Use asynchronous communication to give them the time and space they need to do their best work. Use document collaboration tools like Notion or Google Drive to create a company intranet or knowledge base everyone can access. Then, open these apps in your Switchboard room to keep all your relevant documents organized by project—and eliminate context switching. Your team can connect in real time or move work along async with meeting recordings and voice notes—not everything has to be written out. Plus, with Switchboard AI, you can have all your favorite tools talk to each other and quickly summarize all the information from meetings or project work sessions, so you don’t have to.
To establish when team members will be online and responding to questions, encourage every team member to share their working hours. You can do this by setting it up in your online calendar, or adding it to your profile in various virtual tools like Asana and Slack. The Meeting Manifesto—which was shared company-wide—explains when and how to schedule meetings. Within the manifesto, we also go into details about when you shouldn’t have a meeting—things like sharing status updates or other general information, or meetings without an agenda or purpose.
Say „bye, bye, bye” to unnecessary and unproductive meetings
Made popular by Apple, DRI means a single person is responsible for any given area or project inside the company. That person doesn’t do everything themselves but instead organizes the team or project, makes key decisions, and generally owns the timeline and results. The more you can decrease the number of people involved in decisions, decentralize authority, and increase individual accountability, the more efficient your team will be. This is true in any company but is especially crucial for success in an async environment. Then, set expectations for response times to make sure everyone knows when they need to take action or when it’s time for focus work.
Get product updates, Switchboard tips and tricks, and great remote work resources delivered right to your inbox. Sumeet Howe, VP, Product at Hover, shares how each of Hover’s product managers act as founders of Series A companies. Let’s reconstruct the same broad workflow, but inject asynchronous comms where applicable.
stand up meeting rules for more productive teams
Notion makes it incredibly easy to organize your data into relevant workspaces. You can also use it as a project management tool, and link relevant pages to tasks so nothing gets lost in the fold. Talk to your https://remotemode.net/ colleagues to determine the best time slot for communication. This applies to both synchronous communication as well as async wherein you can expect a response within those hours, no matter the method.
Clearly communicating the response times and establishing norms early on will help manage the expectations of team members. Encourage the team to transparently share their availability and schedules to avoid any confusion or misunderstandings. ETAs are extremely important to keep everyone aligned on when to expect a response. This is even more important in cases where definition of asynchronous communication is used for critical situations (for example, managing an incident).
Synchronous communication examples:
Plus, it integrates with other tools your team uses like Google Docs, Dropbox, and GitHub, and more. Best of all, by sending your team a pre-recorded video, you’re giving each coworker the time and space to digest information on their own before providing a response. If the information is dense, coworkers can even re-watch the video for clarity. The immediacy of synchronous communication leaves little time for self-editing.
This article will explore the advantages and drawbacks of each and help managers make an informed decision when choosing the right communication protocol for a distributed team. This approach enables a simple, decoupled architecture that is easy to read. It also helps support interoperability between protocols and payload transformation between services. Social media has long been an indispensable tool for promotion and customer engagement, especially for commercial businesses. Use the tips covered in this post to guide your team’s transition to better business communication.
