employee has to scramble to document their new knowledge — or lose it forever. Plus, they have no context for what happened before they came on.
Our async-first approach at Strety (with Strety)
At Strety, we’re async-first by necessity and by choice — as a fully distributed team stretching across time zones, it is not always easy to get together. Still, we find ways to build remote team cohesion, and asynchronous communication is a cornerstone piece of the puzzle.
The magic ingredient in our asynchronous communication: Strety. (Bet you didn’t see that coming!) But seriously, we communicate in Strety all day long, and it helps so much because every single communication is contextual, documented, and directly connected to the work we’re actually doing. We don’t need to be communicating in real time to get real work done.
Our favorite async communication tools in Strety
Messages: our digital water cooler and message board
We love (LOVE) our Messages tool at Strety. We built it for those communications that don’t directly tie into any of our other EOS / project management / performance management tools. Here’s how we use Messages at Strety:
Company updates
We have a monthly all-hands meeting discussing the prior month and how Strety’s doing as a business. But it’s more of a recap and “state of the union” than a time for urgent information dispersal. When there’s announcements, company news, initiative launches, customer feedback we want to brainstorm through, and the like, we don’t want to wait for that monthly meeting. We throw it into Messages. This keeps everyone up to date without disrupting their days.
Cross-functional collaboration
As Strety’s marketer, I sometimes run into issues on the technical side and I’m not sure exactly who on the dev team to go to. I know enough technical stuff to be dangerous, but when it comes to things like real code, I’m a danger to myself and our website. When I run into a roadblock, I can throw up a message in company Messages with the issue I’m having, screenshots, and relevant links. I spend a few minutes writing, the right person spend a few minutes responding/helping me with my fix — all at our own convenience.
Everyone gets a notification so the right dev can jump in and company leadership/other teams have visibility into what we’re doing and why. The issue gets solved without “hopping on a quick call” that actually drains hours of collective company time.
Culture building
We’re big believers in building a winning culture. It’s how you win as a business! But building culture as a remote team is not always easy — we can’t exactly play ping pong on our lunch breaks.
Even better than ping pong: using our Messages tool to celebrate big wins and have a weekly “what did you do this weekend” discussion. Someone kicks it off and everyone who wants to chimes in with their weekend update, pics, and videos. It’s a fun, low pressure way to learn about each other and stay connected to the humans behind the amazing work they’re doing.
Comments Everywhere: Context Where You Need It
The other incredible asynchronous communication tool in Strety is everywhere you look: comments.
You can comment on To Dos, Rocks, Issues, Headlines, Scorecards, seats on the Accountability Chart™, and of course, Messages. Not only can you write comments, on every single comment you write, you can click the 3 dot menu on the right hand side to create a To Do, Issue, or Headline out of the comment. This is awesome because the Item you create is linked back to the comment you created it from. So much context, so little confusion!
Comments are also how we can hash things out without spending meeting time on it. We sometimes fully solve Issues before we even meet for our L10 Meetings because we can do the issue solving track asynchronously in the comments. This saves time, plus it ensures the resolution and resulting To Dos are extremely well-documented.
To make our comments even better and put the FUN in FUNctional: our “reaction” option. You can enter a reaction on any comment or message, and you’re not just limited to one emoji — you have 16 characters worth of space to react with gusto, say a couple words, or just add a “got it” to acknowledge you read the comment.
Playbooks: knowledge that doesn’t get lost
Another key async collaboration tool we use is our Playbooks. We use them to document processes, onboard new people, and I used them heavily for my maternity leave planning.
We use comments on Playbooks to discuss any updates needed or answer questions. By sharing knowledge this way, our Playbooks naturally evolve with our business without cumbersome review cycles or letting outdated information confuse anyone.
The biggest benefits of asynchronous communication
Other than eliminating the small panic that comes with a “ping” sound (which adds up, believe me), there are so many benefits to being async first.
Our meetings end early
- Everyone comes ready because context was built asynchronously
- Less time explaining, more time deciding
- Our L10 meetings consistently run short because so much of the real work happened beforehand
We make better decisions
- Async gives people space to process and contribute thoughtfully
- Introverts and different communication styles can participate fully
- Easy to revisit how and why decisions were made
Our culture is tight-knit though we’re far-flung
- Regular check-ins that don’t require scheduling
- Weekend stories and GIF reactions that show personality
- Team members contribute when they’re at their best
Bonus benefit: our amazing search bar
If you haven’t used Strety’s search bar, you’re missing out. You can enter a half-remembered phrase and use filters to find exactly what you’re looking for, like magic. Plus, you may see related items in Strety pop up in your selection of results, so you can go over everything that could be relevant to what you’re looking for. This means all the asynchronous communication you’ve been doing in Strety is not just there, it is available to you within seconds.
Never did I think I would be so excited about a search bar, but here we are. Try it, seriously.
How we make asynchronous communication our superpower
- Set clear expectations: not everything needs immediate response, but everything needs eventual response
- Choose your medium wisely: quick updates vs. complex discussions need different approaches
- Document the important stuff: if it matters to the business, get it out of your head and into the system
- Embrace the asynchronous mindset: it’s okay (and often better) when conversations happen over time
How to get started with the magic of async communication
If your time is super reliant on meetings/chat/synchronous communication, don’t try to go fully async right away. Ease in, notice how nice it is, and move more comms over to your async tools.
Pick one type of communication — project updates could be an easy one. Create a Message in a Project space for a weekly project update. Give your update, and ask everyone on that project to comment their updates. It should take each person 2-3 minutes on their own schedule. And just like that, you’re saved hours of team time a week.
Be patient with yourself and your team. If you’re used to the lifestyle of being inundated with chat pings, instant responses, and hopping on calls to get through your work, async may feel weird or slow at first. But the more you move over, the less time your work gets interrupted, the more you get done, I promise! Plus, your days will feel calmer. More productive and more relaxed: it’s the Strety way 😎
If you’re ready to unlock the world’s best tool for asynchronous communication (in my humble, not-at-all biased opinion), give Strety a try for free. Or book a call with our awesome team — they’re happy to talk to you live about how you can cut down on other, way more boring calls 🙂