Balancing Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication in Virtual Teams

What is the focus of your work these days?

I am the Founder and CEO of Workplaceless, and we train teams on how to be more effective at remote and hybrid work. Right now, because of COVID, we are focusing on the experience and effectiveness of many organizations that adopted remote work very quickly and are now thinking about how to incorporate more remote work in their long-term plans. One of the components of that is improving communication practices to make sure that there is a better balance of asynchronous and synchronous communication.

What is the motivation for your presentation?

The motivation is that many people are suffering from ineffective communication practices which have been exacerbated by circumstances caused by the pandemic. Companies adopted remote work rapidly without thinking about how remote work needs to be different in order to be effective. To truly reap the benefits of remote work, a high level of autonomy is needed. But with the rapid adoption of remote work, what we saw instead was organizations trying to recreate the office environment with everybody being at home. This has led to back-to-back meetings on video conferencing platforms, and now there’s even a new term for it: Zoom fatigue.

How would you describe the persona and the level of the target audience?

The talk will be relevant for anyone, whether you are an individual contributor or you're a senior manager. I’ll describe what it means to have an optimal balance of async and sync, how to improve that balance and provide some frameworks on how to incorporate more async practices for yourself and for your team.