How to support asynchronous work for your employees

If your business is growing, you might find yourself dealing more and more with remote employees.

As opposed to local employees, remote or 'distributed' ones are employees that work from some other place than your company's premises, using communication tools like Slack or Google Hangouts to stay in touch.

With a distributed workforce, you get the advantage of hiring people from all over the world.

But this also means you need to make sure they can work independently, without having to wait for other people to make decisions.

This means you need to learn how to support asynchronous work to help a diverse remote workforce get things done.

What is asynchronous work?

Asynchronous work, or asynchronous collaboration, is a term for working independently while keeping in touch with others via technology.

It's the opposite of synchronous work, where people have to be together at the same time and communicate face-to-face.

That's why asynchronous work is often a better solution for distributed teams. Thinking about going fully remote or hiring folk from other parts of the world? Here are some positive reasons to do so.

Benefits of asynchronous work

It can save time and money since you won't have to pay for extra office space or to move people in for work, meetings, and events.
It creates flexibility for your employees, enabling them to have a work-life balance. And you'll retain your loyal employees for longer by keeping them happy.
It forces you to plan your work carefully, set reasonable deadlines, and communicate effectively to keep running your business well. Overall, such practices will lead to better business performance and efficiency.

If you're still setting fixed timings for work in your business and want to move to do asynchronous work, then the rest of this post will help you out.

Practical ways to support asynchronous work for employees:

Automate your processes as much as possible, so that employees only have to spend time on tasks that require face-to-face, hands-on work.
Create a culture of transparency and clarity around your company's goals and processes, to make sure all employees understand how they're contributing.
Many remote employees are freelancers or consultants, so it makes sense to support them with remote tools that let colleagues track their progress and share documents with them.
Use tools that let employees communicate through chat, video calls, and screen sharing - to bring people together when they need to communicate.
Allow employees to communicate in the way they feel most comfortable with, so you can reach them on their preferred platforms and devices.
Reward employees for good work, regardless of the time they put in or where they work from.
Encourage employees to share their personal lives with each other by learning about what they like outside of work.
Explain how your business works to the employees who are new to it, so they have an idea of what's going on.
Establish clear and measurable goals for your employees. They should have something to work towards every week. And should be able to account for the time and work they've done by producing measurable results.

Tools to support asynchronous work

These are the tools we use in our business to support asynchronous work:

Slack: we create channels for different teams and use direct messaging for individual communication.
Zoom: we use this for video calls with multiple people.
Asana: we use Asana to manage our projects and assign tasks within them.
Google Drive: we share documents, presentations, and spreadsheets with each other through Drive. It helps us store and share files with the right people.
A WordPress membership site for documentation: we created this because we wanted to use a simple and effective way to share knowledge among the team.
Email: we use email rarely but it's useful when I want to share individual communication with different team members. It's also a form of documentation of any communication between people that's easy to track.
Time Doctor: We use a time-tracking app for employees to help them stay productive. It's a tool that tracks clicks, mouse movements, and even takes screenshots of the work people do. It's a powerful way to make sure people are pulling their weight and to keep things fair.

These tools make it easier for remote employees to work asynchronously and accomplish tasks on time.

However, you have to be aware that all the tools and tips in the world won't help if you don't have a great company culture. One where you value transparency and open communication.

As a business owner and entrepreneur, it's important for you to be active on your company channels. Dive in when people ask questions and be sure to proactively share your insights online as well.

If you create a business culture where people are afraid to talk about problems or don't want to be seen as foolish or causing an inconvenience, then asynchronous work is not for you.

It's not obvious - but hiring the right people who work well online and are friendly can be more important than hiring the best developers or writers who can't get along with others.

Focus on culture and people first and then the tools and practices, and you'll see success for sure.

Conclusion

If you manage a remote team or are thinking of hiring one, I hope this post has been useful.

It's a topic that's important to me because I manage a company of 200 people - all of whom work remotely.

We have developers, writers, social media marketers, administrators, growth marketers, security experts, and more.

And we wouldn't be able to manage at all if we didn't follow all the tips laid out in this post. I hope this helps you in your own business. If you have more tips to add, leave them in the comments!