Episode Transcript

Please note this transcript was generated by AI and contains errors including missing and misspelled words.

Meryl: Hey Jack. Welcome to the podcast.

Jack: Appreciate it. Yeah, it's

Meryl: So today we're talking about all things async communication, which is one of my favorite topics. Why don't we start by defining it. So I think some of the audience is probably already familiar with asynchronous communication or, async but others may not be. So if you were to try and describe it to someone that wasn't familiar with the term, what would you say?

Jack: I mean, I think the most high level way of describing it is live. It's like it's happening in the moment. Like we are right now. We're going back and forth in that moment. But that can still be translated to a messaging app where you might not be face to face with someone, but you are chatting like in that moment.

I'm expecting you to respond in the next five to 10 seconds and I'll respond back to you. It's kinda like we're on the same page at the same time. Whereas Async, that it's offline in our own time. I'll get back to you when I have a moment and then you might get back to me a day later or something like that.

 So generally Async is leveraging tech , quite a fair bit.

Meryl: Yeah, I like that summary. So if it's, if you're syncing, then you're online together, doesn't have to be a call or in person. It could be via messaging. And then asynchronous is that you're not online at the same time and you're not expecting an instant reply. And it could potentially be 10 minutes, or it could be.

The next day, hopefully not the next week that would slow things down, but it's each person's responding in their own time. So I, I'm a huge fan of that. That's moving more of my communication to acing is one of the reasons I credit being able to move to a four day work week a couple of years ago and and gradually reducing my work hours in bes.

So I'm massive fan of it, but I know there's some disadvantages as well. We'll get into in the podcast, but I'd like to hear from your perspective, do you have some examples in your day-to-day work now of things that you do asynchronously?

Jack: Yeah, all the time. Johan and I, although we're both based in Adelaide, we don't have an office. We're never in each other's faces. And in fact, at the start of this year, we decided to get rid of our weekly recurring meetings and just see how that would go. And it's actually worked out pretty well.

I think the first few weeks we were we were struggling to work it out and be like what's a high priority and when do I get back to you on this? But we've figured out a little bit of. Maybe an emoji system that we use. Red Circle is high priority. Please get back to me as soon as you can.

Yellow Circle is medium and green is kinda no rush on this kind of thing. But, just between us internally, we use Slack for pretty much everything. When someone's updated something, they'll post an update in Slack and you. Let them know what the priority is for a response.

And it's never immediate or almost never immediate. It's very rare that something has to happen in the moment. You realize that over time. But then with the accounting community that you are part of and the work that we do with the startups, there is a lot of one to many situations there where we have a program that we're running, there may be 10, 15 accountants on. Obviously aligning a synchronous conversation with 15 accountants who are extremely busy and potentially across different time zones all over the world is probably impossible. So we leverage Async to put posts out there on Slack and leave them there for people to get back to over the course of a few days.

And then I'll see who's responded and then maybe I can just do a quick follow up of individuals who haven't after, after those couple of days. Yeah, common examples, but it's basically going on everywhere, async. For sure.

Meryl: Yeah, I think the, the time zone thing resonates with me. That was actually why we started doing more Loom videos, as well as Slack communication because we've got team members in different time zones, and when you're trying to connect someone in Australia or, or the Philippines with America and the uk, it's always a bad time for somebody.

Jack: how quickly did you realize that wasn't gonna, that wasn't gonna work synchronously?

Meryl: Well, we did keep trying because originally I'd read the book Traction with the Entrepreneur's Operating System and that's quite meeting heavy, so there needs to be a level 10 meeting with all of the key management team, which takes about an hour and a half once a week, and then there's other meeting cadences.

And so we were trying to implement that and stick with that. And so we thought it was important to have that level 10 meeting, which stays about an hour and a half was not great when, when someone's super sleepy, just wants to get to bed. So eventually we adapted it and then some of the reporting was just done asynchronously, and then we just split it up into smaller groups with time zones and try to do less meetings.

But that definitely was a pain point in in the beginning. And one of the reasons we started to record more Loom videos and put more in Slack. And then over time that just evolved and we've continued.

