Async Communication: A Vital Skill that is Undervalued

If you are a software developer who work remotely, your level of your communication skills is probably your most important skill. Yet, many believe that they are already doing a good enough job when they are unfortunately not...

The changes in the past few years made “async communication” THE more normal approach for many teams & companies.

(Async communication: Any form of communication where there’s usually a time lag between a message & a reply. Mostly in written form. Ex: emails, slack, discord, …etc.)

So although you might be an excellent communicator when talking face-to-face with someone, but in written communication, things are different.

“Different how??”

1st- Different team members are very likely in different time zones.
So you could send a question to your teammate, but he may not see it & respond to it until a few hours later. (& that might be after the end of your day’s work hours) Now imagine if his long awaited answer was: “Sorry, didn’t understand your question fully, could you clarify?” 😓

2nd- The same words can carry different emotions or tones.
& in written format, a message could be easily misinterpreted or misunderstood. If you ask your boss: “Should I do this??” & his answer was: “No!!” Could you figure whether he is angry, scared, worried, or joking?? Nope.

3rd- Context of speech isn’t always clear, especially for someone jumping between different chats who might assume that the other person already knows what he is talking about.

Solutions

Here are a few things that you could do now to increase the efficiency of your async communication:

1st- Avoid a lot of unnecessary back & forth.
Get directly to the point in one message (or a batch of messages). So don’t just say: “Good morning!” and wait for a reply before saying what you need. His “Good morning” might come back in the afternoon…

2nd- Be VERY clear & precise in what you say.
Because we usually have to send a lot of messages in our work, we tend to try to minimize the amount we write as much as possible (assuming we are saving time). But in reality, we usually make our messages not clear enough, requiring us to clarify them again later.

3rd- Whenever you are communicating a bug or an issue, try to provide as much info as you can.
Don’t just say that: “This API endpoint isn’t working properly”, do you think that’s clear enough??

Send the URL of the API you are talking about, the request body, the response, what is the expected response, …etc. You'll greatly help the developers in debugging & fixing the issue as soon as they see your message.

4th- Take into account who your message receiver is.
Different people needs different levels of details & direction. A junior could use a lot of details, links to learn more, …etc. But a senior will likely get bored.

& that's all folks. Until next time 👋