How to reclaim time with asynchronous workflows
I have a clear mission with my work.
I want to change how leaders organize remote work so we can change how people work altogether. It all starts with asynchronous workflows.
Our most important resource is time. As teams, we need time to do meaningful work. As leaders, we need time to make impactful decisions. We solved the location problem with remote work - almost anyone can work from anywhere now. It is time to solve the problem with time. We need to be able to work from anywhere, anytime.
We will still meet, do facetime, and collaborate synchronously online or even offline. But we need to strive towards our goal: do as much as we can asynchronously, so we can be flexible with our time.
But how do we do it? This issue of Leadership Anywhere gives you the three areas where we can quickly implement asynchronous workflows to reclaim time for ourselves and our teams.
First of all, to be clear, async work is not a third category on top of remote or hybrid work. It is part of both. The goal is to do more async work, so our selection of either hybrid or remote work wouldn't be a necessity but rather a sheer preference of management.
Second, our goal is not to focus on areas where we spend most of the time (so we can reclaim more). Instead, let's focus on areas where we can use more time to improve our work.
Collaboration on projects
You are probably doing a lot of async collaboration on projects already. For example, writing documents together, providing reviews and comments on materials, or writing code asynchronously.
The goal is to make this work intentional and planned and do even more async. To achieve this, you need to focus on three steps:
Set up a proper company hub, so all information becomes accessible on projects. By doing this, you save tremendous time on scheduling and project planning.
Completely ditch brainstorming meetings and sessions. In most cases, they are not helpful anyway. Focus on small project kick-off meetings instead.
Make project communication fully transparent. It dramatically reduces small "what to do" and "where is this document" comms.
2. Decision-making processes
I have covered this aspect in a previous issue for you, but in a nutshell: leaders should give up their privilege to make decisions.
In an asynchronous decision-making process, the remote leader is not a power player but a facilitator. The goal is simple: leaders can have more time to properly assess situations by making decision-making async. The more time the leader has, the better decisions they make.
To learn more about async decision-making, read this previous issue of Leadership Anywhere here.
3. Hiring & Recruitment
If you are a growing company, you can feel the pain already: leaders spend an insane amount of time participating in hiring & recruitment processes.
You know what I am talking about: that 2nd interview stage with the line manager. That 3rd interview stage with the leadership. The constant filtering and sourcing of applicants. It just sucks away so much time. Meanwhile, it burns the productivity of leaders and team members alike.
By planning, you can make most of the hiring processes asynchronous.
Write an amazing job spec that describes your company and the work and ensures that it filters out applicants automatically.
Make the cover letter mandatory. No easy apply - you don't need the volume; you need the quality.
Ask applicants to do a test asynchronously. A survey, a short task, anything can work.
Automate the whole process. The HR manager or team member engages with applicants only if they complete all the necessary steps.
You will receive fewer applicants if you do this, but the quality will spike up. When the applicant has a screening call with your team, they come with a great filter, background, and more.
Therefore, you will not just save a lot of time but will be able to recruit better candidates by default - all because of the async hiring process.
And that's it - I will discuss some of these areas in future issues. It is utterly essential: we need to reclaim our time so we can use it to do more meaningful work.
#TLDR
Remote work allowed us to work from anywhere. Async workflows will allow us to work anytime.
Our mission is to build more async processes into our workflows, so choosing between hybrid or remote setups will be more flexible.
We can implement more asynchronicity into our work in three key areas: collaborations, decisions, and hiring.
The goal is to focus on areas where we can use more time to do our job better. With async flows, we reclaim time to use it more efficiently.
