rfc: async first team #16
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| ### Advantages of Async Team Communication | ||
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| 1. Flexibility: Async communication allows team members to engage with work-related discussions and tasks at their convenience, accommodating diverse schedules and time zones. | ||
| 2. Reduced Interruptions: By minimizing synchronous meetings and real-time communication channels, async methodologies help mitigate interruptions, allowing individuals to focus on deep work and productivity. |
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I find this aspect particularly important, as it's easier for me to be more productive in the afternoon
| 4. Documentation: Asynchronous communication encourages the documentation of discussions and decisions, fostering transparency and ensuring that information is accessible to all team members, as well as a ramp up for new members joining the team. | ||
| 5. Expanded Hiring Opportunities: Embracing async communication widens the talent pool by accommodating individuals from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations. This inclusivity fosters a richer variety of perspectives, experiences, and skills within the team, ultimately enhancing innovation and problem-solving capabilities. | ||
| 6. Streamlined Onboarding Process: Async communication promotes thorough documentation of discussions, decisions, and project information, providing valuable resources for new team members during the onboarding process. This accessibility to historical context and archived conversations facilitates a smoother transition and accelerates the integration of newcomers into the team. | ||
| 7. Mitigated Knowledge Loss: With comprehensive documentation and asynchronous communication norms in place, the risk of losing critical knowledge during employee offboarding is significantly reduced. Team members can easily access archived information and refer to previous discussions, ensuring continuity of work and minimizing disruptions caused by personnel changes. |
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Also value this one, especially to be able to retain context in a ever-evolving system whose individual parts no one is going to be able to consistently be an expert in
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Not sure it's worth calling out directly, but choosing git repos (like rfc, spec, etc) over e.g. slack does foster better information organization and retention than e.g. slack threads and alike.
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| 1. Flexibility: Async communication allows team members to engage with work-related discussions and tasks at their convenience, accommodating diverse schedules and time zones. | ||
| 2. Reduced Interruptions: By minimizing synchronous meetings and real-time communication channels, async methodologies help mitigate interruptions, allowing individuals to focus on deep work and productivity. | ||
| 3. Increased Thoughtfulness: With async communication, individuals have more time to reflect on their responses and contributions, leading to more considered and well-articulated ideas. Moreover, by allowing participants to engage at their own pace and reducing the pressure of immediate responses, async methodologies create a more supportive environment where individuals with challenges such as social anxiety can contribute comfortably and constructively to team discussions. |
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Agreed. I find it particularly useful to digest a topic before having any meaningful questions. It's hard for me to do that live.
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| Considering the small intersection window of some members of the team, spontaneous synchronous discussions should be encouraged and recognized as they naturally occur, rather than relying solely on scheduled calendar slots that may hinder important conversations. While these spontaneous discussions MAY not always align immediately, it's advisable to plan them with some lead time before critical decisions need to be made. | ||
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| For sprint planning and ensuring everyone grasps the broader picture, a recurring weekly synchronous meeting may be suggested as a best practice. These meetings should be recorded, have a predefined agenda, and clearly outlined objectives from the outset. |
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I find it that a recurring 1/2 meetings per week (as far apart as possible) can be helpful in staying aligned and achieve rapid consensus. More than that typically feels like an interruption.
| 1. Continuously anticipate potential blockers or issues and communicate them proactively via asynchronous channels with the team before they impede progress. | ||
| 2. If you encounter a blockage, promptly notify the team through asynchronous communication and identify individuals who MAY offer assistance. | ||
| 3. For design work/team process changes, initiate the process with an asynchronous proposal by one or more team members. Subsequently, gather asynchronous feedback rounds to address simpler aspects. | ||
| 4. Prior to scheduling a meeting, ensure that all relevant materials have been shared in advance to allow the team to review and provide initial asynchronous feedback. This optimizes synchronous meeting time for aligning on complex issues rather than rehashing previously discussed topics. |
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Couldn't agree more 👍. If there are pre-materials, then it's easier to contribute effectively
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Looks good to me. I think it might help to list out best practices as in do's and dont's e.g. don't bury decisions made in slack thread, make sure to capture them in relevant PR or issue. Be specific how you want peers to engage, how do they signal approval, disagreement or how does completion looks like.
