Before going into asynchronous work and its advantages, it’s important to understand how it differs from remote work as most of us have come to know it.

The difference between remote work and asynchronous work

While there is some overlap between remote work and asynchronous work, there are big differences too. If you think back to the start of the pandemic, employees still clocked in at nine as they would have done at the office. Nearly two years later, some employers still expect this, resulting in synchronous work.

Asynchronous work, or async work as proponents call it, is performed according to an individual timetable and members of a team may not be ‘at work’ at the same time. This means that teammates do not expect an instant reply to a query or immediate feedback after submitting a piece of work. Most of us already do this to some extent, for example, by focusing on a single task instead of responding to every single email the minute it lands.

The idea of async work is not new – teams and companies working across different countries and time zones have been doing it long before Covid-19. But for those of us who had to adopt and adapt to working from home quickly when Covid hit, it was a matter of learning and solving as we went along.

At the same time, survey after survey has shown that time management is proving harder than expected and that employee fatigue and burnout are real. (Read more about the three components of burnout here.)

Is asynchronous work the solution to employee burnout?

Immediately, the following pertinent question emerges: Could we really transition from an online to an offline mentality?

Here’s what we do know that may help employers to let go of the synchronous-teams notion:

• Focusing on bums in seats does not work anyway.
• Measuring activity input does not necessarily correlate to output.
• Employees’ mental health has suffered from the increased mental load.
• Work-life balance in most cases has become non-existent. For instance, 36% of participating employers in Remchannel’s October 2021 Salary and Wage Movement Survey said they expect employees to answer emails after hours.

Leading indicators show that teams that do best with async work are fundamentally underpinned by an organisational culture that is crafted with intentionality.

Companies embracing async work share the following characteristics:

1. An evolved communication strategy
They are comfortable with asynchronous communication such as Loom that allows workers to post a video in which they explain their thinking or execution to be watched later by colleagues. This presumes, and necessitates, hiring people who are articulate and can communicate clearly.

2. A culture of performance
Teams are measured and rewarded on output over input. So the focus becomes the goal as opposed to the activity.

3. Trust
This is not a surprising finding. As Patrick Lencioni advocated in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a lack of trust in employees is one of the critical reasons why teams fail. Without a culture of trust and transparency, async working simply won’t soar.

4. Action
Asynchronous work requires that effort manifests in action and directly results in meaningful outcomes. When we focus on enablement and working towards shared goals, the how behind the work becomes more negotiable.

5. Multiplexity
This is best defined as an overlap of roles and exchanges, and is a most interesting element of async working. High-functioning async teams collaborate but they do it differently.

Of course, asynchronous work won’t be possible for all employees nor in all industries, and there will be emergencies when all hands will have to be on deck at the same time, possibly even in the same room.

But what are the first steps for employers and team leaders wanting to adopt asynchronous work? If async work feels overwhelming, start small. See if one regular meeting can be transitioned to an asynchronous process using, say, status updates on Slack or Google Drive and build from there.

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