Jack: So do you have more of a definition now as to. What a meeting should be in an asynchronous world, like a meeting should be when X has to happen, and if X doesn't have to happen, we don't need a meeting. Have you figured out what that definition is?

Meryl: Yeah, so I have my own opinion about that, and I think it, it's still a bit dependent on the different teams within my business as to how they do it. But my thoughts are, if it's a status update, then that should just be a video or a message in Slack. And that's something my business partner Wayne and I do, each week we just do an async update of all the things that we've been working on where we might need input from each other.

And that's not a meeting, but then we do have a call. Every couple of weeks, which is more of just a chat relationship building, how are you going, what's, what's up with the family? That kind of thing, which is nice. And so that relationship side, I think, is better on calls. And so if that's the purpose, is it tin culture, is it relationship building?

Then we do do that on calls or occasionally face-to-face if we can. But if it's a status update , then I think that's far better. Or if you are giving feedback, I prefer to give feedback even if it's a little bit sensitive still with a video so that they can see your tone and that it doesn't feel overly critical.

And then someone has the time to think about that and doesn't have to respond immediately. So they're probably a couple of examples. I'll give a couple of other quick examples. When someone new joins, we would would post that in Slack rather than doing a company team meeting. Kickoff calls with clients, we would do that as a call because it's partly relationship building, partly kind of getting to know each other and then we'll try and convert things over to async.

Jack: Yeah, I think you kind of alluded to one of the main challenges of Async is the. Like you mentioned with feedback, you want people to be able to see body language and the tone of voice that comes into play a lot more. And it's hard to communicate some of that stuff when you're doing async and you can take it the wrong way cuz if you don't communicate everything on a message, it leaves it up to somebody else to fill the gaps and they'll figure out what the tone is themselves.

Okay? It was a full stop. There's no smiley face at the end of that. They're pissed.

Meryl: And that's, I actually do a lot more video. I do quick messages in Slack, but I do a lot more videos for that reason, just so someone can see my face and there's a lot more tone and context. Still try to keep it to five minutes. Sometimes that's not possible. Actually that's another thing that I love is when.

You could have a meeting that takes half an hour cuz you kind of waffle on and people haven't collected their thoughts. But when someone sits down to record a video, usually they've collected their thoughts. They might have written out the key points. They try and do it in five minutes, maybe it takes 10.

You watch it at two times speed, and that's just so much more efficient. If there's a whole lot, if you multiply that by 10 or 20 people or across multiple meetings a week, then you're saving a lot of time through that process.

Jack: So this is where I think for me, it starts to get quite difficult and I wonder if there's other people in the accounting profession, specifically I'm sure every profession but the way that you are always busy in accounting, you're always doing something. And so to take the time to collect your thoughts is actually I don't have the time.

I I need to just I'm just. Put it out there in a loom or in a message or, and so I think that kind of is like a failure of good, what you are saying is good async, which is okay, I'm gonna collect my thoughts and then I'm gonna come back to you with a well thought through loom rather than I'm gonna use this loom to figure out what I'm thinking.

And then you are gonna watch that and be like, why did I watch the five minutes of you figuring out your own thought process? Just for the, like the little bits in, I have to now fish through that to figure out what you needed from me.

Meryl: That's a fair point. And, and so I generally have a one-take rule with looms so you don't waste time trying to perfect it. But sometimes that happens to me, where as I'm doing it, I clarify my thoughts and then, and then I'll redo it, say, okay, these were the three key points that I kind of eventually got to as I was recording the video.

I need to re rerecord that. And often I'll do a screen check. Cause I think some people they prefer to learn their audio, so they take in information when they're listen. Other people prefer to read, so I prefer to read information, but I prefer to speak it if I'm giving it to someone else. So I usually, if I do a Luma screen share so that someone could read it if they wanted to, if that's their preferred style.

But I think what you are talking about there in the accounting firm, it reminds me of a couple of experiences. I also started out in audit. I was a bdo O and I remember. A couple of different situations we can talk about. One was that in busy season, the managers used to come in in the morning to get their work done.

