Teamwork Tuesday #4: Do you work async?

[#1]

Let's talk about Asynchronous work and best practices! 

Atlassian published article 👉 How to excel at asynchronous communication with your distributed team 👈 with many useful tips and tricks on improving asynchronous work.

The Atlassian blog is full of interesting work-life balance and teamwork articles. Teamwork Tuesday is a place to discuss some of the recommended practices! It's kind of like an Atlassian blog book club 😁📚

Three occasions are usually thought always to be synchronous but can also be done asynchronously with the right tools and mindset - Brainstorming & Ideation, Planning, and Status update meetings.

1. Brainstorming and ideation

I know what you're thinking - brainstorming will always be more effective when it's done in person. Well then, you're probably the one who loooves to share their ideas and discuss them on the spot (don't worry, I'm one of those).

But more often than not, the bigger the team, the harder it gets to hear everyone's ideas and opinions.

What works like a charm is to do the brainstorming and ideation part offline (in whiteboards, Confluence, or other real-time collaboration tools) and comment on each other's work.

Not only is this more inclusive for all team members across timezones, but you might get more done while not getting stuck on the first idea 💡

2. Planning

I once worked at a company (pro COVID) where all planning was done offline/async through Jira (Server 😱).

The system was so well done; everyone reviewed the planned work, added their input in comments, flagged tickets that needed further discussion, and estimated their time. I know this system took years of figuring out, but we were a big org and managed to plan for a sprint without a single meeting.

Quite impressive. All done through Jira comments, Estimation fields, and a few handy dashboards and JQLs.

3. Status updates

Ouch, this one hurts. As Atlassian says in the article, "for status meetings, synchronous is never the way to go."

Status meetings can pretty much be a simple Slack message, email, or update in Atlas 😉 the purpose of those meetings is alignment, which can be done in many other ways. 

Anywho - this is my experience with async work. I'm a huge fan. Anything that can be done Async, I'm up for 😌

Do you run brainstorming, planning, or other async activities with your team? How does it work for you?

[Amanda Barber]

I'm loving Atlas for async project updates! I also love having mostly asynchronous collaboration during certain points of ideation. There are times that it helps to get unstuck or generate lots of ideas quickly on a call, but once the initial ideation is done it's great to get through some of the technical exploration and back/forth with the devs/product team asynchronously!

[Ankush Bora]

Post Covid, remote teams have become a norm. For remote teams, asynchronous communication plays a crucial role in team delivery.
In an ideal world, status meetings would be best done on Slack/MS Teams or the likes.
Slack/Teams channels may be used for any impromptu clarifications where immediate action may not be needed.

I would prefer to planning in a meeting (over a team call) as far as possible.

In my current role as a Scrum Master, my primary objective is to keep my 'developers' as free as possible and concentrated on the 'actual' value work. For all else, async is the way to go.

Additionally, the mode of communication should be something that is agreed on by the entire team. And that could any mode of communication email, IM, channel updates etc.

[Jimmy Seddon]

Great article @Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_!

When it comes to brainstorming.  I really like the prompt to be shared ahead of time, and for people to fill in a confluence page (or whatever) of their ideas.  The great thing about this is that usually more than one person thought of the same thing and this in itself can help narrow the scope when common themes don't necessarily need to be discussed, or other things can be eliminated to focus on the common themes.

[Dave Mathijs]

I really like async collaboration. It gives me the time I need to process, analyze and weigh a new idea, decision to be taken of even a simple communication.

If needed, I can decide quickly, but most of the times, I admit I need to filter the input first.

Async is also great to plan and prepare beforehand, gather agenda topics, get insights ahead etc.

It's not the one or the other: synchronous and asynchronous collaboration complement each other.

When meeting for example, I prefer a live session over a remote call.

[Summer Hogan]

Great article @Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_ ! I love the idea about brainstorming offline and I think people, especially software engineers, are more open to brainstorming while not being watched or have to speak to their ideas in a large setting, I find you get more collaboration offline. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! 

[Josh Shepherd]

Async is amazing to get work done, but if everything is async, I personally find it a bit of a downer after 8 hours of work to realize you never spoke with a human. The flip side of back2back meetings all day with no relief is also pretty bad. The key word here is balance - enough to get work done efficiently, but also stay connected. Sometimes a 5 min call is better then 100 Slack messages.

Great work here.