So many of us work in companies that are spread across the world now, which means that timezones are a thing we have to deal with more than we’d like. Communicating internationally can feel so frustrating because it’s slow.
While we can’t align the clocks, there are some ways you can make async communication feel less like a drag and more efficient. Let’s get into it!
🏓 Why international ping-pong happens
Sometimes, a simple question suddenly turns into a week of back and forth over Slack. Why is working internationally so much harder?
Not being able to be in sync changes the way you need to communicate. You can’t have a quick back and forth as you talk through a problem, you’re now in a turn-based conversation. By typing the same way you would to someone sitting two seats away from you, you’re optimising for the same chat experience except this time, it’s dragged out.
Working internationally means you need to pass the ball into someone else’s court and give them enough that they can run with it, not pass it straight back to you.
To avoid the international ping-pong, you need to spend longer crafting more deliberate messages.
💻 Get better at your async comms.
These are some tips to write better asynchronously – they might take you a few more minutes than your usual quick message, but done right, it could save you days in wait time.
📝 Give the context.
Make sure you lay out all the context needed to understand your ask. Great context means that your message lands with the right amount of urgency and also sets up the recipient to action it in a way that’s most useful. It also can make it feel more like you’re working with a teammate rather than just getting orders from across the globe.
Hey, can you get me that churn data from last year?
Hey, would you be able to get me last year’s churn data? I’m putting together a report for the exec team before the budget meeting on Monday and I want to make sure we’re all up to date.
🖇 Make it really easy.
Help them help you! Rather than making them dig through Slack or Notion for the right information, try to collate everything they might need in the same message even if you feel like you’ve already done that recently. Include relevant links to things like Figma files, documents, or anything else that might help them work on your ask.
💬 Be clear on the ask.
If you have an ask, make sure it’s really obvious what you want and by when. Like when you’re unclear in the office, if nobody knows what you want it could result in having to chase them up, and you don’t want to waste a couple of days on that.
🧰 Don’t be afraid to use a few different tools.
A lot of us rely on email or Slack to communicate, but you have other options at your disposal. For anything particularly hard to write down, try recording a video with Loom. You could put together a diagram in Figjam. Or you could combine them!
💝 Consider the recipient’s needs.
Before you send that message, read it again as though you were receiving it. What questions might you have? What else would you need to know before actioning this? Does anything need to be clarified?
(The more you get to know your stakeholders, the easier it will be to anticipate what they’ll need at this step.)
⌛ And get comfortable with taking longer.
Crafting good async messages will take longer, that’s unavoidable. Take your time to do it right, otherwise you’ll just have to keep answering questions throughout the week.
And one of the benefits of working internationally? You can pick and choose a time in your day where you can spend a bit longer crafting a message because they’re not waiting for you.
Good async communication is its own skill, and it takes practice! Being empathetic and considering what your international coworkers need from you will help you to write better messages from them, and they’ll appreciate you so much for it. 💌
