How to Move Your Team Toward Async-First Communication

Substitute constant chatting with less frequent summaries. Emma starts her week off by communicating a “top of mind” document to her team. Rather than pinging a team member when a non-urgent thought comes to her, she adds it to the document for the week ahead. She takes a similar approach with her boss, sending him “closing remarks” every Friday to... See more

Async communication is about allowing team members to “consume and respond to messages on their own time instead of on the sender’s schedule.”

When teams have easy access to information, transparency, and central sources of shared truth, it cuts down on unnecessary communication

Figure out how you set up systems that put everyone in your team in the driver seat of their own productivity, not at the whim of other people’s preferences

By setting norms around communication and boundaries around work, async can be used to create a calmer, more productive, more quality-focused, and more human-centered way of working.