The Benefits of Asynchronous Communication

May 20, 2020 by Nomadic Team

We’ve all experienced it: the dreaded meeting that could have been—or really should have been—an email. But even without a global crisis exerting tremendous pressure on our ability to manage our time, energy, and attention, it’s worth looking at how the timing of our communication can help or hurt our ability to get work done. Whether we’re working from corporate HQ, a cafe, or our kitchen, asynchronous communication can noticeably improve our collaboration and the quality of our work.

This Resource, which is available to members of our cohort-based Academy (learn more about our learning content here), explores the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication, and makes the case for asynchronous communication. Here’s a sneak peek.

The Benefits of Asynchronous Communication
There are a lot of reasons we might have a bias toward synchronous communication—or, any communication that takes place in real time—especially if we are still adjusting to working remotely. For one, it recreates the face-to-face interactions that we experience when we are co-located. For those of us who are managers, mediums like video meetings or conference calls can also provide us with a sense of control that we might lose when we can’t “see” our teams working. Or it might feel like a way to hold our team accountable by keeping them on call.

But the truth is that there are distinct advantages to asynchronous communication or—that is, communication that doesn’t have to take place in real time. Read on to explore a few of the advantages. And to learn more about how asynchronous communication can also make an L&D initiative more effective, check out our post on asynchronous vs. synchronous communication in online learning, too.

Asynchronous communication...

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So asynchronous communication offers clear benefits, but what about asynchronous (or semi-synchronous) learning? Download your free copy of our report, Why the Future of Learning is Instructorless, which explores why what we call semi-synchronous learning is so impactful for global teams. In it, we explain how we designed our Academy to put learners at the center (rather than an instructor), to foster lively debate, and to make the learning immediately relevant to cohort members' daily work.

Interested to discover more about what Nomadic’s cohort-based Academy can do for your organization? Learn about our approach, or get in touch to request a demo.

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