Remote work requires asynchronous communication

leadinginproduct.com

2 points·benkan··3 comments

Asynchronous communications for me means email. It works well when your co-workers and management are able to express themselves well in writing. In my experience there is a large proportion of people who just love to talk and hear themselves. Since their verbiage is very low signal to noise ratio, they are loath to put anything in writing.

In my idealized world there is no Zoom and no office. Meetings are held at locations / venues convenient to all parties and because they are relaxed easily segue into productive conversations.

I've learned the value of brevity in communicating important points.

I've found that my most-misunderstood communications are when I said way too much compared to the actual facts that needed communicating.

I could see people's eyes just glazing over as they read my eloquent, generous paragraphs of prose.

Yeah, people just want to get to the point and move on.

Then again, I've also had a supervisor who absolutely did not seem to comprehend or register anything I wrote, no matter how clearly or redundantly I attempted to lay it out in an email. It was hopeless. I think there are some people with sufficient power, that they can safely ignore someone else trying to inform them or tell them what to do, and impose their own expectations on the transaction.

It could be email, but it also be Confluence, Notion, OneNote, or something like that. I understand that you think a chat solution like Slack or Teams or Mattermost is too "chatty", right?

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