There are a lot of reasons why internal communication is essential for the companies which opt for Asynchronous Communication in the hybrid workplace. It is difficult to think that there are some companies that still undervalued this kind of collaboration. But there are, And they are suffering as a result.
Internal communication is an interdisciplinary effort that involves a lot of departments, with HR in the hub of our strategy. This can mean that this involves delivering messages on behalf of management that needs to answer four relevant questions: why you need to adopt a hybrid model, how you will do it, and which goals as a company are you trying to achieve.
It’s not only about captivating your audience with the right messaging, internal communication it’s a two-way street and it involves the tools that we need to adopt to know exactly what’s happening in your organization (specially when the workforce is far from us).
Asynchronous communication. The keys to "saturated" communication
Internal communication across hybrid workforce requires solid and new digital tools that mix asynchronous and synchronous that let collaboration and communication flow.
Synchronous communication happens in real-time and it can be anything from a video call or live chat. It is a fast form of communication that leads to more active participation, and deeper discussions.
By definition, Asynchronous communication within a remote work environment no needs to be responded immediately. In many cases, this type of communication involves email, audio messaging, daily check-ins or collaborative documents. Asynchronous Communication works well with teams that are based in different spots.
Managers need to take a look into the benefits and drawbacks of synchronous communication in the hybrid workplace. The way most companies faced this shift of remote work was by maintaining the visibility of the managers amping up the amount of videos or voice calls.
The excess use of this communication, followed by an influx of zoom fatigue, affected productivity and damaged workers' health through stress and burnout. If you were part of a company at the time the pandemic hit, then you likely remember the overload of meetings you were used to suffering.
We’ll start with the most obvious reason why this happens. A basic problem afflicting the companies and processes is the lack of trust among employees and managers. We need to build new habits and more aligned processes to serve our current needs of communication in a remote work environment.
If you want to know whether async collaboration works with your team, you need to first identify their needs, and when to switch to synchronous communication, for example, in the case of sensitive matters, meetings with third parties (such as clients), or virtual onboarding.
This way, we can help create a sustainable remote team culture in our changing work environment held by Agile model and Design Thinking methodologies.
Now, let’s take a step back to present some tools companies need to introduce async and synchronous communication within the organisation. In general, in early 2020, came an excess use of sync communication (meetings, video calls, audio calls, …). HR has now the chance to adopt the required tools to set an internal communication strategy.
This works especially if the tools we use promoted two-way communication around what’s happening at the organization, making people input matters.
People need a channel for feedback, pushback, and public debate of issues and ideas. In that way, this can happen in a number of ways: employee polls, chat, chatbot, discussion forum, video calls, document management system, shared calendar, email, employee feedback, or an intranet.
