Podcast
In this episode of Get Reworked, Designing Collaboration director Andrew Pope discusses why asynchronous work can help us claw back some of our focus and shares how to get started.
Listen: Get Reworked Full Episode List
"So first of all, it is understanding and appreciating that it's a problem. And understanding that everybody has different preferences. So it's really just getting the team together and talking about this and A) acknowledging that it's not working, and B) starting to understand that there is value in agreeing one or two more simplified ways. And I think once you kind of realize how bad things are, you go, OK, yeah, we do need to change. And there is a better way and getting the team together to agree collectively what it is, is really powerful."
Highlights of the conversation include:
- Why we need to be more deliberate in choosing which collaboration tools to use when.
- Why team charters can change how you collaborate and communicate for the better.
- How you can convince people to change their habits.
- Where to get started with asynchronous collaboration.
- How working out loud supports asynchronous work.
Plus, hosts Nidhi Madhavan and Siobhan Fagan talk with Andrew about how asynchronous collaboration can help democratize idea sharing, when it's important to work in sync and why building up capabilities like asynchronous work sometimes beats big transformation projects. Listen in for more.
Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Send it to [email protected].
Tune-in Here
 |  |
Show Notes
- Andrew Pope on LinkedIn
- Andrew Pope on Reworked
- "5 Ways to Get Started With Asynchronous Work"
- Designing Collaboration
Episode Transcript
Note: This transcript has been edited for space and clarity
Andrew Pope: The most important thing is start small. We've had the phrase digital transformation pushed down our throat so much, and we all know that we need to transform, we all know that there's more that can be done if we learn more about the tools, and we change how we work.
But that's hard. You know, it's very, very hard to truly transform an organization. I think more more and more, we're looking at capability, what are the sorts of capabilities we can improve? And are we looking at one area that we can improve? Or are we looking at just one small practice that we can improve?
Siobhan Fagan: You just heard from Andrew Pope, we brought Andrew here today to talk about asynchronous collaboration, and the timing could not be better. I think we all feel that we are overwhelmed by so many messages from so many different channels. And Andrew is here to share just really great advice on how to start working in a way that can calm down the digital noise and to start regaining our focus.
Nidhi Madhavan: Andrew is owner of Designing Collaboration. He has advised and coached UK and Australian government departments as well as large multinationals on how to better leverage tools like Microsoft 365. And to develop today's digital leaders. He helps his clients become more clear and confident in choosing how and why to use digital workplace tools and to improve poor habits, such as over reliance on email, and terrible meetings.
Siobhan: Nidhi, I can't wait to bring him on. Are you ready?
Nidhi: I'm ready, Siobhan. Let's Get Reworked.
Siobhan: Welcome to the podcast, Andrew.
Andrew: Thanks, Siobhan.
Asynchronous Collaboration vs. AI, the Noisy Child in the Room
Siobhan: So we brought you here today to talk about asynchronous collaboration. It is a topic that you are very passionate about. You have mentioned to me that you feel like maybe you're not one of the cool kids because you want to talk about this instead of AI.
But I think it's a great topic, and I want to know why asynchronous collaboration, why now? What's happening that is making this such an interesting topic today?
Andrew: It's a great question. And interesting how you referenced AI as well as the very noisy child in the room. That's another thing that's competing for our attention. And there's a huge amount of power and value that it's going to be delivering.
But at the same token, we've got so much else going on in terms of just the day to day work we need to deliver, plus the huge amount of technology at our fingertips that asynchronous collaboration is a way of helping to manage the stress and the sort of the digital overload that a lot of us are experiencing right now. It's probably the most important solution we can have when we're looking at how do we how do we improve how we work? How do we better integrate with our colleagues, when we're hybrid? How do we actually just find some time for ourselves to focus to get our work done.
And it's something that for me is incredibly important and essential, but perhaps is forgotten among the noise and the excitement and the hype of all the new, exciting things that are coming our way.
Siobhan: That's interesting, because I get from that last statement that you said that you're encountering some resistance, let's say, to asynchronous collaboration, and I'm wondering where that resistance is coming from? Is it just that this is new? Or what is going on there?
Andrew: Yeah, I'd say resistance is maybe a strong word. It's not that people are actively against it. It's more, how do we shift our habits, and we are all creatures of habit. And changing habits is really hard. We've just got stuck in the synchronous way of work, because that's how we've always worked, that goes back hundreds of years, and the old factories and work houses of the past, we're all in the same place at the same time. Usually, because we need to be under instruction, we need to be seen because in low skilled work houses, that's how it was done.
