🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

When you’re adopting new ways of working, how do you know if you’re making progress?

💡 Concept

Async-first is an approach to work that prioritizes asynchronous communication and collaboration in the interest of promoting autonomy and flexibility. The focus is on if and how work is done, rather than when or where. Whenever possible, work is accomplished without the requirement of meetings or other synchronous communication.

Adopting an async-first approach across your team can be challenging because it’s easy to fall into old habits, such as defaulting to meetings to get work done or relying on people for access to information instead of relying on documentation.

Enter: the Autonomous Hippopotamus.

Cute, right?

But what is it?

The Autonomous Hippopotamus is a visual cue to indicate when an action or message is async-first. Async is what makes the hippopotamus autonomous, after all!

At Workplaceless, we’ve added the Autonomous Hippopotamus as a custom emoji on Slack:

When someone shares a message that represents an async-first approach, other team members react with the Autonomous Hippo emoji.

Example messages include:

• I can’t attend today’s meeting, so here is a quick video recording of my thoughts.

• The SSoT has been updated to include the new process for approving content.

• Here is the link to my written update for this week.

• In lieu of a team meeting this week, everyone will contribute to the project Mural with updates and blockers.

Of course, you don’t have to use this exact visual cue in your team. Maybe you don’t like hippos. Or maybe you just prefer a different emoji or symbol to represent async-first practices.

Using a visual cue like this helps reinforce async-first practices because team members can easily react to a message with one click, rather than having to type out a whole message. And if it’s that easy to explicitly recognize and celebrate examples of async-first communication strategies, they will be used more often, by more team members, making behavior change visible.

🎬 Take Action

Here are some things you can do to reinforce async-first communication:

• Choose an emoji, symbol, or image to represent your async-first approach.

• Use your visual cue to react to examples of async practices.

• Verbally call out examples of async-first practices used to prepare for meetings.

• Indicate async-first practices in written updates.

• Provide feedback to your direct reports on their use of async-first practices.

📄 Additional Resources

What is Asynchronous (aka Async) Communication & Why It Matters

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

Learn more about async-first practices in our Async at Work eCourse.

📰 News

Workplaceless CEO Tammy Bjelland will be delivering a webinar for Product League on Wednesday, May 24 on remote product management: Is it right for you? Is it relevant to your organization? What are the steps to making it work?

🎁 Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.