If you’re managing a team (and a calendar with enough 1:1s to make your head spin), you probably don’t need a definition of asynchronous collaboration. You need a way to make it happen, STAT.
Staying in-sync (without all the syncs) is Part I of the dream.
Helping people stay in flow (with fewer interruptions) is Part II.
And making asynchronous work the norm—not the exception—is Part III.
In this post, we’ll zip through what’s been covered ad nauseam since COVID-19 flipped the way we work on its head. We needed and need that stuff—but only insofar as it informs an efficient, actionable, and long-term playbook for working async.
It doesn’t matter whether your team is ten feet or ten hours apart. If you value helping everyone do their best work, getting sh*t done, and making an impact, very little should happen in a vacuum. (👋, information silos!)
Collaboration isn’t only key to building institutional knowledge, increasing productivity, and deepening relationships. It also makes it possible to:
Information/idea sharing usually happens in one of two ways. Use the asynchronous vs. synchronous collaboration chart below with your team to confirm you’re on the same page about when, how, and where work should get done.
Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Collaboration
In case your team needs more incentives to default to asynchronous vs synchronous communication, don’t miss the six advantages covered in more detail below.👇
If everyone already wants to minimize interruptions and maximize focus time, asynchronous collaboration probably won’t be a hard sell.
But if you’re surrounded by extroverts who *love* a quick huddle and are always game to hop on a call, you may have your work cut out for you. Here are a few benefits to make getting buy-in—and changing people’s habits—a little easier.
If you want to start with a heavy hitter, start here.
Going all in on asynchronous collaboration means less jumping back and forth between:
Which means it’s easier for everyone—introverts, extroverts, and everyone in between—to take a proactive approach to batching similar tasks, eating the frog, and contributing to collaborative projects when it makes the most sense.
Another day, another stat about how much time we waste in meetings. 😅
What’s the latest (vote for asynchronous communication)?
The better your team gets at working together, separately, the fewer meetings you’ll need. And when you do meet, it’ll be for the right reasons. To build trust and relationships with others, have freeform, live conversations, and feel the energy of your teammates.
You’ve got your noise canceling headphones, your second cup of coffee/tea, Inbox Zero, a prioritized to-do list, and all the energy you need to get sh*t done. And then the interruptions start.
A Slack message turns into a quick huddle. An email turns into a calendar invite. A quick sidebar turns into a 30-minute digression. Before you know it, all the focus you’d stored up is long gone. 🪫
By agreeing to default to asynchronous collaboration whenever possible, you can help your team:
What makes boundaries hard to stick to? An overreliance on synchronous work—especially when paired with always-on tools. 📱
Asynchronous collaboration normalizes less instantaneous responses, and benefits anyone who:
The loudest person on your team may be in their element when they’re thinking out loud, but what about the deep thinker who needs a minute to prepare their thoughts?
They might never get that minute, in a conversation dominated by big personalities. Asynchronous collaboration makes it possible to level the playing field—especially for introverts and anyone who isn’t in a position of power.
If you lean into working asynchronously, the quieter people on your team can:
Even in the most inclusive synchronous meetings, communication is inherently less open—leading to a higher risk of knowledge gaps. 👀
What else is avoidable? All the time spent tracking down information stored in people’s heads and getting new stakeholders up to speed, as goals and initiatives inevitably evolve.
What’s an ideal forcing function for prioritizing documentation? Asynchronous collaboration. 👯
Without a strong culture of documentation, it’s tempting to get lazy about knowledge sharing. Which means the resources and insights people need to do their best work aren’t readily available. Which makes continuous learning (something we should all be doing!) much harder than it needs to be.
Documenting key policies and procedures will help you and your team:
In theory—the more time your team can spend in get sh*t done mode, the more you will too. And the more time everyone will have to:
To go from “in theory” to “in practice,” here are some suggestions from people who believe conversation is king and asynchronous collaboration is queen. 👑
What slows everyone down? Lack of clarity.
To empower everyone to use their best judgment—no matter what time it is or where they are in the world—tweak the criteria below to suit your company culture and collective needs.
We should work asynchronously if:
We should meet if:
Knowing whether to work asynchronously vs. synchronously is half the battle. Getting your team to default to Option A is the other half.
How to increase the ratio of async to sync collaboration internally:
How to encourage asynchronous collaboration with your external partners:
Using the right tool for the right task is a good rule of thumb in general—but it’s especially important if you want to operationalize asynchronous communication and collaboration.
Here are five of our favorites.
Explain anything to anyone, without jumping on another screen share. 🎉
Use Tango to:
To manage team projects and individual tasks. 🫶
Use Asana to:
The digital workspace of our dreams. 🌟
Use Notion to:
To design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place. 🎯
Use Figma to:
A collaborative online whiteboard platform. 💭
Use Miro to:
Everything you love about video, without the calendar invite.
Use Loom to:
It’s going to be hard to do #1, #2, and #3 without #4.
Leaning into asynchronous collaboration may mean letting go of the ways you’ve assessed people’s productivity in the past. What’s out? Looking exclusively at hours worked and meetings attended, for sure. But also—looking for the little green dot announcing people’s (active) presence on Slack, and other common traps that make it easy to mistake busyness for effectiveness.
What matters most?
Asynchronous communication tools are obviously central to asynchronous collaboration.
But to make async work work for the long run, you’ll need to find a way to go beyond mostly one-way status updates and encourage two-way learning.
Screen shares, live workshops, formal trainings, and classroom-style lectures have their time and place. But what’s the real unlock? 🔓 Making learning on the job asynchronously as easy as it should be.
Tools like Tango make it simple to:
We touched on the importance of documentation before—but here’s a stat to hammer it home: 81% of employees feel frustrated when they can’t access the information they need to complete a task.
If you’re serious about wanting to unblock your team, centralizing your team’s know-how is just as important as choosing the right tech and setting up asynchronous workflows.
Effective documentation means people don’t need to be available—or even awake—at the same time to make progress. 👌
Deep work has all sorts of benefits, including but not limited to:
Psyched about asynchronous collaboration? Don’t make the mistake many do and use the wrong tool, at the wrong time.
It used to be that you had to use your synchronous collaboration mindset and tools when you needed to get sh*t done. There was no other choice. We’re happy to report this is no longer the case. 🕺
Tools like Tango make it possible to stay in get sh*t done mode and get answers to questions in the flow of work. Without the hassle of searching for knowledge, context switching, sharing screens, or having a meeting.
With clear boundaries about when to work asynchronously vs. synchronously, a bevy of benefits to working async, actionable ways to change people’s habits, and a free (!) tool to maximize knowledge sharing AND focus time, you can take asynchronous collaboration from the exception to the norm in no time. ✨
Asynchronous collaboration offers flexibility, increases productivity, enhances creativity, strengthens documentation, and promotes inclusivity, making it a valuable, modern way to work. By leveraging asynchronous communication tools effectively, teams can overcome time zone barriers, work more efficiently, and achieve better outcomes.
Synchronous collaboration refers to the act of individuals or teams working together in real-time, where communication and collaboration occur simultaneously. It involves immediate interaction and response between participants, typically through in-person meetings, impromptu screen sharing, video conferences, phone calls, and instant messaging/chat sessions.
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