I'd like to think we've moved on a little bit from them that we have skills and the ability to be more autonomous. However, despite the technology enabling us to do that, we haven't really changed our habits and our practices to exploit that, and we do tend to still fit that nine to five, you know, we are working at the same time, not necessarily the same place, now I feel that with the pandemic, we managed to break that habit despite a lot of us being forced back to the office now. We still are seeing a number of people working remotely or at home at least a couple of days a week.
So it just goes to show that we can break this if we need to. But time is up hard one to break your meeting still drive a lot of our measure of productivity performance, just a way of being seen when perhaps we don't really know how else to connect with our colleagues.
Communicating Everything Everywhere, All at Once
Nidhi: Andrew, it's interesting that you mentioned the pandemic and the rise of remote work. Obviously, that's still relevant. But at this moment, a lot of people are returning to the office.
Would you make the argument that asynchronous collaboration is still important, even for those who are in an office?
Andrew: Absolutely. Whether you're in the office or at home, there's still a lot of distractions around how we work.
So let's say for example, we can use meetings, email, chat, channel messages, whether it's Slack or Teams to do the same thing. Yeah, we are, let's say we're trying to coordinate some team activity. There are a lot of different ways of doing that. And quite typically, we use all of them without really knowing why. So we might have a conversation in the chat message. And we might have a meeting as well about the same thing.
And a lot of this just adds to that digital burnout, it adds to all the distractions we're seeing, the notifications, we're getting, the amount of meetings that we're facing, and we're still reading all about having too many meetings, or we're having too many badly run meetings. And that's the case whether we're in the office, or we're at home.
And when do we actually have that time to focus to be able to do that deep, deep work that we need a distraction free environment to perform it in the office, at the end of the day, if we're in there, we're still going to do the deep work as well as the collaboration.
Siobhan: Listening to you speak, it sounds like we're all communicating everywhere, all at once. Everything everywhere, all at once, but we're doing not a particularly good job of it. Would you say that's the case?
Andrew: Oh, absolutely. And this isn't the fault of anybody in particular, we just have a lot of options, we have a lot of choice to make as to how we work.
I'm a big fan of all the collaboration tools available, if they use properly, you know, they are really powerful tools. However, I don't think we've spent enough time to sit down and think how am I going to use this for my work, they get positioned as solutions. And that's great, and they are solutions. But what's the problem we're trying to solve?
And, and it's very nuanced, you know, each team has different ways of working, each team will have different requirements and different needs. And yet, we kind of treat them all the same. So there's a big issue where we don't tend to think, let's take a step back and look at what are the best ways of working and perhaps picking one particular tool that we use for urgent collaboration, something where we need an immediate response, let's all agree to use one thing and one thing only for that, we tend to use everything.
So I find personally, and there's evidence around it, that chat messages are incredibly distracting. And I think there's something like we receive, on average about 32 chat messages a day, you know, sort of knowledge workers daily life. And assuming that we take notice of that notification, and perhaps a lot of them will go immediately have a look at them and then get distracted and then perhaps respond and think about something and then return to the task. You know, this is incredibly distracting, throw into the mix the meetings that were invited to, the email notifications, as some people they may even dare to pick up the phone and call us. And you know that there's another distraction. I mean, I personally I'm a big fan of of using the phone as an alternative to pinging more chat messages. But there's a lot of ways of getting our attention. And you know, the onus is on the recipient to respond. And I think that perhaps the sender of the message perhaps needs to think a little bit more about what's the impact of this, you know, Is this really necessary? Am I going to disturb someone, perhaps there's a better way of helping the recipient understand this isn't urgent, or what's the timeframe for this, and we don't usually think in those ways. It's just like, I've got something on my mind. I want to discharge it as quickly as possible.
And emails another great way, I think, you know, this, email is a nice way of thinking, I'm gonna send this email to everybody. And then it's done. My job's done. I've discharged my responsibilities. It's now the onus is on somebody else to respond or to deal with that. And it's not necessarily a healthy way of working and certainly not particularly collaborative.
Conference
Sep
16
HR Tech Conference Las Vegas 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Siobhan: I have to say that the estimate that it's only 32 messages a day in chat, I'm like, wow, I want to work in that workplace. I am just as guilty as the next so I am not saying this is on anyone.
