An executive's guide to asynchronous company communication
Asynchronous communication is a simple concept, but leaders may find it difficult to apply it to how they engage with their people.
- A sync-first approach to communication is usually inconsistent. It often leads to a game of telephone, has a poor signal to noise ration and it doesn't contribute to the organisation's memory.
- An async-first mindset, however, overcomes these challenges, makes coordination easier, and drives up engagement.
- To go async-first with your company communication, you don't need to boil the ocean. This post has a dozen ideas of varying fidelity that you can implement to supercharge the way you communicate.
At its heart, asynchronous communication is quite simple. You can describe it using any of the following sentences.
Delayed communication, where people take part at their own pace, within a reasonable timeframe.
Meetings (and real-time communication) as the last resort and not the first option.
Writing as the most preferred communication pattern. Write first, talk if necessary.
Now of course when you say any of this the conversation doesn’t end there. You can have a much deeper exchange about this way of working depending on the person you’re talking to and their world view. Yet, it’s a remarkably simple concept. Almost too simple. To the extent that simplicity trips people over. Especially leaders who usually see slideware loaded with corporate jargon to explain complex concepts.
“The art of communication is the language of leadership" - James Humes
Communication is a big part of an exec’s role. In fact, many people would argue that if an exec isn’t communicating, what are they doing? In today’s post I want to demystify asynchronous company communication for the executive. If you’re leading a department, or your own company, think of this as your guide to effective internal communication.
The perils of being sync-first
I’ve spent 15 years in a company that prides itself on being “high-touch”. When I joined Thoughtworks back in the day, we had just about 80 odd people across India. When a leader wanted to say something to people, they’d just stand at the centre of the office floor, get people’s attention, say what they had to say and call it a done deal. If you had to say something across three offices, well, it wasn’t that difficult. Three people would synchronise what they wanted to say and follow the same “shout from the centre of the office” pattern. Worst case, someone would fly to each office and repeat themselves. It was all synchronous and all in person.
The romanticism of this model aside, you can probably see its inefficiencies already.
Inconsistent interpretations. The trouble with verbal communication is that people, even skilled communicators tend to talk too much and stray off topic. Depending on the audience’s engagement, different people would then interpret the leader’s message differently.
If you missed the meeting, hard luck. Inevitably, people would be either busy or on leave or out sick or even at a client site. If they missed the meeting, they often missed the message and had to deal with a rephrasing of what had happened. Since different people understood the message differently, a game of telephone followed.
An unpredictable signal to noise ratio. Across three offices, if different people conveyed the message, you couldn’t quite guarantee that they said it the same way. In fact, you couldn’t guarantee consistency even if the same person travelled to all three offices. People suffer from “occasion noise”, driven by several environmental factors and perform the same task differently on different occasions.
Poor organisational memory. When everything was just a conversation, nothing was ever in writing. Between one leadership talk and the next, it was hard to keep track of things, or to know what had changed or to even hold each other accountable. Especially for newcomers, most all-hands meetings started with little or no context.
All the problems I’ve highlighted above were true for an 80-person company, but they get worse with size and scale. Imagine a company of 15000 people spread across 50 odd locations. Synchronous communication breaks down as your company grows.
Adopt an async-first mindset
“Communication is a process, not an event.”
Synchronous communication is all about high-stakes events. An async-first mindset lowers the stakes by thinking about communication as a process and not just an event. Let’s play both approaches out for say, a change in organisational structure that leaders want to announce to their people.
| Communication as an event | Communication as a process |
|---|---|
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On the face of it, looking at communication as a process is a far more involved approach than just looking at it as an event. To me, that’s the beauty of it all. An event-centric approach creates the illusion that you’re done communicating. When in fact, you’re a victim of all the problems I’ve described earlier in this article. A process centric approach spaces out communication over time and allows you to build your message from one stage to the next.
While adopting an asynchronous way of working has its own benefits, asynchronous company communication brings a few added benefits.
Consistency. You write once, run infinitely. Everyone reads the same language. You can also reference what you write at a later point of time.
