The 5 learnings from 2023 on async work
Hey there, my last newsletter covered my main focus in recent months: leadership presence.
In this one, I want to summarize what I learned on asynchronous leadership practices in 2023.
Last year was a big year for async practices.
We’ve had new shiny tools, amazing books published, and many distributed companies sharing their best practices.
I was also heavily involved in async operations.
So, after all the learning, here are the essentials of async work. I made it into 5 points for easier consumption.
01. At least 60% async ops is mandatory for distributed teams.
Business operations have 5 areas:
Legal & Finance
Project Management
Alignment & Governance
Revenue (Sales & Marketing & CS)
Investment (Innovation & Ideation)
At least 3 of these should be almost fully async.
Ideally, most of them should have some level of async workflow.
Legal, finance, PM, and most revenue ops are easy guesses, but I would also further ditch most of your alignment & governance meetings.
It is mandatory because there is no office. Also, in most cases, there is no shared timezone either.
Location and time independence force you to build a solid system of async operations. Otherwise, you and your team will not know what is happening.
02. Documentation is just a start. The structure is more important.
By this time, everyone knows that documentation is the foundational stone for async ops.
But it is just the start.
Documentation has one single goal: to provide clarity by increasing transparency.
If you document everything without a structure, it becomes chaos.
So, structuring your documentation hub is more important than ever.
Here’s my 5-category approach that is simple and works for everyone:
Start with archiving. Transcriptions, recordings, etc., are all gathered passively in a folder.
Build support documents on top of archives. These are your summaries, memos, and short-form conclusions.
Create action plans from support documents. All activities should move the needle forward, so create to-do lists and action plans from support documents.
Guides and manuals. If you do something more than twice, put it in a guide so others can replicate and amend it. Saves time.
Policies. What you do all day should be included in policies. These are your “how do we conduct our business” documents.
It’s simple. Easy to tailor to your needs. Works for any business.
03. Practice means integration.
Successful distributed companies practice async workflows.
This means they try it out for certain activities first. If it works for them, they integrate it into their workflow.
Integration can work on many levels:
Async collaboration makes it to the project management system
Async decision-making becomes part of the leadership practice
Async feedback and mentoring become part of the management
It depends on the company and the team what sticks.
But great ones experiment and learn what works.
04. It starts with the leadership.
Obviously, right?
As with any new methodology, it won’t fly if you don’t get the management buy-in.
But with async, I have noticed that leaders make it super public if they practice async with their teams.
It is part of their culture. Part of the overall practice of work.
It partially boosts their productivity, solves their teams' distributed fragmentation, and is a great way to attract future talent.
Now, as with anything marketing, you should be cautious. Not everyone who says they practice proper async work does practice async.
But those who do? They have the added benefit of a marketing boost for their company, not to mention their leadership presence.
05. People love it.
Most people who follow me would say, “Oh, of course. People love async, as it gives back time and clarifies everyone.”
I’m naturally skeptical, and I’m the guy who dares to ask the question “why” 100 times over in a row.
So, I thought async would work for only certain people.
For those who can make grown-up decisions on their own.
Those who can own their time. Their workflows. The way they work.
Most people are not like that, so I thought they wouldn’t benefit from async.
Turned out I was wrong.
In all reports in recent years, when companies measured employee engagement, productivity, and retention numbers, we saw the same insights:
People value deep, uninterrupted work, and they hate interrupted micromanagement workflows.
People can juggle their own time or at least need to do so. They want their employers to allow them flexibility.
Lack of transparency, clarity, and flexibility are among the greatest causes of why people leave their jobs.
More importantly, people value these, sometimes even more than their salary. They would prefer to work for a company that offers more flexibility, even if it pays x% less than their current employer.
So my question is this:
Building up at least some level of asynchronous practices in your company doesn't cost money. It only takes time. Why not do it?
Until next week,
Peter