Andrew: Yes, it's easy. It's convenient, isn't it? When someone's seen the message, you know that they're probably gonna respond fairly quickly, which is great. But is it urgent, you know, do they need to be distracted?
Can You Innovate Remotely?
Siobhan: No, absolutely. So I do want to jump into how we actually go about building this asynchronous collaboration practice. But we have a couple of more questions here in the theoretical world.
And one of them is that there's this theory that face-to-face helps innovation, that having that interaction with people where you are either seeing them in person, ideally, or on a video call, you're going to have the sparks fly, the ideas will happen. How would you respond?
Andrew: That is very true. I used to be in a previous life and innovation manager and the face-to-face interactions can be incredibly powerful.
However, there is a big caveat in that, that it's typically the loud, more confident more senior voices that tend to have more of a say in these environments, it's very easy for perhaps people that are more from marginalized communities, or perhaps more junior members of staff, that don't feel quite as safe to speak up in these environments. And asynchronous collaboration here, particularly around innovation, creativity, is a lot more even, I've done a lot of workshops that are, some of them are remote, they're not in person, and some of them have a big asynchronous component. And that allows people a safer space to input I think, also the pressure can be on not everybody has a great idea. At that moment in time.
Some people like to speak up, some people will just say something for the sake of saying something with confidence. And it sounds great and powerful, because they, they're spontaneous, their confidence. But is it actually valuable? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. And more often than not, the valuable insights come from people that need to think about it and perhaps need to respond in their own time, or perhaps don't feel empowered to shout up in a noisy environment.
So, there is definitely a lot that can be said, for the safer asynchronous spaces.
How Asynchronous Collaboration Impacts Culture
Nidhi: You've talked about the impact on creativity, and the idea that it can even democratize ideas sharing. I'm also curious, though, what does asynchronous collaboration mean for culture? Do you think that it's possible that we get further depersonalized from our colleagues when we're not seeing them face-to-face?
Andrew: That's the big issue right now, isn't it, it's trying to find that right balance of what is the right amount of time to spend either in person face-to-face with our colleagues, and what is the right balance of spending time, that's more focus that is more asynchronous. And at the end of the day, a bad culture is a bad culture, you could be in the office five days a week, and spend very little meaningful time with your colleagues, if the culture is that toxic, and you really don't want to be there, and you're just desperate to head out the door at 5 o'clock.
Saying that I think there is a balance somewhere where we start to build some rituals and some practices with our colleagues that kind of build a positive culture. I mean, some of these can be asynchronous, you know, we can create rituals that are very positive, that are asynchronous, you know, we can do things like quizzes, or even just sharing a little bit about ourselves who we are, this doesn't always have to be in a social gathering. And for some people, the prospect of going out for a few beers with the overbearing boss is not a pleasant one.
But there's value from connecting with people, I think, if we are left without any sort of real face-to-face or synchronous collaboration for too long, we can feel disconnected. So obviously, it's possible. You know, a lot of teams are 100% remote by virtue of perhaps location that they aren't in the same place. So it's not to say it's impossible, but we just need to appreciate that. There's an element that we need to humanize that we need to bring our full selves into the conversations rather than just always talking about the task, that project what we're working on, that we need to bring in a little element of ourselves a little bit of fun somewhere. And that can be harder to do asynchronously, it's hard to have that spontaneous kind of connection than to bars and interaction when we're talking.
So it can get complicated. And I think it's important that we were aware of this and that we are monitoring how our people are we're checking in that if somebody isn't necessarily always synchronous with our colleagues, are they okay, you know, do they need some more input from the manager and certainly puts more, more onus on managers to be aware of this and to proactively reach out to their people, because it can be easy to be quiet and to feel that no one's listening to you.
Siobhan: Andrew, something you just said made me think. I mean, when we talk about asynchronous collaboration, we're not saying that that is the only way that you're going to work. Can we can we just clarify that, so that there will be times where you are interacting with people, hopefully in both a compassionate and meaningful way beyond just the transactional, here is document I need this from you kind of thing.
Andrew: Absolutely. What is really important is that we take a step back and we look at what we actually do. And we work out, what are the things that we ought to do asynchronously, but also, what are the things that we really want to do that are either synchronous or synchronous and in person, and you know, there's a range of activities that every team in every department will do.
