What is asynchronous communication? How it can help you spur your startup growth
A startup success story is like hot bread pulled out of an oven. The smell of success travels fast, and everyone wants a whiff of it. Even if you’re not a startup enthusiast, you’re still inclined to investigate their valuation, funding amount, and the investors backing them. You can’t wait to talk about it with your friends and colleagues the next time you meet them.
However, it’s always easy to talk about success stories, but what’s not easy is what goes behind the scenes of making a startup successful. Hours of slogging, sleepless nights and an infinite amount of patience are the common traits observed in the startup environment.
Besides, all the above-mentioned similarities, most of the startups have to fight a surfeit of challenges. Amongst all of them, the one that has a significant impact on the daily working environment is communication. Establishing linear, and transparent communication within the team members takes a long time, but if it’s done the right way, then it becomes the foundation stone for growth.
In this blog, we will be dabbling with this topic, and go deep in understanding asynchronous communication, and how it can help startups to achieve phenomenal growth.
What is asynchronous communication?
Asynchronous communication is communication done on a non-instant basis. In other words, in asynchronous communication, the participants, not necessarily, have to be in sync or stay online to have a conversation. Take emails for example; you can send an email anytime, but the recipient has the choice to reply to your email at their convenience. Once you get a reply, the conversation can be carried on as an email thread.
This is different from phone or video calls where the participants have to stay online or in sync to exchange information. Unless they both choose to be available at the same time, a conversation is not possible. Asynchronous communication is great for having deep and meaningful conversations where a lot of thinking is necessary to put forth different ideas. Whereas it might not be an ideal choice where quick actions and decisions have to be made, and considerably less amount of time is available for thinking.
How asynchronous communication can help startups?
A strong communication setup within a startup creates growth and a collaborative environment. Asynchronous communication helps to do that by giving more flexibility to the team, communicate more effectively with the customers, and uninterruptedly perform work.
Let’s talk more about these points in detail in the next section of this blog -
Thoughtful communication
In a startup, you have to get things done faster, but that does not have to be the same with communication. Any form of communication done without putting a substantial amount of thought can work against the plans. Getting on a conference call with your team to brainstorm ideas, and implementing them at a blazing speed can give you a temporary adrenaline high. However, when you give more time for the thoughts and ideas to settle, you’re most likely to spot loopholes. Asynchronous communication safeguards your strategy from such loopholes as it gives you more time to think and act on ideas. As you get more time, you can look at things from different perspectives, and give more priority to calculative actions instead of quick decisions.
Effective collaboration
Startups that grow very fast have a very collaborative environment. Bringing all hands on deck, and encouraging teammates to put ideas together, are great initiatives to infuse collaboration in the daily working schedule of the startup. However, having too many in-person or online meetings can cause fatigue, and defeat the purpose of having collaboration. Switching to asynchronous communication like screen recording can keep the collaboration effective. With screen recording videos, participants can share their screen to pitch ideas and use their webcam to record themselves and their voice at the same time. This means, you still get the feeling of having a personal meeting, albeit without risking mental fatigue. In the long run, having a mix of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration can prove to be a great move for startups.
Deep work
Deep work means working on an activity for an extended amount of time without any distractions. Getting into deep work almost guarantees a higher level of productivity. Imagine how important deep work is for a startup. If every employee can work in a distraction-free zone, then they will be able to contribute at a much higher level. Once a startup decides to switch to more asynchronous work, employees will automatically get in the mode of concentrating only on their work for long hours. There will be almost no distractions due to unplanned meetings, unceasing phone calls and unnecessary chat messages. Employees will also act more responsibly before calling a team meeting as they will be more mindful about respecting each other’s work commitment.
Better relations
So far, we have been focusing on how asynchronous communication can revitalize internal communications in startups. However, the benefits of this type of communication don’t end there. Even while interacting with stakeholders like customers and suppliers, startups can enhance their communication by using asynchronous techniques. To give an example, instead of bombarding a prospective customer with a flurry of calls or making them sit on an hour-long online demo, a well-structured email with a screen recording as an attachment can do the task. Similarly, your suppliers will also appreciate it if you use more personalization in your emails by sharing a quick screen recording along with the email.
Mental balance
This point summarizes the overall effectiveness of implementing asynchronous communication in a startup workspace. Running a startup is mentally straining as you’re fighting against space and time to establish your brand in the market. When you already have a lot of pre-occupied ideas in your head, asynchronous communication helps to light it down by cutting down on mentally draining synchronous communication. Besides, as your employees embrace asynchronous techniques you can be assured that they’re producing good results, and coming up with new “thoughtful” ideas for the growth of your startup. In the short run, this might not sound very believable, but as time goes on, results start showing up.
Summing it up
A startup success story grabs everyone’s attention. However, it’s easy to talk about it, but when it comes to understanding how many challenges a startup team has to overcome to achieve such a feat, it can start getting overwhelming, including finding a reliable development company for a startup. One of the biggest challenges that startups face in the early stages of development is communication.
Having a strong foundation for communication is very necessary for charting the future roadmap of a startup. Asynchronous communication helps in doing that by making the communication more thoughtful, collaborations more effective, and empowering the staff to do more productive work. The above three factors ensure that many ideas are put forth by the team, but they’re done after a considerable amount of thought has been put into it. This further pushes the team to have more meaningful conversations. On top of that, when employees get a distraction-free environment, their mind unplagued with incessant calls and meetings; a startup is bound to get good results.
Furthermore, using asynchronous combination techniques like email and screen recording videos, startups can also establish a healthy relationship with their stakeholders like customers and suppliers. This mild change in the communication technique will generate big dividends as the company grows.
Asynchronous communication is one of those ideas that are less explored but have the potential of delivering huge results. With slow and calculated steps, startups can revolutionize the way they work today, and welcome a brighter future that’s sustainable and inspiring.