So some managers would be there at 6:00 AM and then they'd get to get their real work done, and then after 5:00 PM they'd get their work done because the rest of the day, as soon as their teams came in, they were constantly interrupted. And they were unblocking their teams, which maybe that is the role of a manager, but to me that's not really work-life balance if the entire day you are interrupted because you're trying to unblock your team so they can continue and then you've still got all of this extra work to do.

that was probably when I thought that , this is not what I wanna, this is not where I wanna be, is a manager or a director in audit. What do you think about that and how, I didn't know whether. Async would help with that cuz that's an office environment.

Jack: I think it absolutely helps on one side of the coin and doesn't on the other because a manager who can and work from home's the same. I think this, I think these conversations go somewhat hand in hand and the move to work from home has led to more people with an uptake of async comms and that's a whole nother thing, but, I do feel as a manager in that environment you'd come in and you've got no other choice.

Because you can't not help the team, when they're there and you can't not answer their questions. Otherwise, that's not really gonna be overly effective for anybody. So I think being able to move to an async situation there is great for the manager cuz they can then have that focus time where, Maybe they block out their calendar to focus on a few big up ticket items, and then they can come back and resolve the queries in a bunch together rather than, hitting me ad hoc.

But also, if it is on a messaging tool or something like whether it's Slack or Teams the rest of the team might be able to see that. I was never there in an environment where that was happening, and so I feel like I was asking the same questions multiple times. I'm sure there were other accountants at my level asking similar questions, whereas if it was.

Put somewhere summarized well became a bit of a knowledge res resource or knowledge bank other people could pull from. Then you saved the managers a lot of effort. But on the other side to that, and something we've tossed around a little bit before being here was the whole as a graduate you do learn so much faster when you're in, when you're exposed to.

in person. You can immediately get feedback. You're overhearing what other people are saying and you do. I feel like you would lose that. I don't really know how grads did it during Covid.

Meryl: Absolutely. And so there's the manager perspective of them getting their work done, but their role is also to train their team and help their team be effective and not have roadblocks. And then as you said, this graduate and early stage in your accounting career. I, can remember as well, I, learned so much listening to a partner.

Negotiate scope, creep and fees just on the phone and hearing the way that they were handling that or seeing a manager push back when a team member said they couldn't get something done on time. And seeing how they handled that and where they pushed back where they didn't. And also how they were different with different team members.

And that's the kind of thing you can't pick up from Slack and probably even a Loom video. It was all the nuances , of how they were communi. And also just being able to quickly ask questions. Cuz as a grad, I mean, I didn't know anything that first year I had the accounting degree, but really had no idea what I was doing.

And so you'd have questions every hour or two. And I do remember trying to batch them so I wasn't too annoying. But if you had to wait three hours for someone to get back to you, you had a pretty unproductive day.

Jack: Oh, absolutely. Extremely unproductive. And I think as to your point before with, the stuff that you're seeing in that environment that you just you're looking around and you're seeing what's going on and you're hearing how somebody's handling a certain situation.

As much as in an async world, we'd love to have that, the partner isn't gonna go and record a loom for you because they're having a conversation with. , that's not something that, that you need to share, but inevitably by being in person, you were getting that. It's just a nice offshoot of being there and in person.

Look, I, that's a challenge that I don't think I have a good answer for.

Meryl: I've been thinking about it because I think this is actually going to impact the accounting profession. I, I know at my firm, we hire only senior staff because it's quite difficult to train junior staff. We don't hire any graduates. We, it's normally five years experience plus just cuz it's so much harder to train remotely.

And then with the trend, Of offshoring too. A lot of that junior level work is going overseas, so that is something I think about of how's that gonna impact the industry in 10 years time when there's not been that same number of accountants that have had that solid hands-on training. So, yeah, don't have the solution either.

I am thinking about it and I also think that, yeah, as a graduate I would want in person, but as a manager I wouldn't because I can have better work-life balance if I'm out of the office. So it seems like there's a, a bit of a trade off. The managers often have young families, they've got other commitments.

