My Simple Agile Framework to Work Async-first

according to a recent Microsoft study 87 of employees feel productive while working hybrid yet only 12 percent of leaders have full confidence that their team is actually productive the problem is that employers fear that they are losing control if they can't see their employees working as they could in the office that's why lots of companies have recreated the office online with back-to-back video meetings in an attempt to keep everyone on the same page but this comes at the cost of employees productivity and well-being there are different ways of working hybrid but the 60 40 model that a lot of conservative companies are choosing right now is the most difficult way to work hybrid because it requires a team to be great at in person online and hybrid meetings but the fact is that most meetings are a waste of time and this virtual workflow instead of helping you be more productive and that's why most people hate meetings but meetings are still the go-to method for giving updates brainstorming and making decisions but actually There's A Better Way enabling your team to work asynchronously first working async first is the opposite of working real-time first so instead of collaborating with meetings you can use tools like Miro to brainstorm asynchronously post updates request feedback and give visibility into what everyone is working on I'm in the mirror expert program and I've helped many teams to design digital products asynchronously Define their way of working and even create the curriculum for courses asynchronously working async first means that you have fewer and better meetings and can get more work done as a team but working towards a async first approach can be difficult so in this video I will show you how to get started with the one Workshop work week with the use of a mirror template and if you want to you can copy the template just go to this URL the one virtual Work Week is an Azure framework that helps your team work together async first this means fewer and more productive meetings so your team gets more work done it enables your team to work anywhere they want and whenever they are most productive and by the way you might not know me I'm Angelo Arthur I'm the founder of Workshop Wednesday and I help Tech teams to work better together I've been working in and with virtual teams since 2005 as an online gamer software developer Azure coach and a remote work expert right right now I'm working with other remote experts to craft the one Workshop work week which is an Azure framework that helps you apply the principles of the best remote companies like gitlab doist and stripe if you want to get started with working async first then you can follow along with the steps in this mirror template in this middle template you see a workshop that you can do together with your team to get started with the one Workshop real quick so we have a couple of steps over here let's start at the goal of today and this is an async team agreements Workshop so it's kind of like a kickoff Workshop that you can do with your team to start working together Towers in async first way of working using the one virtual Work Week framework this Workshop will help your team answer the question how might we get more work done together async first I just explained the Y already so let's move towards the how and those are five steps the first one is watching this video so you're almost done with that then sharing this template with your team you can do so in the top right corner run this Workshop Widget theme and then start your first one Workshop work week because you will learn the most by doing and the work inspect improved cycle helps you to focus on improving one percent every day eliminating other meetings at your own pace and documenting Decisions by updating your knowledge base and team task list the workshop starts with giving an overall idea of the one workship work week it's an agile framework that helps your team work together async first so you can have fewer and better meetings more time for getting things done work anywhere you want and whenever you're most productive it helps you to move from an agenda like this with back-to-back meetings towards a agenda where you have more control over your day and more time for deep work you can do so by using your communication Tools in a different way because on a meeting first way of working which you see on the left side there is a lot of use of tools like slack Zoom or Microsoft teams or maybe face-to-face meetings for real-time communication and the problem with that is that everything is urgent and probably because of that you have back-to-back meetings it's hard to get work done and if someone is not in the room be it physical or virtual then they are missing out on the conversation so we want to flip this pyramid and work async first we want to make more use of a team knowledge base a team task list so that we can have less real-time communication the benefits of that is that you only have one weekly Workshop no other meetings you always know your priorities you have blocks of focus work and you're always in the loop even if you're not part of the real-time conversation now why I'm such a big fan of Miro is because it can help you with all these different layers of communication you can plug it in into existing tools and if you want to it can even replace those tools for example to become your team knowledge base but the important thing about async communication is that you want to create a collective brain for your team so your team knowledge base and your team task list they will always be the single source of Truth and always up to date with the latest information so that other people from your team know what has been discussed and what decisions has been made even if they were not part of the discussion I will explain the team knowledge base and team task list in a bit but the overall ID of the One Direction work week is that you have one weekly Workshop in this case on Wednesday a well-designed weekly Workshop makes all other meetings Obsolete and you can work together towards async practices of working so your weekly Workshop is the only meeting you have as a team and it has three parts work on new insights improve your way of working and plan your next week it has a maximum duration of three hours and if you can finish faster then that's great of course now you might be thinking what about my other meetings so the overall idea is that you don't have any other meetings with more than three people involved because it's usually best to wait until the weekly Workshop but some other Meal Time meetings that might be helpful are one-on-ones pair programming or pair problem solving now to be able to do that your async communication needs to be on its a game so if you want to learn more about AC communication I created a YouTube video for that it's in a template as well but the basic idea is that you want to move from meeting first