And we need to really think about it. What do we really want to get together for, so an example is, perhaps if somebody new is joining the team, is this something where we get together in person for just so we start to build up some relationships? What are the sort of more operational day-to-day things that we can move asynchronously, such as status update meetings, perhaps they can always be asynchronous, unless there's a particular issue.
So I think it's important that we agree this, it's not that somebody tells us we agree, you know, what do we want to interact synchronously over? And using things like a team charter is a powerful tool. It doesn't take very long, it's just do we actually take a step back and think about, what are the things we do? And is there a better way of doing it rather than defaulting to A) either 100% asynchronous or B) 100% meetings? Yeah, there's definitely more nuance in how we need to work that perhaps we don't appreciate.
How to Build an Asynchronous Work Practice
Nidhi: Thank you, Andrew. And you know, as promised, we definitely want to start getting into the meat and potatoes of things.
So opening up with a broad question here, how do you recommend the team start building the practice and introducing asynchronous collaboration?
Andrew: Hmm, yep. No, that's a great question. And for many, that's a hard thing to understand. Because A) we're used to ways of work B) perhaps we don't know how to best use the technology. As I just mentioned, I think the first step is just to really have a conversation about it to take a step back as a team and think about what do we do?
You know, a team charter is starting to become more of a useful tool in how we work where we just make some simple agreements as to what do we go into the office for? What can we do remotely? How do we protect our focus time? How do we communicate when it's urgent, and just setting these things out that this is maybe an agreed way of doing it?
So for example, we just use chat for something that's urgent, or we pick up the phone for if it's urgent. And then we agree, well, how do we do other things asynchronously? What do we do asynchronously? And, and perhaps the fear is that by jumping too far into asynchronous work, we're going a little bit too out of our comfort zone. And it doesn't have to be everything, there can be some very simple starting points.
So for example, I've done some workshops recently with some government departments around just improving collaboration and better understanding how to use the tool set they're using. And one of the areas that we really understood that needed to be improved with meetings, you know, there were too many meetings, they were, a lot of them were badly run. And there was a great desire to do something about it. But we needed to start small.
So a simple way was just to look at meeting notes as a stepping stone to asynchronous collaboration. So rather than having to rely on everything being in the meeting, we can start to launch meeting notes before and after the meeting, where it gives everybody an opportunity to contribute to the agenda to add some agenda items, or to even start to respond to the agenda items before the meetings even begun.
So you start to build up some asynchronous content around the meeting, we're still going to hold the meetings, but it's the stepping stone to where we don't have to do everything synchronously, we can actually contribute. And for those that can't make the meeting, it gives them a chance to put something in, or for those that have something to offer, but perhaps didn't have that thought during the meeting itself, there's a space and a way of providing some input afterwards.
Defining and Aligning Goals
Siobhan: Andrew, when working in this way, how do you ensure that teams are staying aligned on goals and what the bigger picture is? Because it seems like that is something that could in theory be lost in this kind of communication.
Andrew: Yes. And that's a challenge, because how many of us actually are aligned on goals? In in an office environment? You know, I, I'm still staggered, that measure of productivity is still time spent in the office. And we haven't really embraced how we can use the technology to better work towards goals rather than using time and presence as a metric.
So there's a bit of a rethink into actually starting to use goals and starting to define what are our goals? For project teams, that's a lot easier because the goals are more clearly defined, you know, you are working towards a particular endpoint that's very well defined. But for operational teams, that's a bit of a challenge because a lot of the stuff is repeating or it's responding to issues.
But then that doesn't mean to say that we can't be aligned. You know, we are working on a thing with other people who work on the same thing. What is that? thing. And once we've agreed that, you know, it's then a case of increasing our visibility of what we're doing. And that's, the missing trick is how can we have more visibility of what we're working on without that feeling of we're being watched and we're being tracked. I think there's a sense that we don't a lot of people feel unsafe, sharing too much in a synchronous tools about what they're actually doing, because you feel that you're being judged, and you're being tracked on what you're doing. Whereas, it's a lot easier to kind of be hidden away, doing your thing, but you know, you're there, people can call you up anytime, but no one really knows what you're doing.
So a big part of it is building a culture of trust and safety that this is okay, that we want to know what you're working on. Whether it's you know, using planning tools to share tasks, and where everyone in the team has visibility of that through to things like narrating your work, where you're actually proactively sharing what you're doing each day, who you're talking to, what you're working on, what are the barriers you're facing, for the benefit of the wider team.