How do you entice them back to the office?

Jack: Yeah. Yeah. That's extremely difficult. And I guess at a very high level if more work is being done, Offshore. There's less opportunity to learn as a graduate, in person at an accounting firm. Then potentially, it becomes less attractive a job to take up like, I don't know then where, you know, less of the good firms are taking on junior accountants like yours.

So maybe there's less opportunities, whereas before, that was a good source of lower cost, lower outcome work. Are they going to be out there for longer periods of time doing more face-to-face hospitality roles and things like that where those skills are actually extremely valuable actually a lot of that data processing kind of role is no longer necessary, more tech, more ai, more ssh.

 What we don't have enough of in accounting is people who can handle relationships and deal with conflict and provide feedback and those first few years as an accounting firm, you got a little bit of that through the overhearing of conversations. But potentially that learning can come through other means.

But yeah, it's a big challenge for the

Meryl: Yeah. Something else we've been talking about is speed of execution. that's one of our philosophies at been, so we have our core values, but then we also have almost like philosophies about how we operate. And one of those is that speed of execution is a competitive advantage.

 So we're always thinking about without dropping quality, how can we move faster? And for me it's more. Reducing the scope of things, so figuring out what is absolutely essential. And so those that know the be story, we launched in seven days, we built a website and got our first customer in seven days as a bookkeeping business, even though we'd never done bookkeeping per se before.

So was startup methodology, and then we try and apply that in business with everything we do. What, what's the minimum viable product? How can we get something out there and then test it and get feedback. But something you and I have been discussing is how does asynchronous communication impact speed? So interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Jack: Yeah, and I think this once again goes hand in hand with, I think there's personality types and. Way people like to work. So for me I'm probably of the little more like traditional. I don't wanna, I don't know if that's the right word. You know, I like to get things done in the moment and so I really enjoy having people, being able to get back to me quickly so that I can keep things moving because my brain is I need to tick things off.

I need to get stuff done. I'm thinking about it right now. . And so maybe I just need someone's quick yes or no, like green light, red light. Are you okay with if I do this so that I can get on with it? But that person might be going for a run and not available. And you get stuck in this new world of people who are working when they want.

Now that doesn't leave my brain. So it's still taking up capacity in my head. But now I, don't wanna be complet. inefficient for the next hour or two whilst that person gets back to me. So I need to move on to the next thing without forgetting that I need to do that because it's a five minute task.

 I do find when I think logically about this problem, that actually that's not fair on other people.

I think Async is much better for people's wellness, mental health. There's less pressure in the moment. So I don't think I'm saying it's a downfall of Aing. I think it's a downfall of me personally that I need to learn how to be better at it.

I just think there's probably other people like me who would struggle with it.

Meryl: No, it's interesting that you say that and one of the things that jumped out at me there was the context switching, and I think Async does force more context switching because you're working on something and then when you hit a roadblock or you need to get an opinion from someone else, you can't get it immediately, and so you'll have to park that and leave that task in some way that it's easy to get back to.

While you pick up something else? Something that I've been experimenting with to help with that is thinking about decision gates of if I make this decision, can we reverse it? And so try to have that culture so people can move forward and make decisions and say, this is the decision I made.

If it's irreversible or there's a big downside, then. Obviously you can't move forward without making that decision. But because we're in different time zones, things can get really slow if there's backwards and forward. So trying to set up that environment where it's easy for someone to make a decision, we can reverse it if needed and then continue on and just say why you made it.

 Then as a leader, I had to make a trade off between, with the Be Ninjas brand, are we gonna do everything exactly the same way in the different countries where there's different leaders , who are running those businesses? How much autonomy am I gonna give them to make decisions around what their tech stack is, what their pricing is?

And so I made a decision to give them more autonomy so they, they don't have to check as

Jack: Yeah. Great.

Meryl: But the downside of that is we wanna have a really consistent customer experience for the brand. So whether it's someone's working with us in America or the UK or Australia, and that's something we've had to sacrifice a little bit.