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Added a few quick comments but need to hit send before other meetings. Overall, I am a huge proponent of async work in many aspects, and think much of what is mentioned here is fairly well understood as beneficial.
One meta suggestion that this might be best served as being framed/maintained as "Best Practices for Async Work" versus "Async First Team", as the latter would suggest to be more about specific policies related to hiring than to work style.
| 3. Increased Thoughtfulness: With async communication, individuals have more time to reflect on their responses and contributions, leading to more considered and well-articulated ideas. Moreover, by allowing participants to engage at their own pace and reducing the pressure of immediate responses, async methodologies create a more supportive environment where individuals with challenges such as social anxiety can contribute comfortably and constructively to team discussions. | ||
| 4. Documentation: Asynchronous communication encourages the documentation of discussions and decisions, fostering transparency and ensuring that information is accessible to all team members, as well as a ramp up for new members joining the team. | ||
| 5. Expanded Hiring Opportunities: Embracing async communication widens the talent pool by accommodating individuals from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations. This inclusivity fosters a richer variety of perspectives, experiences, and skills within the team, ultimately enhancing innovation and problem-solving capabilities. | ||
| 6. Streamlined Onboarding Process: Async communication promotes thorough documentation of discussions, decisions, and project information, providing valuable resources for new team members during the onboarding process. This accessibility to historical context and archived conversations facilitates a smoother transition and accelerates the integration of newcomers into the team. |
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Exception: This particular one is counter-factual to most of what I've professionally experienced. New staff onboarding is streamlined by good documentation for sure, but I haven't seen any evidence that an async process is better for onboarding new employees, and have seen plenty of evidence that it can be detrimental.
[EDIT: Unfortunately need to remove the example here as I forgot this repo was public, and it contains internal information about a company.]
Anyhow, not a refutation of the value of good documentation in onboarding! but I would not personally include onboarding as a purely pro column entry of async processes.
| 2. Reduced Interruptions: By minimizing synchronous meetings and real-time communication channels, async methodologies help mitigate interruptions, allowing individuals to focus on deep work and productivity. | ||
| 3. Increased Thoughtfulness: With async communication, individuals have more time to reflect on their responses and contributions, leading to more considered and well-articulated ideas. Moreover, by allowing participants to engage at their own pace and reducing the pressure of immediate responses, async methodologies create a more supportive environment where individuals with challenges such as social anxiety can contribute comfortably and constructively to team discussions. | ||
| 4. Documentation: Asynchronous communication encourages the documentation of discussions and decisions, fostering transparency and ensuring that information is accessible to all team members, as well as a ramp up for new members joining the team. | ||
| 5. Expanded Hiring Opportunities: Embracing async communication widens the talent pool by accommodating individuals from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations. This inclusivity fosters a richer variety of perspectives, experiences, and skills within the team, ultimately enhancing innovation and problem-solving capabilities. |
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This one is perhaps more a reflection of Remote work, rather than Async specifically?
| 1. Flexibility: Async communication allows team members to engage with work-related discussions and tasks at their convenience, accommodating diverse schedules and time zones. | ||
| 2. Reduced Interruptions: By minimizing synchronous meetings and real-time communication channels, async methodologies help mitigate interruptions, allowing individuals to focus on deep work and productivity. | ||
| 3. Increased Thoughtfulness: With async communication, individuals have more time to reflect on their responses and contributions, leading to more considered and well-articulated ideas. Moreover, by allowing participants to engage at their own pace and reducing the pressure of immediate responses, async methodologies create a more supportive environment where individuals with challenges such as social anxiety can contribute comfortably and constructively to team discussions. | ||
| 4. Documentation: Asynchronous communication encourages the documentation of discussions and decisions, fostering transparency and ensuring that information is accessible to all team members, as well as a ramp up for new members joining the team. |
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I'd argue that async communication requires good documentation to be effective, but does not necessarily create it. E.g. it is important to set best practices, resources and norms around what good documentation is (both content and format), in order to make async practices work better.
Here follows a proposal to adopt async first on how team can communicate in an async first fashion, in order to enable us to be more efficient, while bringing transparency and producing artefacts for our future selves, or future onboarded folks