“Let’s Connect Async:” How To Build a Better Asynchronous Culture

You may have noticed that the phrase “Let’s take that offline” is gradually being replaced by “Let’s connect async.” Both expressions are a type of white flag, surrendering to the reality that a tricky issue needs to be resolved in a private conversation rather than in a group call. It’s often music to the attendees’ ears because it means the meeting is almost over.

But most people who use the expression “async” don’t fully appreciate the value of an asynchronous culture. It’s not just a way to end a call or promote a “remote first” company in a job ad. It’s a fundamentally different outlook on modernizing workstreams, akin to how “agile” software development disrupted the old waterfall model some years ago.

Done properly, an asynchronous work culture can be extraordinarily beneficial, greatly increasing efficiency, improving employee well-being, and allowing company knowledge to be shared more easily and preserved in perpetuity.

What Is Synchronous Work and Why Is It Broken?

The concepts of synchronous and asynchronous are rooted in computing.

Synchronous computing architectures are those with tightly dependent “blocking” processes, meaning one process must complete before another may begin. Asynchronous architectures are those with “non-blocking” processes, meaning processes may be performed independently and loosely connected—where no single point of failure can bring a system to a halt.

Most corporate cultures are still blocked by synchronous workstreams.

What does that look like? There are four ways this can take shape, ranked from worst to best:

1. Synchronous and closed: An example is a meeting that only a few attend. Everyone must wait for a decision to be made, and only a select few get the context shared during the meeting, making future decisions harder.

2. Asynchronous and closed: An example is a direct email or Slack message. This is slightly better, but only if people act on their inbound async tasks. It still doesn't create future knowledge because information that could be shared with everyone is shared with only a few individuals.

3. Synchronous and open: An example is a recorded town hall meeting. This can also kind of work because at least folks in the future can hear what was discussed and make better decisions. But it still requires waiting for the busiest person's calendar slot and delays decision-making until the meeting.

4. Asynchronous and open: An example is a shared Wiki page. This is the ideal way to work to achieve true async collaboration. But to truly succeed,  it requires leaning into the discomfort of being messy and working in public.

An asynchronous, open culture ensures that institutional knowledge is created and shared widely, not restricted to private documents or forums. Imagine if instead of building libraries, we just wrote each other letters and kept them in a drawer. Imagine if Tchaikovsky had written all that beautiful music, then shredded it. This is the absurdity of siloed, synchronous work. When we work in closed groups synchronously, we throw away all the knowledge we’re generating and create single points of failure that choke company progress.

Open, Asynchronous Culture: Being Messy and Working In Public

An asynchronous work culture is more like a printing press. It completely inverts the model and prioritizes the distribution of knowledge. It gives your company a flywheel of institutional knowledge out in the open. It not only saves current employees from doing extra work to acquire information but also provides a constantly evolving playbook for future employees. It allows decisions and progress to be made more quickly than having to wait for the first available meeting slot that works for all stakeholders.

At Confluent, we believe in async work so strongly that we developed our own set of commandments. Here are some of my favorites:

• Share work in public, findable places by default. Think wikis, not docs or email (with obvious exceptions for sensitive data).

• Provide active feedback as you read shared content. Leave likes, comments, and emojis freely so that others know you’ve read the content and what you think.

• Treat everything as a shared work product. In other words, if something doesn’t look right, fix it in the page directly or leave a comment.

• Accept that communicating ideas in words and diagrams can be hard but that doing it well yields a high return on investment, since anyone in the future can get aligned without needing to ask others what’s going on. Good content is like good code—written once but consumed many times.

• Be a good asynchronous citizen and start any question by searching for answers on your organization’s wiki.

• Encourage asynchronous behavior in others. For example, respond to emails by posting them on a wiki for group discussion, forcing good asynchronous behavior.

Ripping Off the Band-Aid Is Worth It

Many people find it uncomfortable to work in the open. It’s awkward to go from a push to a pull model in workstreams. It’s challenging to go from 1:1 communications to shared documents. If employees aren’t used to working this way, it feels foreign for their ideas to be out in the open in wikis, owned by everyone and not just a single person. It can feel less kind, less soft.

But the switching pain is so worth it because corporate cultures built around meetings and other synchronous communication workstreams are paying outlandish costs for decision-making and the flow of institutional knowledge. The productivity gains that can be captured by flipping the model are dramatic.

Remote work without high-performance, asynchronous work is a recipe for endless, repetitive meetings and slow progress. So while it’s fashionable to denigrate the remote-first model as employees are called back to the office, smart companies have honed far more efficient hybrid workstreams by building an asynchronous culture.

And it’s not too late for you to “connect async,” too.