 Still providing a great experience, but it might be a little bit different in the regions. And that was , a trade off that, we decided to make.

Jack: Yeah, I think that's a very interesting space, the autonomy aspect of it and responsibilities and making that very clear as to what you can do and execute alone and what you do need to go back to the team with, because in an old world it was a lot easier. To make sure everybody checked everything with everybody before something got done because okay, we've got a meeting every week.

We've got a couple of meetings every week where everyone's there. So just bring those things to those meetings and we'll just make sure everyone's on the same page and we'll tick them off and then you can go and do them. And so I feel that if your job is very, Task intensive. Like I've got a lot of things to do, lower quality things, but a lot of things to do.

But I still don't have autonomy to make a lot of decisions. It becomes really hard to do that in an async world where you're waiting on somebody every time you try and do something, you're constantly stuck. And I can't just pop across your desk and like, look, hey, can I, yeah. Okay, cool.

I'm good to send that. Whereas, when you are someone at a high level in a business and you. You're working on big strategic decisions. You're working on big projects. Async are fantastic cuz you can just say, I'm offline and I can block three hours in my calendar and just sit and think and solve those problems, which I ne you never would've been able to do in an office.

You never would've been able to get that time. . So if you are thinking really like some of that more deep work focus work kind of stuff, probably developers are in this space as well where they need to sit there and solve problems quietly fantastic. And then if you're on the lower end where you can't make decisions and you've got a lot of little things to do, you can get really hamstrung.

So agreeing that autonomy and maybe being a bit more flexible with it, as you said, there's a cost, but maybe it suits the environment better.

Meryl: I think that might play into personality type a little too I know my business partner Wayne, he's a thinking on the, he's really fast on his feet, so he is great in meetings, ideas just come to him. So he would prefer us to have a chat. the ideas will just calm and flow and that's him, in his element.

But if we're having a strategic conversation, I wanna know in advance what are we talking about? What's the background, what's the context? And then I'll do my best thinking when I'm off going for a walk or I'm surfing or I'm driving, I can kind of process it and think it through. And I don't need days.

I'm still about, let's make decisions fast, particularly if there's no downside. But I like to have that overnight or that couple of. Away from my desk to think things through. I'm aware as well that when you're communicating it's not just about what you like, it's understanding well how, how can you best communicate with other people and what are their preferences.

So that's something I'm aware of with Wayne, that sometimes, even though I think brainstorming is actually better done, ay as well, that for him it's better in a room, us together. He'd, he'd like it if we're in a room with a whiteboard, which we can't, we're in different countries.

Jack: Yeah, Johan and I have the exact same, but. Problem. So I'm the other way around. And Johann loves to go for a walk or sleep on a decision. And I just wanna get this done

 So I think it's good in business. And it sounds like it's a good relationship that you guys have and possibly why Yohan and I work well together is we are different.

And there's certain problems that need someone to say, Hey, we should sleep on this. This is something. getting a hundred percent right, or 95%. And so as much as Johann understands, I'd like to get things done sometimes, I've figured out situations where I send something to him and I want his feedback.

He doesn't prioritize it for a few days. And I'm like I just don't think it's that big of a deal. I'm just gonna go and do it. But I think I gave him the opportunity. He's decided it's not a big enough priority to solve in this moment. And I've, and I'll take that and that's, But I think it works well.

We bounce off each other and we disagree, but it's great.

Meryl: I do things like that. Probably not so much in my role now, but I remember in, in the early days of beers, doing things like that, here's the information I'm gonna be making a decision or an action on this date in three days or whatever. If you've got any feedback, let me know.

Otherwise, I'm moving forward and , doing this then it's kind of, they had the choice and all the information, so

Jack: I know it's a little bit, it's probably a little bit cheeky, but yeah,

Meryl: Well, you gotta keep moving forward. It's

Jack: yeah.

Meryl: I think business is all about momentum and making those, those little steps. So I think as accountants, we're often trained to get those details right, and that was something I had to go from my accounting mindset to then try and use more of a startup mindset. And there was a couple of things I felt I had to unlearn, but one was about understanding what has to be correct. So accounts going out, they need to be right. There can't be errors, but as an auditor yourself, there's materiality. So that's still something that's worth considering. So a $15 missing receipt maybe.