Workplace Habits and Letting Go of Assumptions
Siobhan: Andrew, I was listening to you and honestly was thinking that so many of the criticisms that come up about asynchronous work is just that, in many ways, because you have to be more deliberate in the practice, it is surfacing a lot of bad workplace habits that we somehow managed to work around when we are in person.
Andrew: Yes, absolutely. Everybody's got the experiences of the terrible office, the terrible manager, or just the colleagues we don't get on with and we, it's not pleasant, and we just want to get our job done, we want to get out of there, or we don't want to feel like we're being judged. And most of the time we're not.
And a big part of it is actually getting rid of some of these assumptions we make you know, I've been guilty of that myself in the past, you go into an office, if you're not entirely sure about what the ways of working are, we make assumptions, and we assume the worst. So that doesn't really encourage us to bring our whole selves into the workplace.
And I think a good team working environment is a lot of these assumptions are not needed. We explicitly say, this is how we work. And this is okay. And so for example, if you are doing focus work, that's okay, we don't expect you to respond, we don't expect you to have to react to every message that you get within five, 10 minutes. I think these are some very common areas where we get an email and we feel we have to respond, we have to reply because then it's shows a sense that we are there, you know, if we're not in the office, that we are there, we're responding where a very diligent employee, whereas the reality is, that's probably not the best way to work, the best way to work is that we do have that focus time where we can get on with what we're doing. And if it's just a, you know, a crappy email, that's not that important, then that's okay to reply back at a more suitable time.
And having these things out in the open, makes a much healthier asynchronous environment. So we do have that time for the deeper focus, because as you say, good, asynchronous work requires a bit of a bit more intent, we're spending more time creating and crafting our content, and that needs focused time.
The Tech Side of Collaboration and Personal Preference
Nidhi: So Andrew, I want to shift focus a little to talk about the tech side of things. So the different collaboration tools are out there, because as you said, there's a lot of them. And so within that, all that noise, which tools do you find become more helpful than others? Or does it sort of depend on the team or the context?
Andrew: I do feel that it really depends on the the team and the context. Because as much as some of us might loathe email, perhaps if there is a team that just use email, and it works for them, and that's how they work and they don't want to use anything else, and they're all equally happy with that. Maybe that's okay. You know, personally, I think that would be got a great working environment. But for some, that's fine. And it's really understanding what are we doing? What's the best method, I just feel that at the moment, we're probably using all of the tools available to us to do the same thing. And that's not really healthy.
I think, understanding what we're doing and problem is as the technology isn't really, we're not trained on it in terms of specific use cases to us. We're trained on it based on all the features and functions it can do. And we don't need all of those features and functions, we really need to know the things that we need to know for our job. And that's hard to get our heads around.
So we tend to get sort of sucked into lots of the exciting features that we probably won't actually use and you think about within the Microsoft tool set, there's all sorts of wonderful things for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. You've got Channels, you've got Chat, you've got Loop, then you've got the meetings themselves. You've got Outlook, you know, there's so many different things you could use to do exactly the same bit of work.
And it's really important to think, well, what are we doing here? Can we use just one of these and use it really well. So perhaps we just base everything we do in Teams channels, and we just use that as our primary form of communication. We use something else when it's urgent, but that might be channels for one team, it might be chat for another and the worst cases that we see people using chat as their primary form of communication and collaboration, which is a very poor form of, it's not a good record, you, it's really hard to find chat messages, that we lose the context very easily. And so there's another important reason understanding Well, what are we trying to do and maybe why this is not the best way of doing it.
I worked with one organization and they have a very short retention time for chat messages, it was about a week or something yet, that was their primary form of collaboration on working matters. And you get to sort of think this is not great, because suddenly, all this lovely content is gone. Who said this? Well, who is the person I need to go to for that I can't find the message. So we can't really resolve this issue anymore. So understanding perhaps how we're using things and what the technology can do and cannot do are important. And I think that we tend to be a bit over focused on the features and functions and less focus on what are we actually trying to do as a team or as an individual.
Nidhi: So it's interesting, you mentioned moving people towards being more intentional about what they use and trying to figure out what we're using. For a lot of people, it comes down to personal preference, there are some people who just feel more comfortable sending emails, or other people who would much rather use chat, from the change management perspective, how do you get people on board to change the way they've been doing things, or that they're comfortable with that they've been doing for a while?
