This post is written by Ciaran Carolan, Program Manager, International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Montreal, Canada.

  • The problem: Asynchronous work is an increasingly global reality as organisations seek to offer working arrangements aligned with the values of modern society. This requires changes in the way that work is managed.
  • Why it matters: Productivity will suffer if teams continue to follow traditional approaches honed with synchronous work when more flexible scheduling is put in place.
  • The solution: The strategic adoption of new approaches can enhance productivity - the five tips outlined in this article provide important considerations for managing asynchronous work.

Asynchronous work – work accomplished by team members who work different schedules – has generally been the preserve of those working with geographically dispersed teams. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted expectations. Asynchronicity can enhance employee well-being, allowing adjustment of work schedules to life or family demands. It can boost gender equality in the workplace and the home. It can also enhance productivity, allowing team members to work when they are most capable (i.e. according to their chronotype). There are good reasons for all managers to consider flexible scheduling. Yet it requires some adjustment of management styles and approaches.

Based on more than a decade of experience leading and working with teams across time zones, here are my five top tips for leading asynchronous teams.

1. Emphasise vision

Asynchronous work requires each contributor to make effort to act independently towards success. Steering of team members as work is undertaken is difficult and significant progress may be made towards the completion of a task before a manager has the opportunity to assess the efforts made.

The dawn of asynchronous work means revising hiring strategies to recruit more polymath profiles and placing an increased emphasis on training.

It is vital that all team members share a common vision, understand how the task at hand contributes to this vision and are aligned on how any deliverable furthers strategic objectives. Otherwise, time will be wasted in endless re-editing and you can end up with the types of Frankenstein outputs that are all too familiar in the civil service. It is incumbent on the manager to assure such vision is set, shared, reinforced and adjusted as necessary over time.

2. Discretise tasks

The limited concurrent oversight associated with asynchronous work means that managers need to build distinct checkpoints into work planning in order to steer progress. Break larger efforts into discrete tasks, each with its own deliverable that can be assessed as progress is made towards the larger end goal.

3. Adopt a production line approach

It can be helpful to apply an assembly line approach to the completion of any task. Personally, I find the analogy of constructing a building useful - you need to, among other things, dig the foundations, build the walls and finally polish the interiors. There is a logical sequencing of work across different individuals that allows the final product to be successfully built. Make sure that your team has the skillset, capabilities and behavioural tendencies needed at each stage of the output development process and, as manager, allocate their work in a logical sequence to ensure success. Assessments based on the Belbin Team Roles model can be useful to give insight into the behavioural tendencies of your team members and support task assignment.

4. Specify core tools

Don’t be the team where members are developing their own partial outputs in an uncoordinated manner and filling up email inboxes with multiple versions of the same thing, leading to chaotic efforts to bring it all together post-fact. Any team, group or organisation aspiring to work asynchronously will exploit three main tools – a workflow management solution that will allow allocation of sequential tasks to individuals and monitoring of progress, a collaborative editing and commenting tool and a team messaging solution that preferably allows for task-based and/or team-based message segregation. Ensure that there is full alignment on which tools are used.

5. Think multi-skills

When working asynchronously, the specialist, strategist and editor cannot sit together to co-prepare something. Each team member needs to fit all of these profiles (and more) so that they can contribute properly to the task at hand. The dawn of asynchronous work means revising hiring strategies to recruit more polymath profiles and placing an increased emphasis on training to assure that each team member has all skills necessary.

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