It's okay to move on. Internal management accounts. Let's get this done. What's the purpose of this information , is for someone to make a decision, not for ato. , then let's get them that information fast.

Jack: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm not in accountant anymore, don't do that anymore, but I think I did struggle with the. The level of detail some people go to in that role. And I just, I think it is a bit of a challenge you've gotta deal with, maybe, personally you like to say, look, is this actually helping the business owner?

Is this actually adding value or is this just ticking a box? And so I'm much more let's focus on what's gonna add value to this business owner in this business. , but you need someone to make sure that the checks and balances are done so that responsibilities are met and they're not gonna get audited and be in trouble for it.

So there, there is a, there's a balance.

Meryl: I was having a conversation with an accounting firm owner earlier this week, and we were talking about that ideal personality trait or what's the profile of your ideal director? So someone that's their role is to bring in sales, so they need to be great at communication and business development,

But then they're also managing a team, so work.

It's, it's probably more manager than than director. So someone that's trying to get to that level. So they're managing their team. They also need to be technical. They, you want them to be good at business development and sales. You're saying that's kind of, it's a unicorn cuz they're almost different personality types.

The kind of person that's great at getting out and about and networking often isn't the same person that loves super attention to detail and project manage. and all the systems involved in that. I mean, I'm not saying that there's not those people, but they're pretty expensive because it's a unique set of talents to have all of those skills.

And so we were talking about, well, can you, in other businesses, you just pair people like that and you might have the strategy thinker. Who's great at that and the relationships and hard conversations. And then you might pair them with someone that's great at project management and detail and, and managing the team and holding people accountable.

And that's something we think about at bes of, not necess, not necessarily having the traditional roles, but how do you pair those personality traits so that you've got not necessarily everything in one person.

Jack: I think it's absolutely spot on. There's a lot of that in software businesses. There's two avenues they often give to developers when they become a little bit more senior. It's do you wanna be an individual contributor and become a technical expert and solve massive problems and keep writing code?

or do you wanna be a team lead and start managing other developers and learning those skills. And so it's almost like a fork in the road decision that, that they get to make. And I know plenty who would prefer to go down the individual contributor path. I think there's, you limit your potential earning capacity because you can only produce so much by yourself.

Whereas when you can make a team more efficient, then you are able to produce more value. And so I think that whole concept of having somebody who's technically minded and somebody who's able to maybe be more people focused working together in an accounting firm seems like an inevitable way of moving to me.

And we, within the early adopters hub, we had a couple of startups explore the advisory space. And all of the challenges that firms had delivering advisory was that. Didn't want to do it because it's going into a meeting with uncertainty and client challenges and trying to solve them and talk to them and help them when they're not feeling so good about things.

You're a coach, you're, you're not a technical accountant. You need, didn't prepare you for that. They it is a different skillset and I think a massive challenge for accounting firms and some are even saying actually those people are gonna hire as advisors, are gonna be ex-business owners.

They're not gonna be accountants, they're not gonna be technical accountants. That kind of thing is happening.

Meryl: Yeah. Slight, slight tangent, but related to that same thing. I've been chatting with lots of accountants the last few weeks and talking about how hard it is to scale advisory, cuz you can scale management, accounting, outsource finance, it's process based. It's very repetitive. Even if it's complex, you can really build strong teams around that.

But advisory in what I'm seeing and the, people that I talk to in the industry, it's really. Hard to do unless you're an accountant. If you're the owner of the firm or you're at that kind of level where you're a business owner, you're more than an accountant. You understand how business works.

And I think you've got a completely different perspective when you're doing advisory compared to if you've come up through the ranks as an accountant, but you've never owned a business. So I have a similar opinion. We've had it very hard to scale advisory outside of the directors who own part of the business.

 So we are kind of scaling that back cuz it's not scalable. It's great margins, valuable work, but at the moment we haven't really found a great way to scale it.