where a lot of communication is happening face to face via video call or phone call do an async wave working with shared documents pre-recorded videos or audio messages and to give an example of what can be done async first status updates sharing information brainstorming planning problem solving decision making of them can be done async first but working together async first takes practice and depending on the needs of your team it might change so there's an exercise in the workshop which will help your team to decide how they want to move towards async first maybe you're already doing some things async first that you want to continue doing or do more of the Second Step you can list the things you want to stop doing real time and then the third step is the things you want to start doing asynchronously use this area to brainstorm ideas us with your team ask them to write down their ideas asynchronously so this could be before a real-time meeting or if you want to do it in a meeting then give some time for silent thinking so set a timer for four minutes and then ask them to write down their answers here before you start discussing that with each other after you've decided how you want to move towards async first there's also a second exercise that you can do with your team to set expectations about availability how to handle urgent things what communication channels you want to use and how you can see if other people are available and after you've done that it's time to design your team knowledge base your team knowledge base is your single source of Truth which enables you to work together async first it's a place where you store all team knowledge it increases team productivity and it's easier to onboard new team members your knowledge base can be built in an ocean in Google Docs in confluencing Click up it can be even built in middle but it is important that everyone knows where to find it and that it's up to date so a good exercise to do if you already have a current knowledge base is to ask your team what's missing in that knowledge base what's given problems or is bothering people and what do you really like about the current knowledge base because this is all great input for keeping up to date and improving your team knowledge base in the next exercise you can ask your team to pick the bearing blocks or the topics that they find important in team knowledge base that are not in yet I've included many examples in these template you can find questions below those examples to pick the topics that makes most sense for your team then up to the team task list and a team task list is your single source of Truth as well but this one is about connecting your daily work with your team's goals and vision it helps you to visualize the work in progress always know what's next and find decisions that have been made it's a prioritized list so similar to the product backlog is from the most important things are on the top the things that you will do later in time are lower on the list the idea here is that if it isn't on the team task list it will not be done so everything from tasks discussions documents debates decisions Improvement actions if it's something that isn't asked that your team has to do it has to be put on a team task list because otherwise there will be confusion about priorities and when you confuse you lose similar to the knowledge base it's important that your team knows where to find the project management tool so it could be notion jira Asana click up or even middle and once you have picked that tool it's important to make agreements about how others can see a new work item has started our others can see someone is stuck on a work item and what conditions your done work items need to meet now creating the team task list is a whole exercise on its own but the overall idea is that you want to connect the mission efficient of the company with your daily execution by picking the best possible strategy so work together with your team to make sure all tasks discussions documents debates decisions and actions are in a team task list and only break it down into smaller tasks when you actually start working on the item now we're almost there with the one virtual work week but an important part is to set accountability standards and we can do that by making use of automated questions automated questions on a regular schedule help us practice sharing writing and communicating automated questions help for higher accountability faster and better feedback loops and to improve your async habits and skills an inspiring company when it comes to automatic questions is Basecamp they have their own two base camp which you can use for this which can help you to set automatic dailies weeklies or basically automatic reminders whenever you want it will send a question to your team and then you have a dedicated page where everyone in the team can answer these questions so base camp isn't tool that you can use but of course you can also just plan it in your calendar you can make use of slack and set auto reminders over there and also in notion you can set recurring events so brainstorm with your team what automated questions will help them learn more about their work and each other there are some examples included here as well so they're automatic weekly that we can highlight trivia the automatic daily you can use those as inspiration but of course feel free to add your own after you've picked the automated questions that make most sense to you put it over here so the question will be over here and then ask your team to practice with it so if it's an automatic daily what is the question and then ask them give them some time to practice to review each other's answers and then give feedback on it because that's a great way to learn async communication so that's a quick overview on how to get started with the one Workshop work week after you've done this session with your team start your first one virtual work week and then a week after do the weekly Workshop to review the progress that has been made and to plan your next week because this will give you feedback loops and it's all about working and inspecting and improving focus on improving one percent every day eliminate your other meetings at your own pace and then document your decisions by updating your team knowledge base and team task list now if you need extra help or want to learn faster with your team then one of the ways to do that is with our hybrid work team training it's a four week program that will help you and your team to get from the old way so the meeting first approach to the new way the async first approach using our deal framework to Define eliminate practice async and liberate your team from the meeting first approach it's a four week program with personal coaching personal work live team workshops and on-demand videos and that's how you get more work done together async first I wish you the best and fun with getting started with the one virtual work week