Asynchronous Meetings Everything You Need to Know - Fellow App

This resource first appeared in issue #49 on 06 Nov 2020 and has tags Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools

Asynchronous Meetings: Everything You Need to Know - Fellow App

As we get more and more comfortable with distributed teams, there’s increasing interest in written asynchronous team communication. It has the advantage of retaining a record and allowing people to contribute on their own schedule. Some things are hard to do asynchronously - it’s hard to imagine an asynchronous one-on-one being successful - but some are quite easy like status updates.

We know (from, for instance, open source) that complex decisions can be made with exclusively asynchronous communication; it’s even possible to set up to set up asynchronous meetings after a fashion - circulating an agenda with a deadline for items, have everyone contribute notes and discussions with a deadline, and proceed with decisions however you usually handle decisions.

There are definitely going to be discussions - such as one I had today where I badly misunderstood a fundamental point and didn’t realize it - where the high-bandwidth back-and-forth of synchronous discussion unblock things much more quickly than emails or shared documents. But a lot of routine communications can be done in writing and asynchronously. Getting used to working more in that mode is going to be something of a superpower for recruiting more distant employees, and teams who master it will also have a huge advantage in international collaborations.