Do not work asynchronously

Do not work asynchronously.

What is “working asynchronously”?

https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/26291176846/working-asynchronously

A synchronous working style is one where some of all of the team has to regularly stop what they’re doing, meet and discuss and agree on the next steps together, and then get back to work implementing those steps. These synchronous “join points” are frequent, unavoidable, and built into the structure of the work.

An asynchronous working style is one where the entire team rarely, if ever, gets together for big agreements and discussions, each individual team member more or less works on their own and at their own pace, with collaboration and agreement being handled by asynchronous mechanisms such as e-mail and shared online documents.

Why is asynchronous working stype not a good idea?

Asynchronous working style might seem like a good idea. It may work well in mature teams where all the members of the team respect each other’s time and understand their role and play a good part in the team.

But in most scenarios, especially, when there are a lot of Indian/Chinese/African people involved, asynchronous working style is not going to work. They do not even understand the concept. I have seem examples of this. When I tell them please send a message to that person, the answer I would get would be But he is not online. Or, but he is out of office today. These people do not understand that the other person doesn’t have to be online but we can still go ahead and send the message - and that message will be checked by the other person later - asynchronously.

Asynchronous working style is going to hurt our careers in bad ways. People probably don’t have the time to read messages in communication apps like slack and skype. They cannot tell that we are contributing value by looking at those communication channels.

For example, if we notice something, we have to set-up a meeting and make an announcement that we have identified a production defect and we that we are doing everybody a huge favor - even though that is a lie. Will this hurt other people - the people that are responsible for that defective code? Yes, it will. But this is the only way for you to get visibility.

Every decision that we make/take has to be in a meeting - preferably, with big shots in the team. There is no use in a meeting with subordinates - unless, we are conveying something that would help them do a better job at delivering things quickly and efficiently.