Asynchronous communication is all the rage nowadays. With remote work becoming a norm, companies are embracing asynchronous communication as a way for workers to perform more productively. Professionals can work at their own pace and as per their working patterns while managing the time zone differences. While the employees may not always be present for team discussions, they can still collaborate well and work in alignment with the team.
The best part is that asynchronous communication keeps everyone in the loop, as well as on the same page. Thus, no important information falls through the crack. Clearly, this communication style will be there in 2022 and beyond.
In this blog, we’ll get you through nine asynchronous communication standards that your team should know about for better remote work. So, let’s get started!
Contents
Undoubtedly, email is one of the most commonly used asynchronous communication standards. However, decluttering the inbox becomes a pain, especially when new messages start coming in. Here are some tips on how to get the most out of an email-
- Choose your targets, and don’t CC everyone.
- Leverage email rules and folders to make it more manageable.
- The subject line of the email should inform the audience about your message.
- Proofread the emails.
Video communication
Have you ever been in a long meeting that could have been a simple email? Though email is a communication standard in offices, it comes with some limitations. The recipients often scan long text; thus, important information might be missed. Further, it’s impossible to have a face-to-face conversation with an email.
Instead, create videos (informational or instructional) and share them with your teammates. It provides the employees with more flexibility, as they can view the video as or when they want and understand the content better.
Project management tools
Project management tools make remote work a lot easier and are a standard for communicating with remote working teams. There is an array of tools, like Asana, Trello, etc., that help keep the work organized and visible to the teams. With these tools, you can display your tasks, so everyone knows what’s going on without having to deal with hundreds of messages.
In order to take your productivity to the next level, learn advanced tricks to use your favorite tool better. You can read blogs on these tools or watch tutorials to stay updated on the latest feature updates. Educate your new team members about how to use the tool and for what.
Comments
Comments allow team members to express their views on an issue or idea and have become a great asynchronous communication standard. Comments on tools like Asana, Google Docs, etc., provide the teams with a wonderful place to kick start focused discussions. You can also use screenshot comments to discuss things in a visual context.
However, you need not have a product in order to use comments as an asynchronous communication tool. It could be an idea or plan, for example, a marketing strategy or a buyer’s persona. You can write an idea and discuss it with your team through comments.
Screenshots with markup
Looking for a quick way to give feedback on a project or content asynchronously? Screenshots with markup are the way to go! Taking screenshots and adding markups or annotations is one of the easiest ways to communicate asynchronously.
Suppose you discover one of your product pages has outdated information. In that case, you can send someone an email and explain everything. However, a screenshot makes it easy for you to explain the information easily. You don’t have to conduct a meeting or create wordy emails.
Messengers
Messengers like Facebook and WhatsApp are quite popular; thus, you can kick start team communication on these platforms too. But you need to make sure not to mix work and home accounts. Also, ask your employees to create a separate account for office communication.
Use corporate logins or contact numbers for messengers. Further, refrain from using messengers for generic communication. It is better to use messengers for specific tasks with specific teams to avoid any chaos.
An up-to-date wiki or Sharepoint site makes asynchronous communication easier for a large team. This is where all the important documents, directories, and company guidelines are stored. Clearly, an employee can get answers to all his questions even if a teammate is not active online. Further, they can locate documents required to complete work without having to wait for someone’s reply.
Reference Guides
You may need to explain a task more than once when all your team members are not online. Creating a reference guide to explain tasks and queries that will likely pop up is a good alternative. It offers more flexibility to your teammates as they can go back to your guide for review whenever needed. They don’t have to send messages back and forth, and you don’t have to explain things again and again.
Standups in Slack
Slack is extensively used for both real-time and asynchronous communication. However, it becomes challenging for inexperienced teams to manage both. Due to an addictive messaging format, teams in Slack often spend too much time or host too many meetings. Clearly, asynchronous messaging is the solution. This is where standups in Slack come in!
Asynchronous standups in Slack present a series of questions to the team members about their progress. The team can answer these questions at their convenience. The responses are gathered in one place so teams can analyze and track their progress.
To sum up
These are some of the asynchronous communication standards you can rely on. With more people using remote work tools, facilitating effective asynchronous communication is important. These tools can help you manage synchronous, asynchronous, as well as hybrid communication. You just need to figure out how to balance them. Hopefully, this blog will help you find out the most suitable async communication tool for your team.
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