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. And then this is the hardest thing to change, it's back to habits again, and one of the barriers is learning the technology, the other barrier is changing our habits. And it's really hard to change habits.
And as you say, people that are used to email will largely want to carry on using email. And the risk is is where you have a team of people, and they all have different preferences. And so one person will want to choose email, one person would prefer chat, and you end up with just a mess. And for anybody in that team, you're having to read and respond to all these different tools where it could all be done in one.
So really, I mean, the best way of dealing this, I find is that you need to get the team together to talk and this is something I do quite a lot of is helping just understand, how are we working at the moment? What could be improved, and this always comes up as an issue. You know, if we want to improve something, it's the sheer amount of communication and collaboration tools we have we use, is always a big problem. Great, okay, we've acknowledged this as an issue. So first of all, it is understanding and appreciating that it's a problem. And understanding that everybody has different preferences. So it's really just getting the team together and talking about this and A) acknowledging that it's not working, and B) starting to understand that there is value in agreeing one or two more simplified ways. And I think once you kind of realize how bad things are, you go, okay, yeah, we do need to change. And there is a better way and getting the team together to agree collectively what it is, is really powerful.
So, you know, there's not one person there's not an expert, or the manager saying this is the way to do it. It's a case of going well, what do we want to do? What's what are the right channels? And I do find it's actually, once you start these conversations, it's quite easy. We start to think, well, let's cut these things out. What are the least popular methods of communication? And actually, you know, as much as chat is incredibly well used, not many people really like it, or as much as email as well used, not many people really like it. And you Okay, great. Well, why are we using it if we don't actually like it? And is there one that perhaps would fit our needs better?
And then for new people joining a team, great, you starting to create some certainty as to around how do we work? What do we use for what and then you start to simplify things, how things work, not just reactively but proactively.
Addressing Cross-Team Collaboration
Siobhan: Andrew, I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into this scenario. So you've got your team. They've all aligned on their tools. They're working great. But the truth of most organizations is that they work cross team like it's cross-team collaboration.
How do you get two teams to cooperate in this way? If, for example, both have gone through this exercise, they've both established their preferred norms. And as Nidhi said, they are wildly different. They have wildly different agreements and preferences.
Andrew: Yeah, that's a challenge. I mean, it's for every team that you mean, there's going to be upstream downstream teams. And do we have the luxury of being able to agree with them a preferred method of collaboration. It's worth finding out, you know, it's worth exploring Can we try and agree a way that our team agree with your team? Having some consistencies is really powerful. And and this is, the problem is who owns this space. And I think this is where the real issue is, is that no one tends to own it, you know, IT own the technology, but they don't really have that much of an interest in how it's used. They're not that fussed about. If different teams want to work in different ways, and perhaps work in isolation of each other. If that's what they want to do, then that's fine.
There's not a responsibility for this. And this is a big problem. And I think having some kind of awareness that this digital culture is really important. And if we're not able to align teams, from an enterprise point of view, if we can't do this, then we're going to struggle. And we've got a lot of broader organization wide community tools that I think a very underused, and personally, I think that's the secret sauce is if we aren't, if there's less agreement between how we work, then are there ways of setting up communities where there's one place where perhaps teams can come together over a particular shared purpose, or shared area, whether it's a client or wherever it's a technical practice, or some shared competencies.
And community building is one of the brilliantly collaborative and bottom up activities that I think really works. But you need to have purpose, you need to have intent, you need to have a community manager, somebody who is actually assigned to run and moderate and ensure that conversations flow that takes investment and time. So it doesn't happen as much as I like. So that's one way.
But it doesn't necessarily help with those sort of more immediate transactional issues that teams need to have. And I would say, there's different ways. I mean, one way that I do find really nice is just sometimes inviting somebody from another team into your meetings, just starting to get a presence into what you're doing, and start to have some visibility of what each other is doing and finding a simple and effective way to do that.
I'm a big fan of using things like Planner and Trello, etc, to start having visibility of what we're doing. And if both teams have more visibility of what they're doing, then that's a good starting point, we might not necessarily be specifically collaborating over that. But if we're starting to see more of what we're doing, that can really help, that can make us more informed, and perhaps less reliance on these messages, or these emails, or these multiple forms of communication to ask something when we've got the knowledge in front of us.