Jack: whenever it comes down to personal experiences and giving actual advice, it's not something everyone's gonna be able to do. But I think there's an aspect of advi, I know we're getting into a tangent here, but there's an aspect of advisory that is coaching and accountability and that is something

that can be delivered by other people at a relatively good scale if there's the platforms and tools to support that, because it becomes less about the accountant having all the answers and more about them helping to facilitate the business owner to figure it out using frameworks and tools.

Meryl: I'd agree with that. Cause I would say mentoring is when someone's done it before, and coaching is where you're asking questions to help someone get to the answer themselves. So I suppose it depends how you frame the advisory, particularly if it's going through the accounts and accountability quarterly goals and stuff like that.

And the expectations aren't that you're talking with an equal business owner, then potentially

Jack: Yeah. And you're not gonna get the answer a lot of people wanna go into a meeting and be like, you're gonna tell me what I should do? And that's extremely expensive,

 To get that service because there's risk and there's all this other stuff associated with, going to somebody and them saying, I think you should do this, versus, okay, let's.

Okay, let's unpick this. Why is this a problem? Why does this matter? All of that kind of stuff. So it's interesting and I think there's still a lot of work to go in that whole realm.

Meryl: Yeah. Well, back on the Async topic. I know you've listened to something recently all about emojis in communication, and I'd love to hear more about that and also how it applies to accounting firms.

Jack: Yeah, we kind of alluded a little bit to this before in that, ascent communication doesn't give you, if you don't use emojis and you're just writing texts to somebody, it doesn't tell the whole story. There's no tone of voice, there's no body language. I really am left to figure out myself

how you're expressing this to me, the same sentence can be read five different ways, 10 different ways. One angry, one sad, one happy, one excited. The same words. I think first and foremost it's important to understand that if we are going to be using more ASIN communication, that we have to appreciate that the person on the other end may not read it the same way that I meant it, and that can lead to some really, Awful thoughts for people, and I've been through this, I've been on the other side of this where I had a boss who'd just write super short messages like, Hey, and then nothing else, and then the next message and full stops and no, and like just short language that just felt like they were pissed, but then you see them face to face and it's all.

And it was just like this mental challenge, this battle that I would go through every week and I go home, talk to my wife, I'm like, oh, my goodness's straining. I think, I dunno if I'm doing a good job. And then I'd go, we catch up on a Friday and it'd be all good. And it was just a bizarre scenario.

And so without those catchups, every now and again, I would've been completely sure of myself that this person. Didn't like me or felt like I wasn't performing, but in reality, I'd have the performance reviews and all that and it was all good. So I just had to train myself to be like, no, they don't mean it.

They don't mean it, they don't

mean it. But I think with this, it does go both ways. It's not all about the more junior person accepting whatever the manager or the boss is saying and be like, I gotta figure out what they.

Meryl: Mm-hmm.

Jack: it's on you as well as a manager and a director or a partner to make sure you're communicating things properly and emojis are the ticket to like doing that easily.

And what I mean by that is no, you don't have to do everything face-to-face. You don't even have to do everything over a loom. A loom is a great way of doing it. It's more expressive than an emoji, but just a simple at the end of your sentence to make sure it's extremely clear that you're not annoyed at somebody.

Add the right smiley face. But then you get into, this whole challenge of baby boomers, gen Z, millennials, they all have different ideas of what means something. There's so many people that completely misunderstand. And a good example of this not emoji based is, it was classic when I was in high school, you'd write lull all the time, laugh out loud, and then you find out that your mom has sent lull to someone.

Their family member died and they thought it meant lots of love. And so it's just if you don't get it, there's also a whole thing, and this was in this podcast I was listening to, it's if you just send someone a blank smiley face, it's actually sarcastic. And I don't mean it, I don't mean I'm happy with this.

, so if you don't get those little nuances with your emojis that's just something you need to be aware of as well, is that there's a challenge that way. But, you know, businesses can benefit from them. I think you can add a lot to your ascent communication by getting to know them.

