Asynchronous meetings are a new category in the broader world of asynchronous work, but that doesn’t mean smart companies haven’t yet found a way to hack together their own asynchronous meeting platforms. These companies' desire for a better way to meet is a big motivation for the team at Asynchly. Our mission is to build a platform that enables them to run their asynchronous meetings in an efficient and effective way — whatever that means to them.
In this post, we examine the push behind asynchronous meetings at Loom.
Note: The information in this post was sourced from Loom’s original post, which can be found here.
About the Company and Team
It feels a bit “meta” to be examining the concept of asynchronous meetings at a company that offers a product to deliver asynchronous video messages, but here we are.
Loom lets its users record and share video messages of your computer’s screen, cam, or both. They believe that the videos are faster than typing an email or meeting live — or as we’d say, “meeting synchronously.”
The company was founded in 2015 and has 9 million users at 120,000 companies.
The Problem they Faced
At Loom, there were three main problems the leadership identified as challenges with their synchronous all-hands meetings.
- The rapid growth of the company meant that many team members were located across several timezones. This made scheduling all-hands staff meetings extremely difficult because what times worked for some wouldn’t work for others.
- The leadership team also (smartly) understood that having the entire company in attendance, virtually, to listen to a group of executives talking or providing an update wasn’t an efficient use of time.
- The team also noticed the lack of engagement by most, if not all, attendees during their all-hands meetings.
Their Approach to Solving It
As a company devoted towards building an asynchronous communication tool for the workplace, Loom decided it was important to free up time in order to deliver better meeting content while also driving more engaged conversation.
So, rather than have presenters talk live to the team in a synchronous format, the company’s leadership asked all-hands meeting presenters to record brief videos using Loom to share their updates. In turn, the team was tasked with watching the videos at a time convenient for them.
Loom has found it useful to schedule a synchronous meeting after employees have had the chance to review the videos. This time is for Q&A based up on the asynchronous presentations.
What they Learned
Loom realized that by switching to asynchronous all-hands meetings, four key benefits were enjoyed:
- Team members could consume the updates on-demand, which enabled better consumption and the opportunity to pause, skip around, and return to content they found particularly important or interesting.
- Presenters received better feedback thanks to the comments and emoji reactions.
- The in-person (synchronous) Q&A session that followed had better impact and engagement.
- The videos created an archive where future employees could go back and view on-demand.
As a leading asynchronous meeting platform, we couldn’t be happier about a company like Loom leveraging asynchronous communication and asynchronous meetings for its own employees. It’s our goal to offer companies just like Loom a complete tool for asynchronous meetings.
Is your team ready to make the switch to asynchronous meetings? Read our asynchronous meeting needs assessment post to see how you and your team could benefit by meeting asynchronously.
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