Enhancing Employee Experience with Async Practices

Make work visual, personal and productive. Make Videos For Free With one of the most competitive labor makers in history, organizations are having to do all they can to attract and retain top-tier talent. One of the best ways for companies to have a competitive advantage over all other choices of a potential candidate is to place emphasis on the employee experience. Happier employees are not only more likely to stay but also to encourage others to join by raving about your company. So what is employee experience? According to TechTarget, employee experience refers to a worker’s perceptions about their journey through all of the touchpoints at a particular company, from candidacy through their departure from the organization. Employee experience includes the work environment, physical workspace, culture, and even the tools used in their daily workdays. A positive employee experience has been proven to present numerous benefits associated with higher employee satisfaction levels such as better employee engagement rates, increased productivity, and a higher quality of work. All of these lead to greater business performance. After all, a company is only as good as its employees! So now that you know why employee experience is a crucial aspect of any organization, how can you improve it? One of the easiest ways to improve employee experience is to implement more asynchronous communication practices.

Asynchronous Communication and Employee Experience

Asynchronous means that an action or interaction that is occurring doesn’t need each party to be participating at the same time. As opposed to synchronous, which means it can only happen while the involved parties are actively participating. Think of asynchronous as a text message and synchronous as a phone call. So what can using asynchronous messaging tools do to improve the employee experience? Asynchronous communication has many advantages for enhancing the employee experience. Async communication and collaboration allows for more people to be involved, without showing accidental favoritism to a particular timezone, it frees up employee workflows and keeps them more focused on their tasks, and it allows for a more prolonged interaction and gives each party time to fully digest the information and make follow-ups. For more guidance, check out these async communication tips.

More Inclusive Communication

Video conferencing and being able to jump on conference calls has been a major player in being able to include more relevant participants in a discussion, especially across distributed teams. Gone are the days of needing to be in the same physical location to be able to have conversations and make decisions. BUT, a scheduled meeting isn’t always the best way to communicate to reach the desired results. There will always be some exceptions when a synchronous meeting is required, but it is important to identify when it doesn’t need to be. Asynchronous communication removes the need to find a time that fits into everyone’s schedule or requires workers to shift around their schedules like a game of Tetris to make it work. Asynchronous seamlessly fits into each schedule because it can be acted on when that employee has time in their day to review and respond. Since the pressure of joining a meeting or being somewhere at a certain time is alleviated, more employees can be a part of the information sharing, which leads to a more inclusive work culture.

Fewer Workflow Disruptions

Asynchronous work is a way for your team members to assign a hierarchy and complete tasks in an order and manner that aligns with their workflows and priorities. Since responses and feedback don’t need to happen on the spot, employees are able to reduce work pressures on themselves and their coworkers. Some of the biggest challenges facing employee productivity are the daily distractions, whether in the office or working remotely. Once an employee has been derailed, it takes additional time and effort to refocus on the task they were working on and get back on track. Additional meetings and those calendar notifications are a very common way to distract employees. Once they realize they have a stop coming up, they already begin shutting down on that task and preparing for the meeting. But what happens if the task wasn’t completed? Can they jump back into that train of thought and pick up exactly where they left off? Of course not. They have to get back into that frame of mind. The trend of reducing meeting overload is one more reason async communication is gaining momentum. Giving employees the chance to communicate and respond when it best fits into their schedule makes them more productive and happier workers, because they feel they are getting more of their tasks completed more quickly.

More Continued Communication

One major benefit to asynchronous communication is the ability to keep the conversation going. Each party has time to review the information, formulate follow-up questions and comments, and even collect necessary materials that may aid in the interaction. Sure, talking face to face and replicating that conversation can be a great way to better get to know someone, but oftentimes you may feel as though you didn’t have enough time to cover every topic you were hoping to and feel as if you don’t want to take up too much of their time.

Zight (formerly CloudApp): The Ultimate Asynchronous Visual Communication Tool

Zight (formerly CloudApp) makes communicating asynchronously simple. Users can share information more clearly and provide additional context through screen recording, screen capture, annotated GIFs, and screenshots. Zight (formerly CloudApp) integrates into any employee workflow and the user interface makes it simple to just click and record! We all love the facetime of seeing the other person as we communicate. So much of our communication is more than just verbal or the words we use. The body language, tone of voice, and other nonverbal cues help make communication what it is. This is what has made video such a powerful medium for communication. Zight (formerly CloudApp) screen recorder capabilities can be a great way to replace a meeting or share a message with added personalization to your team and employees. Large company updates or presentations where one, or few, people will do most of the talking? Make a recording and share it when employees can watch it on their own time. Want to give an employee a shoutout for their performance or just check in? Send them a personalized note, or even better, record a video so they know it took additional thought and effort to create it. The uses can be virtually limitless, along with the potential for increasing the employee experience with more asynchronous communication practices. Schedule a demo to see how Zight (formerly CloudApp) can improve your employee experience! We make work easier by making communication visual. Connect with us on Twitter here.