Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
If you’ve ever thought “This meeting should have been an email,” or “This email should have been a meeting,” read on.
As a professional communicator for going on three decades, I’m fascinated and bewildered by the current state of communication at work. We have never had more ways to stay in touch with one another, or to get one another’s attention. But we’re not communicating effectively.
Because everything feels urgent, it’s hard to fish out the signal from the noise.
We often sacrifice depth for efficiency. Get the question, the request, the statement out of our brains as quickly as possible, so we can move onto the next thing. Or we’re spinning our wheels, burning loads of expensive staff time, on things that don’t really need discussion.
Remember in the early pandemic days, when everything was a Zoom or Teams meeting? We quickly discovered how draining it was to do everything in real time and to be on camera constantly.
Have you ever been frustrated with a coworker who wants to do everything by email or Slack and is reluctant to just pick up a phone? (Yes, I’ve been guilty of this.)
The difference is synchronous versus asynchronous communication.
Synchronous communication is for discussions that require nuance or emotion, for coming to consensus in a group, for making sure everyone quickly gets on the same page at the same time.
Asynchronous communication is for conveying non-urgent information in one direction, for workshopping a document, for allowing the recipient to process and react on their own schedule.
Relying too much on one instead of the other is a recipe for communication overload.
What to do?
Don’t schedule a half-hour meeting for everyone to go around the table and read their updates off a page without discussion. Circulate the updates as a document instead.
Don’t exchange 50 emails with a colleague about a complicated scenario. Hash it out in a 15-minute meeting or call instead.
Understand that a message from the boss will always be treated with synchronous urgency, regardless of how and when you send it. If it’s not urgent, use the delay feature on that email or text message so it arrives within reasonable work hours.
Questions to ask yourself:
When does this communication need to be sent?
When does this communication need to be received?
Is the purpose of this communication to inform? To discuss?
If the purpose of this communication is to spur action, when is the action required?
And if you want to go deeper into what a healthy communication culture could look like in your organization, check out Cal Newport’s excellent A World Without Email.