A high signal to noise ratio. Since you’re writing, there’s less room to ramble. It’s not impossible, it’s just a lot more effort to ramble. Most of the time, you’re likely to make the point in the most succinct manner possible. If you have a comms team at your disposal, they probably have the writing skills to help you shorten and sharpen your message. The cool thing is that on most platforms, you can edit your message after the fact. That’s a feature verbal communication doesn’t have!
Fewer coordination challenges. In a distributed workplace, you no longer need to think about calendars, travel and how to get people to attend. People also read much faster than they can listen, so the cost of consuming your communication goes down considerably as well.
High engagement. By spacing out communication and thinking of it as a process, you drive up engagement. If you look at the example, I played out above, you build out multiple touch points with people. Individuals can build on each other's understanding. Modern platforms allow people to engage through lightweight means such as reactions and emojis. You can now meaningfully gauge people’s sentiments with respect to your communication.
Thoughtful conversations, when they happen. Well-crafted writing can make real-time communication unnecessary, but when real-time conversations do happen, everyone starts with some mutual understanding. Your conversations can now go a few levels deeper than if you’d just relied on a one-and-done event.
Deep organisational memory. The ability to go back and look at a leader’s prior posts and to reference them make for a terrific way to trace back an organisation’s journey. While leaders can avoid a lot of context-setting by simply referencing a prior post, people can hold leaders accountable the same way. Now this may seem disconcerting because no one likes others using their words against them. I urge leaders to not take themselves so seriously. If people are going back to your old communication and holding you accountable, that means they care. This is a good thing. It helps you grow, and it helps the organisation become stronger through shared accountability and ownership.
Before I move to specific things you can start doing as part of your leadership comms, I want to share a thought about the introverted leader. Over the last decade or so, I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with leaders across various organisations. Almost all of them have learned to equate leadership with extroversion. Is it any surprise then that Susan Cain describes Harvard Business School - the church of business leadership - as the “spiritual capital of extroversion”? Leaders have no choice, but to be “vocal” and confident, charismatic presenters!
You’ll be surprised to know how many of these leaders, several from a technical background, are introverts who are living the extrovert ideal. When they’re due to address 500 people, many of them spend days stressing over it. A 40-minute session with 500 people isn’t just a 40-minute session anymore. It’s probably 40 hours of stress, anxiety, and preparation for many of them. Some people get good at this with time. Others struggle. An async-first mindset to communication levels the playing field for introverted leaders. Not only is it more efficient, it’s more inclusive.
Small changes, big improvements
If you feel convinced about the async-first mindset to communication, you’re probably curious about how you can implement this approach. Well, I’ve got a dozen ideas for you to chew on. I’d urge you to think about how you can implement these ideas in your context. They’re not all-or-nothing, though if you implement them all, I can assure you that you’ll have an effective communication strategy.
Be authentic. People like people who are like themselves. However, leadership is such a lonely gig that at times, it forces people in such roles to take themselves more seriously than they should. You want to appear strong, intelligent, self-assured, and no, you can’t be wrong. Guess what? Your people want you to be authentic and vulnerable instead. It’s ok to be wrong. It’s fine to share who you are. And yes, it’s ok to do this in writing.
Follow the DRY principle. Programmers will recognise the DRY principle from Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas’ book The Pragmatic Programmer. It stands for “don’t repeat yourself”. Simply put, you shouldn’t repeat software patterns. Avoid this redundancy using a higher level of code abstraction. In Hunt and Thomas’ words, "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system."
If you as a leader have to say the same thing several times, then you’re probably violating the DRY principle. Write it down. In a previous post, I’ve described Liam Martin’s rule of three for documenting stuff. When you implement DRY, you can then respond with a link and protect your time for more meaningful interactions. This behaviour also lays the foundation for a handbook first culture.
Communicate early. This goes hand in hand with authenticity. Leaders often wait too long to communicate with their people. On one hand you’re looking for a certain level of polish. On the other hand, you want communication to be perfect. What if things change? What if people perceive a sense of finality with what you’re saying? While these perceived risks are real, the risk of not communicating early is that the stakes get higher with time. When people understand that you’re thinking aloud with them, they’ll join you for the journey. Let them know if your thoughts are a work in progress. They’ll appreciate your transparency.
Communicate often. The corollary to communicating early, is to communicate often. This helps keep communication small and manageable. Taking people along that journey becomes a lot easier. Moreover, if you’ve communicated early, you can’t leave people hanging. They will want to hear the next message.
