Parabol’s 3 Principles for Effective Communication

❣️ Why This Guide

In our hiring process, the Parabol team gauges how comfortable someone is with remote work and their skills and abilities with async communication.

This is an important foundation for being successful at a fully-distributed company, and we want to make sure that all new teammates have a good start.

But, we’ve heard in onboarding retros that, even for folks who are clearly skilled in remote and async comms, there’s a learning curve to our specific way of doing this.

This guide is an intro to Parabol’s way of doing async.

In a synchronous culture, most things are handled by a quick meeting, where information is shared out loud. This is nice for the person sharing the information – you just talk for a bit – but it doesn’t work when async for a few reasons:

Recorded communication doesn’t need to be written. We use a variety of tools to document our process and discussions: Loom, Notion, Google Sheets, Figma, or just Slack! Use whatever works best for your 🧠.

Examples:

Search Notion or Slack for an answer to your question first.

If it doesn’t exist there, ask in a public channel.

Then, document the answer in the place you went looking for it. Since you most recently had the question, you are in the best position to answer it — and you’ll know what did and didn’t make sense to you at the time.

Whether you’re trying to come up with a new plan for how to tackle something, struggling with responding to a customer question, or proposing a new idea, start by just writing down your thoughts, getting them out of your head and onto digital paper or recording them in the format that works for you.

Even if it’s uncomfortable, taking something that used to just be thoughts and making it shareable will help you clarify your thinking. Also, you’ll be able to get feedback from the team, including clarifying questions, and that’ll help you learn how to communicate better next time.

In traditional, synchronous organizations, information is shared in specific places, where only the folks invited to participate can benefit from it. To keep our async environment healthy, we prefer to share things in open spaces, for a few reasons:

Information that’s shared in a DM can only be resolved by the folks in that DM conversation. In a globally-distributed company, where folks work different hours, that can be limiting and slow.

Instead, ask questions and share information in public channels, like your team channel (#t_growth, #t_product or similar).

If you’re not sure which channel to send information to, go for the one with the broadest audience — your teammates will help you find your way if that’s not the right spot.

One of the hardest things about remote work is that we’re not around each other by default. That means, if we’re going to get to know each other, we have to make ourselves seen in a digital space, and that can be uncomfortable.

Take heart: We’ve all been exactly where you are.

Sharing that you’re confused about something, unsure how to find something or just feel uncertain is not just OK, it’s expected. Sharing your needs gives your teammates a chance to help.

There’s no need to suffer in silence.

My (Aviva‘s) camp lead at Burning Man used to give this advice at the start of each Burn:

And the same is true for work-in-progress: The longer you wait to share, the scarier it’ll be, as you’ve grown attached to the work you did.

Instead, share as soon as you can (likely before it’s comfortable!) and your teammates can join you on the ride to making it better.

Async work changes our perception of time. Work goes from being around you all the time, to being something you engage with when you’re ready to. That requires some adjustment.

With folks all over the world, and various other time-sensitive considerations (pick-up or drop-off times for children, caregiving duties, doctor appointments, peak grocery store times and more!), we need to let each other know when our attention will be on work.

There are a few habits we have around this:

Google Calendar: Add your working hours, block off specific times when you’ll be away for a few hours or for a day, or add in focus times. This will let your teammates know when your attention is on or off work.

Slack: If you’re gone for a few hours, set your status or send a message in a channel to let folks know. If you’ll be gone for several days, change your profile name to reflect when you’ll be back.

Add your preferred working hours to your own record in Notion so others can see when and how to work with you.

These habits also work in reverse – you can expect teammates to have logged their availability in the same spots.

With everyone working different hours, and their attention shifting between tasks in their own way, it’s hard to know exactly when you’ll get a reply to something.

For your own sanity, plan your work in such a way that waiting for an answer isn’t disruptive.

That could mean:

Considering what input you’ll need from others, and make sure to ask before they leave. For example, if I (Aviva, US central time) am working on a blog post with Gareth (Poland, European time), I know it’ll take a day for each cycle. So I’ll plan for:

Consider what review cycles you need, and how much time they’ll take, in planning out your week.

Consider being explicit about when you would like feedback by or when you intend to move a project forward. This gives both you and your teammates clarity on timelines.

As you transition to work on your own time, with minimal distractions, you might find something surprising: it’s really exhausting.

With long stretches of deep work, it’s likely you’ll find yourself tired at different times or in different ways.

Feel free to play with your schedule, take breaks and work when it works for you. Working in this way is an adjustment, so let yourself adjust.

While the majority of our work is async, we do also have meetings, and synchronous time can be super helpful for certain kinds of activities.

To understand when to async, we must also understand when to sync.

Some general guidelines: