Now that we’ve covered synchronous communication, let’s dig into the pros and cons of asynchronous communication, and look at some examples and best practices. Following all meetings or phone conversations it is important to send a quick follow-up message to everyone who was in attendance. The message should thank them for attending and note any key takeaways, decisions, or outcomes of the meeting. You can send this by email, direct group message, or via an update in your project management system. Depending on how spread-out your team is, synchronous communication can cause problems with work-life balance and result in burnout because of timezone differences. The optimal time for one person may be the middle of the night for another and if synchronous communication is the expectation that won’t be overly effective.
With those advantages to a remote workforce, mandatory meetings might suddenly seem less necessary than they once did. For a long time, employers and managers have been obsessed with a sync-first communication culture. In many corporate cultures, the default solution for dealing with any kind of nuisance is calling a meeting (it’s why meetings get a bad rep). Similarly, pre-COVID, many companies were stuck on the idea of an office-first culture. Team building is an important part of creating an engaged and productive team, and impossible to do synchronously. Because the point of effective team building is to make connections with your colleagues and build relationships with them.
Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication in Remote Work – What Should You Know?
When it comes to urgent issues, asynchronous communications aren’t the best options. By nature, asynchronous communication methods allow people more time to respond. While that’s the beauty of them, it won’t work for every situation — especially not an emergency. If the only way your team’s communicates is through real-time meetings or phone calls, you’re not creating an inclusive environment for your team members in other time zones.
While there is no universal perfect ratio that applies to every single team or organization, the aim should be to refine your communication practices to achieve incremental improvements constantly. The breakdown of sync versus async communication may change depending on the needs of your team members. It also puts the person on the receiving end in the precarious position of engaging in an unproductive back-and-forth, the total opposite of asynchronous communication. Clarity is a vital ingredient in successful asynchronous communication. Any confusion created will likely cause a series of back-and-forth communications which will delay progress. For a truly collaborative and productive work environment, you need a culture of trust.
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As the primary difference between the two approaches is in the time between message delivery and response, this could easily be the variable that tips the scales in one direction or the other. The long and short of it is that there is no simple, all-encompassing answer to this question. It’s almost always a carefully curated combination of asynchronous communication and synchronous communication that will best serve a business. There are very few workplaces that can effectively rely solely on one or the other of these approaches to communication. Asynchronous communication works really well for remote teams that cross various timezones.
Hence, the same communication method would be considered asynchronous in this situation. A colleague walking into your office with a question or convening an in-person meeting is probably the oldest and most traditional form of sync communication. However, sending Microsoft Teams or Slack messages or audio and video calls all fall into definition of asynchronous communication the same category. As the name suggests, project management platforms are designed to help you map out resources, timelines, and specific steps necessary to bring a task from fruition to completion. These tools visually show who is responsible for what, and task owners are able to communicate when they accomplish these assignments.
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Occasional synchronous meetings can form part of your asynchronous approach. The goal is to cultivate the most effective culture of communication amongst your team, with asynchronicity at the forefront. If we haven’t been loud enough about this yet, we are huge proponents of asynchronous communication mode at Float.
- For example, our customer success team uses Loom to respond to customer questions more clearly.
- Now that we’ve covered what asynchronous and synchronous communication includes, it’s time to take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each.
- If there’s an immediate response required, then synchronous communication is better suited.
Instant feedback can be asking if right now is a good time to talk, to ask if your co-worker or counterpart thinks the matter is urgent, or if they’re the right person to be chatting to. In most monolithic application architectures, statements about the system’s behavior are relatively evident as part of the app design. However, when the underlying architecture is made up of distributed services, it is harder to track the flow of communication. A single task built on dispersed services likely involves multiple layers of communication. Coherence around inter-service communication is one of the challenges in a distributed architecture like microservices. Synchronous communication is simpler in design but carries the risk of spreading failures across services.
✅ More focus time
Individuals may take on the role of speaker or even just as listener, but communication is happening simultaneously on both ends. At Hugo, we often send video messages or use Slack threads instead of getting something on the calendar. These asynchronous habits might seem odd for a meeting technology company, but for us, respecting each other’s time, including around meetings, is a crucial ingredient for success.