Think TikTok. This is a generation that’s exposed to high quality communication on the internet. Between TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, you’ll notice that content creators are trying to make their point in the shortest time possible. Indeed, this is also what the audience wants. The TikTok generation doesn’t grok Zoom webinars. Think about how you’ll engage with them. Using video. In the shortest time possible.
Think TED. Now you may (rightly) think of TikTok as a frivolous platform. I wouldn’t argue with you about that. You may think that your company communications are serious enough that you can’t share your message in just two or three minutes. I agree with that, but then I’d argue that you’re probably not communicating early and often. If you can’t be TikTok, at least try being TED. TED talks cover some of the most complex and important topics the world can think of and yet the longest talk can only be 18 minutes long. Several talks are as short as three, five or nine minutes. If the world’s best speakers need just that much time to make a point, why do you need more?
Relinquish the stage. If you’re writing often and communicating using asynchronous video, make peace with the fact that you don’t need to get on a webinar or in a town hall meeting that often. This is a feature, not a bug. This means you’re communicating more efficiently than before.
Keep it bi-directional. Relinquishing the big stage means that now you have time for smaller, more intimate conversations. Even if you continue to do some of the big stage stuff, you don’t need to make it one way traffic anymore. People don’t have to listen to a 45-minute presentation, while they type questions in the chat that someone else answers. When you communicate in real time, you can now have deep conversations and thoughtful questions and answers, especially since the “content” is now out of the way.
Care less about vanity metrics. Social media has taught us some bad habits. We focus on how many people attend our town hall, or how many people like our posts and how many people follow us. To some extent, these are useful ways to measure reach, but beyond that they’re just vanity metrics. As a designated leader, you’ll always have more reach than your average employee. The deeper question is how you use that reach.
Sweat communication effectiveness. The corollary to caring less about vanity metrics is to care about the impact of your communication. This is the hard part and it may even vary with every single instance or campaign. For example, if you’re sharing information - how much are people engaging through questions, comments and answers? If you had a call to action, how many people took it? Be critical of your own self. Weigh the cost of your communications against the value you got from it. All-hands meetings for instance are costly activities. Did you use it for what could have just been a short email or a post on your community platform? And it’s ok to do badly on effectiveness, as long as you’re willing to track it, learn from it and do better the next time. You’re a role model, remember?
Get help if you need it. I realise some of these suggestions may be a lot to take in for the overworked executive. Effective communication needs time and skill to craft. If you need a communications specialist to help you out, get one on board. You can still guide the sentiment you wish to communicate. The specialist can help you get it into the most ideal form for your audience.
Invest in the right tools. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to wrestle with poor communication tools when trying to get your message across. On the consumer internet, your people have access to tools with highly efficient, engaging user experiences. They expect a similar user experience at work, otherwise they don’t engage. If you can’t trust the tools you use to engage your people, you’ll eventually slide back into old habits, such as communication blasts on email and IM and the mindset of communication as an event. Revisit your communication and collaboration toolset and invest in tools that your people will use and that’ll serve your purpose. This particular idea may not be as easy to implement as the rest, but in a distributed organisation, you can’t ignore it for too long either.
Shankar Vedantam, Hidden Brain podcast
"People who can write well are people who know how to think well. So I often equate clarity of writing with clarity of thought"
Depending on where you are with your personality, experience and preferences as a leader, my suggestions may resonate with you or you could be sceptical of them. If you still have trepidations about adopting an async-first mindset, let me make one last point to rest my case. I borrow this line of thinking from Rob Ross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant. You can share three kinds of resources with your colleagues.
Informational resources such as knowledge and skills.
Social resources such as your organisational awareness, access to systems and people and your network position.
And finally, your personal resources, i.e., your time and energy.
Informational and social resources are quite different from your personal resources. They don’t deplete when you share them with others. Your time and energy are finite. When you spend time in redundant meetings, repetitive town halls, or saying the same thing over and over, that’s time you could spend somewhere else, doing something more valuable. Think about your time as a zero-sum game. An async-first mindset to communication, can help you pay less of the communication and collaboration tax and be a more efficient version of yourself. Now that’s something we can agree on, can’t we?