And you can even make them functional as well. Like I know with Slack you can set up your three default emojis and for Johan and I, we've set them up as a tick to basically say this has been done. We've got eyes so that we know, like I've read this, I've seen this, so you know that I've seen it.

And then I think there's like a hands fantastic. That's awesome. Congrats kind of thing. So we have those three as default and they're functional emojis, like they help us get stuff done and they help us understand when stuff has been done. But then you've got cultural stuff as well.

Like I know, a lot of people add their own customer emojis and my wife's work her and her team have all uploaded pictures of their cars as emojis. So they have this little inside joke around you react with your car and maybe you throw someone's car on a post for some reason cuz it's a bad car or a fast car or whatever it is.

And so you create a little bit of a fun culture. Around your own little internal signals and what's specific to your business and that goes for gifts and all that kind of stuff as well. So yeah, I think it's a fun little addition to the conversation.

Meryl: Agreed. Well, last question before we wrap up, Jack, if there was an accounting firm owner who had listened to this or they'd talked with someone else and they'd heard about ASIN communication, but they're not doing it at the moment, what advice would you have to help someone get started?

Jack: I think, to get started, it is a funny one. I don't really know what was the first thing I did that was async? You're probably doing it if you're emailing people internally already. If you're still doing that. My first recommendation would be to please stop sending internal emails, go to a teams or a slack.

It's a lot more effective.

Meryl: Let me jump in quickly, go to a, go to a Teams or a Slack, but don't expect instant communication. So fine to move to that, but don't expect they're gonna have it on all the time and reply immediately

Back to you, Jack.

Jack: That's totally a fair point. And yeah, first, just try something like if you have any status meetings, like you said. Give it a go to try and say we don't need our status updates happening in person. So if you can get rid of a half an hour meeting that involves five people and just say, look, Monday morning, can you please all post, my old work, we did the daily frog thing.

So what are you doing today? What did you do yesterday? Did you get it done? Are you blocked on anything? That's a super quick post that takes five minutes for everyone to do. Everyone gets a bit of an. Um, And it doesn't matter what time you had your coffee because you can do it before your coffee, after your coffee.

You might be someone who goes for a run in the morning, you do it after that, but at least everyone's got visual on that. You didn't have to be in the same place at the same time for 15 minutes. So that can be a nice place to start.

Meryl: That's a good one. I like the concept of daily huddles, but I hate having to be online at a set time, . So we, we do, we do something similar, not the whole company wide, but in smaller teams. And I'd have a similar perspective that it's just taking a step in the right direction. So whether it's trying to do.

So something we did for example with our marketing meeting, it's still in the calendar every week because sometimes there's creative things we need to talk about, but there's an agenda that goes out and we try and cover everything in Slack or videos first, and then the time's still there if we need it, if we have to get on to discuss something.

But often we can cancel it and say, okay, we've covered everything, but it's a, a standing meeting. So that's kind of a low risk way to try it, that the meeting's still there if you need it. See if you can get through without it. And then my other point would be to have a go at loom and have a challenge where everyone in your team records one internal video for the week and just gets comfortable.

 I recommend on camera because that's part of the point of loom, is so people can see your face just to, cuz some team members aren't comfortable with that. So just try and do it in a fun way, low pressure that everyone starts to get familiar with a tool like that.

Jack: Yeah. In fact, I'd be plus one to say if you're not using that, that's a, like loom is probably the place to start. That is an easy way to get going with a few things. And so many people, a few years ago when everyone was starting to get on it, We're like, oh my goodness, this is awesome.

So I think it's a good, easy win towards the async movement. So

Meryl: yeah, Well, Jack, thanks so much for coming on. It's been an awesome chat. If anyone wanted to get in touch with you what's the best way that they could connect with you?

Jack: I mean, I'm generally on LinkedIn and things like that. You can find me. If you're an accountant and you're an early adopter of tech and you wanna be involved potentially in, in the hub, then you can go to our website, which is just early adopters hub.com. Likewise, if you're a startup and you wanna talk to accountants, you can go there. Great. Thanks so

Meryl: much.

Jack: No worries. Cheers, Meryl.