Remember the old days of the advisory firm? All employees are in the office at their desks and can ask each other questions, hand off work, get instructions, or discuss current projects with each other.
Now, Nancy is pulling three shifts of work in 3-hour blocks throughout the day to accommodate virtual school in between, Jim moved in with his in-laws in a different time zone for childcare help and a backyard, Brooke dials in from an AirBnB at the beach, and everyone is wearing sweats on the team Zoom call that they hate.
Work isn’t happening at the same time for everyone anymore. It’s a mess, it’s asynchronous, and so we resort to the best tool we have for that: email.
I was drowning in email before the pandemic and it only got worse. Need a response? Send an email. Then wait. Check email repeatedly to see if it’s here yet. Another email delivers new demands. Send another response and wait for yet another response. Nothing ever gets finished and there’s more email to answer. Sound familiar?
I do not want more email and neither do you! And you have another problem: your employees don’t want to come back to work at the office even if you want them to. Welcome to the blog for solving these two problems because they stem from the same issue. Stick with me.
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist, Wharton professor and author of Think Again (and four other bestselling books) described three work types during Prudential’s recent 2021 Leadership Symposium:
- The individual athlete (the gymnast) – who needs to be off on their own practicing and improving their solo routine.
- The relay – the team that routinely hands things off to keep the race moving forward. The teammates line up to receive the baton as efficiently as possible.
- The sports team (soccer, basketball, etc.) – each member is contributing at the same time, ready for the ball to come their way any moment within executing the plays.
Let’s put this in work terms via this article, and overlay a retirement advisor practice, and I think you’ll see we can do better with our teams and get rid of some email traffic.
The gymnast is the asynchronous and independent worker. We’re all the gymnast when we’re doing work that doesn’t rely on anyone else. Perhaps the gymnast is in charge of building the enrollment presentation from the template and the plan documents. The project or task has a defined start and finish, and it’s either done or it’s not. There’s often work product to represent completion and a date it needs to be completed by. Living in your email inbox will rob you of time and cognitive power for this type of focused, quality work. It’s impossible to get in a state of flow if you’re switching tasks and getting interrupted every few minutes. Everyone must have, guard, and reserve time for deep work, as author and professor Cal Newport refers to it.
The gymnast equivalent of communications includes asynchronous, non-time-dependent, non-urgent messages. Think status updates messages. They can wait – read whenever they are relevant. Standard operating procedures or “here’s how” videos are accessed and reviewed prior to a task. Client information about how to get to their office and the security procedures or who to schedule meetings with and how fall under this category. This is where you need to be thoughtful about storing firmwide information, client information, SOPs, how the information is accessed, and by whom and when. To paraphrase the E-Myth, you’ve got to write down how to make the coffee if you want someone else to make it. You also need to make sure the gymnast knows where the instructions are… without email involved.
Congratulations, you just got rid of the how-to/where/let me update you/are you done yet emails from your inbox (and a very inefficient way to recall information). More to go.
The relay is the asynchronous yet collaborative type of work. The team is collaborating, but the work isn’t necessarily getting done at the same time. It might be a recordkeeper transition, where everyone is working in a project managed environment, there’s a list of tasks that cascade effort down the chart in sequence. It’s onboarding a new client, where multiple people are building files, collecting documents, creating documents from templates, logging preferences in the CRM, and building invoices. There are handoffs and interdependencies with the work. Deadlines and status need to be transparent and communicated in this environment and then everyone can race to the finish line knowing where the rest of the team is.
The relay team will interact in several ways, but a heavier load (and dare I say more efficient) will take place in asynchronous communication, where two-way exchange is expected but not necessarily at the same time. These could be “setting the stage” communications, non-urgent but important updates reported within the project management software, or the “this meeting could have been an email” (or video). Making these communications asynchronous allows for deeper and richer communications to happen in-person. Examples are status updates sent prior to a team meeting – done, in process, stuck – with the synchronous time spent on the problem solving. It’s an agenda that is sent in advance of the upcoming meeting requesting client input for the open discussion section, or a handoff message to the new relationship manager. It’s Harley Davidson’s huge screen on the wall in their plant showing the status of each station in the factory at a glance so help can be deployed to the right area and the rest of the team can adjust.
You’ll be better served by employing collaboration tools for this type of interacting, where employees can grab tasks assigned to them and have transparency into deadlines, who depends on their work, and places they can leave non-urgent questions and comments for the team who is not working at the same time, and in a relevant area to that specific project. What I’m saying is, you don’t need email strings about 20 client follow-up items in your inbox! Put them in a Trello or Monday.com project board or Excel spreadsheet or check it off in Salesforce so that when it’s time for you to work on that client today, your mind isn’t bogged down with the anxiety that you don’t know where all the information is or what’s going on. Think of it like a tidy container that you open up to look inside and everything relevant is in it… instead of in your email inbox, multiple scattered documents, and five sticky notes on a desk somewhere.
Now you just eliminated project-related email strings and nagging status checks out of your inbox and put them with the project materials where they belong, all the while handing off your baton efficiently and quickly to your teammate.
