Is Your Team’s Productivity Suffering Because of an Asynchronous Work Imbalance?

Jessica Reeder showed up to her first day of remote work at GitLab by simply opening a provided laptop. Inside, she was surprised to find nothing but documents to get her started.

No meetings. No training. No calls.

“Those first few days were honestly disorienting for me,” Reeder confessed in a podcast interview. “I would wake up every morning, and I didn’t know what my schedule was going to be.”

The disorientation didn’t last forever, however.

“I slowly came to realize over those first few weeks that I’d been thrown into the deep end of asynchronous work. GitLab was showing me, effectively from the very first day, that they trusted me to get my work done, without micromanagement and without unnecessary meetings.”

While synchronous work isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, there’s no denying that asynchronous work is on the rise. In addition to GitLab, large companies like Figma, Loom and Upwork leverage async work for everything from building products to hiring teams.

Asynchronous work has a new look

A few years into the remote work boom, most of us are still struggling to find the right boundaries around, and balance between, synchronous and asynchronous work.

Platforms like Slack and Zoom are meant to help companies recreate the familiar real-time work culture of being in-office. But that comes at a cost. When teams are distributed across geographies and timezones, too much synchronous communication becomes a burden that prevents focused work and productivity.

Constant pings keep team members from engaging in the deep, meaningful work necessary to keep projects moving.

Part of the problem is the tools which were once asynchronous have bled into the synchronous sphere. It has left us asking where one ends and the other begins.

What is asynchronous communication, anyways?

Asynchronous communication is when people collaborate outside of real-time. Messages are sent without the expectation of an immediate response.

Besides snail-mail and human messengers, examples have included email, message boards, task boards and voicemail. However, remote work has turned many of these once-asynchronous tools into real-time demands.

In the past, work messages sat unanswered until someone physically returned to their office and completed their tasks. Today, push notifications command immediate attention via laptops and cell phones 24/7.

This has benefits…and drawbacks. In an effort to avoid cluttered inboxes and unread messages, workers are compelled to check these messages and respond immediately. In some companies, they’re even expected to do this regardless of what they’re working on at that moment.

What was once asynchronous is no longer. And this shift is eating away at productivity as team members sacrifice focus in favor of instant communication.

We need to find a digital work balance

In a digital work environment, too much synchronous communication leads to distraction, less productivity and ultimately burnout. That’s because of the ways we use technology.

On average, users spend about ten hours a day logged into Slack for example. Of course, people might not be spending that entire time using the platform, but they are opening themselves to receiving and sending messages and notifications. Assuming an 8-hour workday, this adds more than an entire extra day of ‘on’ time to each workweek.

When you consider heavy Slack users in large companies send between 200 and 1,000 messages a day, it’s easy to see how distractions and burnout happen.

Asynchronous communication, by contrast, enables employees to reply to messages during times that best suit their schedules, needs and roles. This way, when team members do respond, they’re likely doing so while well-rested and relatively free of distraction—producing better work.

And better work from remote employees is no longer an option for business success. Surveys show as much as 82% of employees prefer working from home and that 68% of knowledge workers prefer hybrid work , despite its challenges.

To remain competitive, employers need to attract talent and enable that talent to work in ways that minimize distractions from focused work.

Meet the demands of digital-first

“In 10 Years, ‘Remote Work’ Will Simply be ‘Work’,” asserted Bloomberg author, Henry Ren. With the future of work hurtling ever-deeper into the digital sphere, leaders need to move quickly to adapt.

This means setting employees up for success with a digital-first approach. Ask yourself whether your distributed team members have:

• the technology they need to do their jobs well
• high-quality tools and connectivity
• a thorough onboarding process to digital platforms, and
• the right kind of help when they need it.

If not, these are issues that need to be addressed.

Once these needs are met, it’s time to face the core culprit of distributed team struggles: clinging tightly to the synchronous work models used in traditional offices .

This is particularly true when there are team members in different time zones or working under very different circumstances, such as in regions with different labor laws.

One study even found collaborating across time zones and differing international laws were two of the top HR compliance issues for global teams.

In these circumstances, requiring all team members to be online from nine to five in your headquarters’ time zone sets workers up to fail. Some will inevitably work during their least productive time of day, struggle to find an effective work-life balance to prevent burnout, or both.

A digital-first approach demands robust support for both synchronous and asynchronous work and communication.

Use asynchronous work to streamline collaboration

Over the last decade, collaborative work mediums like emails, phone calls and video meetings have increased, consuming 85% more of people’s work weeks. You’ve likely encountered this ‘collaboration overload’ when drowning in messages and meeting invites you can’t possibly keep up with.

A typical workday is eight hours. For knowledge workers, about 60% of that time is spent on shallow, logistical work, according to findings from Asana.

Done right, asynchronous work can help alleviate this problem.

• It empowers team members to sign off from work, mute their notifications and recharge before returning to their desk.
• When they return, instead of signing back on to dozens of notifications, they can find a high-level view of progress and upcoming tasks. This is often accomplished with project tracking software, asynchronous meeting summaries and shared documents.
• From there, they can search only for the information they need to continue their work. Collaboration happens asynchronously and projects move forward.

With team members working during their individual ideal hours and enjoying real time away from work, productivity is preserved—and possibly increased. In fact, 43% of workers say flexible working hours helps them achieve more productivity.

The right to disconnect, and the power behind it

Many European countries already have laws around the right to disconnect. The concept is gaining popularity in North America as well, with legislation recently passed in Canada.

In a nutshell, the idea is workers have the right not to respond to work-related communications outside of work hours. Regardless of whether your country has legislation around this idea, the benefits of work disconnection off-hours are numerous. Forbes lists some of these:

• Avoiding employee burnout
• Promoting work-life balance
• Improving efficiency
• Higher productivity levels
• Increased creativity and engagement
• Higher retention rates
• Building respect and loyalty
• Honoring employees as people

Asynchronous work empowers team members to disconnect fully during their off time. Taken a step further, it can even enable more deep work during work hours.

Encourage employees to mute notifications and set their status to ‘away’ or ‘busy’ while focused on a task.

This is important, considering research shows it takes in the ballpark of 9.5 minutes to get back into workflow after switching between digital apps. When making multiple app switches and context switches in a day, that adds up. The same research found 45% of workers report context switching makes them less productive.

Support the right to disconnect on a level that supports deep work and you can leverage asynchronous work to maximize collaboration and productivity.

Optimize your team’s productivity with data

Where does your team stand when it comes to optimizing async work? One way to find out is to benchmark current work patterns. With this data, it’s easy to identify and address areas for change or improvement.

For example:

• How much of the day do your team members spend on internal calls?
• How much time are they spending in Slack or Teams messaging each other about work?
• And how often are team members checking their email in between other work tasks?

Produce8 helps teams measure and understand how they use their technology. Armed with this information, teams can begin to have important conversations about what’s working, what isn’t and what changes may be necessary to create a more productive (and less distracting) digital work environment.

With the right insights and decision-making, asynchronous collaboration optimization is just a few adjustments away. And having the ability to measure the results to ensure positive impact is key.

It's time to do asynchronous work better

Work has changed. And for many, that means the workday no longer includes commuting to an office and working physically alongside teammates. It means working together digitally, working from home or working from anywhere, for that matter.

And like Jessica Reeder's experience touched on in the beginning of this article, they need to let go of micromanaging as well as message and meeting overload.

While there'll always be a time and a place for synchronous work in business, creating a better balance between synch and async work can have a dramatic impact on how well your team performs, how they feel about their work and how much they want to continue being part of your team in the future.