Read on Twitter
Going Asynch
A work culture dominated by synchronous communications norms is suboptimal https://workfutures.substack.com/p/going-asynch
A work culture dominated by synchronous communications norms is suboptimal https://workfutures.substack.com/p/going-asynch
Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. | Jason Fried
In Collaborative Overload, Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant discuss their research on collaboration in the workplace: 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees.
The demands of a synchronous communications culture — where all are expected to respond to requests nearly instantaneously— will lead to the strongest collaborators burning out and disengaging.
Note that meetings are another form of synchronous communications, and even more demanding of attention than Slack chat.
John Lacy discusses the negative impacts experienced in his PR/Marketing agency following the wholesale shift to remote work, and the increasing use of communications like email, Slack, and Zoom as though those media demanded synchronous response.
Lacy split the workday into two parts: mornings would be maker Hours and afternoons would be manager Hours. This meant that managers were to only schedule Zoom meetings with makers after lunch.
Lacy set new rules for communication: Slack and email, as well as our project management tool, Teamwork, would be used exclusively for asynchronous communication. A same-day or next-morning response would always be sufficient for these channels
Lacy again: If a manager needed a response within an hour or two, they were to send a text. If they needed an immediate response, they were to pick up the phone and call. No exceptions.
Lacy’s approach is smart, but most importantly it explicitly identifies the synchronous communications trap as the root cause of attention fragmentation, not Slack, per se.