The soccer team is the synchronous and collaborative work. Real-time engagement is critical – you’re brainstorming on solving a client’s employee engagement issues, working through profit sharing scenarios, discussing the merits of a fund that is underperforming in the current market environment, engaging in a client review, or conducting team strategic planning or performance reviews. This is the kind of work that happens in groups in real time. Trust building, decision making, brainstorming, discussion, celebration, and so on.
This is where we mostly have it figured out. Where we’ve failed though is in leveraging the asynchronous, collaborative communications mentioned above first. If you have that right, no one complains that this meeting could have been an email and you can better dedicate time to activities that depend solely on synchronous communication. This makes way for urgent communications and meaningful interaction to happen, gives everyone more time to dedicate to focused gymnast work, and makes the entire team more productive and effective.
We’ve now reduced your inbox load and gave you some time back to spend on better real-time interaction. Now it’s time to deal with employee resistance to returning to the office, which is entirely related to the work processes and communication above. This all boils down to expectations, or lack thereof. A deep reliance on in-person, synchronous communication is what was compensating for lack of structure, visibility into your and your team’s work, and everyone’s self-management skills within that chaos. These were all problems before the pandemic and they will return if you don’t make an effort to change.
Those in favor of remote work love this environment because they can integrate work into their lives. You can actually be there for the washing machine repair person to arrive in their 10-hour window and stick dinner in the oven at 4:30 pm. It can help provide career opportunities for those who live in remote areas and small towns. It allows individuals to optimize their workday for their own personal efficiency preferences, rather than being tied to certain working hours. And for once, you don’t have to overhear all of Nina’s phone conversations or be distracted by constant interruptions. The gymnasts rejoice. Hipsters and techies love a good remote work situation that allows them to travel to fun places and still clock in. Ah, but, “Why am I not getting ahead?” they might ask. Well, maybe because it’s easier to be mentored and form personal relationships in a physical environment. At least they can keep status quo from their Airstream in Montana?
The bedrock of remote work is asynchronous communication. The strengths of that communication are that everyone can participate, the discussion is not dominated by one or two individuals, it allows everyone a chance to reflect and think prior to responding, and it keeps the wheels of productivity turning across time zones.
Those not in favor of remote work hate this environment because it’s lonely and it’s often slower and inefficient. Piles of email is inhumane! Extroverts need hugs and high fives and people for energy. Many employees prefer built-in boundaries on when work takes place (when they arrive at and leave a physical place), and like a reason to shower and a change of scenery. Baby Boomers are famous for being addicted to face time and built their corner offices on it. “If they’re not here, how will I know they’re actually working?” they might ask. Well, we all know that sitting at your desk looking busy for long hours is the opposite of productive…
We do ourselves a disservice by not having synchronous communications and encounters. We need, from an evolutionary standpoint, to interact with each other and connect. Besides the fact that emails and chat messages are often misinterpreted in tone, we miss out on all the non-verbal aspects of communication that are so important for context if we’re limited to asynchronous interaction. Since the Harvard Business Journal says we should be disagreeing more at work to get better work outcomes, improve relationships, and a more inclusive work environment, then pondering the meaning of a sentence over an inter-office chat box and whether they meant it to be mean or direct is going to get in the way of progress and real discussion. The relationships and sense of belonging that define culture in an office often have a physical component, and it’s understandable that employers would be concerned with losing that if no one comes to the office.
A main reason that leaders don’t want to have virtual employees or remote workers is because they don’t know how they’d manage them. What this really means is they don’t have the processes clear in their own mind on how work gets done. When there are no expectations or workflow processes because the leaders haven’t set any, it’s quite easy to confuse that with a lack of trust in your employees and resort to micromanagement or bringing everyone back in the office as the Easy Button. That’s a top-down management problem and a chaotic work environment problem – not a remote work problem. And employees shouldn’t be the ones to suffer for lazy leadership or judged on productivity by how long they sit at their desk.
So where does that leave us? Remote or in office – this is not an either-or scenario, even for financial services. Both types of communication and work environments have their strengths and weaknesses. And yes, so far I have pretended your compliance department doesn’t exist so you will have to deal with the technological constraints and compliance-related issues that your business prevention unit has for you. Sorry. But, no matter where your workers are located, our work has changed and requires a commitment to both synchronous and asynchronous communication as part of your culture or you face drowning in email without the necessary processes and tools to make survival and efficiency feasible for you and your team.
Keeping your email inbox from overflowing is reason enough to address the type, flow, and process of work getting accomplished within your team. Considering when and how it’s important for your team to interact in-person or asynchronously based on actual criteria is now critical as we ease into the New Normal with a workforce that has new demands. To quote Brene Brown, “Clear is kind.” Clear processes, clear intentions, clear expectations.
For more reading:
- https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210406-how-asynchronous-communication-could-change-your-workday
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurelfarrer/2020/12/10/the-art-of-asynchronous-optimizing-efficiency-in-remote-teams/
- https://www.techsmith.com/blog/synchronous-vs-asynchronous-communication/
- https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/e-mail-is-making-us-miserable
Courtenay V. Shipley, CRPS, AIF, CPFA, is the President and Chief Planologist at Retirement Planology, Inc., in Alexandria, VA.