So once we start to get more deeper into asynchronous collaboration, there is more knowledge there is more information available. That does mean we rely less on those messages pinging up 'Hey, can you just tell me what about this' or 'I need to see a little bit more about this,' that information is more often available. So it does reduce the need for that kind of immediate transaction or knowledge sharing.
Nidhi: Thank you, Andrew, we've covered a lot of ground today. But you are the experts. So we do want to end things by just asking whether you have anything else you'd like to add, or if there's anything else teams should keep in mind when trying to build these practices.
Start Small
Andrew: The most important thing is start small, we've had the phrase digital transformation pushed down our throat so much. And we all know that we need to transform, we all know that there's more that can be done if we learn more about the tools, and we change how we work. But that's hard. You know, it's very, very hard to truly transform an organization.
I think more, more and more we're looking at capability, what are the sorts of capabilities we can improve? And are we looking at one area that we can improve? Or are we looking at just one small practice that we can improve?
So for example, meetings, that's just focus on how can we improve how we run meetings? What asynchronous components can we bring into meetings to make them a little bit more equal a little bit safer for people to contribute or to shorten them or whatever it is, we want to get out of it.
So there's a lot we can do without having to really try and change everything around how we work. I think a good starting point is just looking at well, what do we do that's really important that we're not doing so well, what can be improved? And is there a way that asynchronous collaboration can improve on that? And another area that I mentioned before that I think is really powerful is just perhaps agreeing one way of, of interacting when it's urgent, starting to segregate the urgent communication from the less urgent so we're starting to think a little bit more about what we do, we're starting to create a bit more intent around how we collaborate.
So we talk about that and that's not that hard to do. There's fewer barriers to implementing something like that, than there would be to say, we're going to try and work 50% asynchronously in terms of how to interact that's maybe a jump too far for many. It also depends on how the team is where they are. If you're in an office, if you're hybrid. If you're 100% remote, I think if you're 100% remote, there is a completely distributed team. There certainly is, by default, going to be more asynchronous collaboration. So you can probably go a little further and a little deeper, but it's starting to understand what are your current practices and maybe one or two small areas, you can improve on them.
Siobhan: Thank you so much, Andrew, I love that you brought it down to that, because it can be daunting, completely rethinking how you rethink your working practice. And so this advice to start small, is kind of like a collective sigh of relief, like, oh, you don't have to change everything at once.
Andrew: Absolutely, I mean, how many times have we seen like a full digital transformation really extend to the whole workforce, it's really hard. And it's, you know, we don't have the money to spend on these kinds of projects anymore, either. This is the other thing I'm seeing is, there's less and less investment in these widescale transformation projects. And building up capabilities is, I think, a much more smart use of investment.
And perhaps you're training up a few people or you're building up a practice, or you're working one team at a time to help them embed some new ways of working, or you're building communities around this. And this is another way to create communities around this practice, and allowing people to contribute and share their ideas. And, boy, what's worked and what hasn't, and this coming from inside the organization is very, very effective. Because you know, you haven't got the the expert coming in and telling you how to work. You've got people you know, and you trust saying, well, this is what we've tried, and this is working for us. And I can help you, I can take you through this.
Siobhan: So I know that our listeners are going to want to find you online, Andrew, where is the best place that they can find you, other than of course on Reworked where you write for us and we will link to some of your articles. But where else can they find you?
Andrew: I'm usually most active on LinkedIn. That's probably my main visible place. Andrew Neil Pope is my LinkedIn name and on Designing Collaboration, or there's the Designing Collaboration website, which is designingcollab.com. But yeah, I'd say dig me out on LinkedIn. And I'm usually quite happy chatting about the good and bad of digital working and digital culture.
Siobhan: Fantastic. Well, we are going to link to all of those in our show notes. But in the interim, thank you so much for joining us, Andrew.
Nidhi: Great chatting with you all.
Andrew: Not at all. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was a lovely chat.
Siobhan: If you have a suggestion or a topic for a future conversation, I'm all ears. Please drop me a line at [email protected]. Additionally, if you liked what you heard, post a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you may be listening. Please share Get Reworked with anyone you think might benefit from these types of conversations. Find us at reworked.co. And finally, follow us at Get Reworked on Twitter as well. Thank you again for exploring the revolution of work with me, and I'll see you next time.
