The vast majority of scholars and practitioners believe that working synchronously is essential for creativity. With the rise of remote work and flexible work schedules, however, team members can often collaborate on the same project without being in the same time zone — much less the same office. When team members contribute to a joint outcome but work completely separately — not even coordinating over Zoom or phone — we call their work asynchronous. Asynchronous teamwork is rapidly growing, and it has tremendous consequences for creativity in the future of work.
It’s true that working synchronously can encourage individuals to feed off of each other’s insights and energy, leading to more and better ideas as well as the opportunity to build on each other’s feedback. Furthermore, synchronicity enables workers to stay on the same page as they contribute to a given project, decreasing coordination costs that may already be high when working on creative projects. Finally, in the course of working together synchronously, team members may interact with a wider range of individuals, gaining new insights and information that might spur new ideas in synchronous work environments.
However, this assumption about creativity flourishing in synchronous environments ignores variation in the team members’ social status. Studies show that women and people from marginalized communities are given fewer opportunities to speak and are criticized more harshly when they do in a range of synchronous work settings. Consequently, synchronous teams may inhibit women and marginalized people’s expression of new or risky ideas, ultimately making teams less equal and their output less creative. To investigate this further, Aayan Das and I looked specifically at the effect of asynchronous versus synchronous teamwork on the performance of men and women in a creative task.
The study
We chose to study Baul folk musicians in India, taking advantage of the fact that studio recordings of music can be performed both synchronously through live recordings and asynchronously with the help of a click track. Baul music is an oral tradition preaching mysticism through song, whose lack of notation means that each song has many versions and interpretations. Studio recordings by Baul ensembles were also an ideal case to study because generally each member of the team has a distinct role, thus they can record synchronously or asynchronously without changing their role. Further, Baul singers are either men or women, but the instrumentalists are primarily men, so it is easy and realistic to compare the experiences of men and women singers performing alone or alongside the men instrumentalists.
We followed a full-cycle approach, so we developed my theory and hypotheses through qualitative observations and interviews, then tested them with a field experiment. Initial interviews revealed that women singers performing synchronously with men felt constantly “corrected by [their] seniors” and sensed that their fellow musicians “did not stand by [them].” They did not report being offered the “encouragement” and “positive reinforcement” that their men counterparts described receiving from their colleagues. However, new technologies like the click track enabled Baul singers to start recording asynchronously, making women feel more comfortable and free to express themselves creatively. One woman said she preferred recording asynchronously because “no man musician is trying to assert their dominance over me while I am singing…I have complete creative freedom.”
Based on these observations, we hypothesized that women singers recording asynchronously would perform better than those performing synchronously, and that this performance improvement would be driven by increased creativity.
The findings
We tested these hypotheses by bringing 49 women and 50 men singers into recording studios and having them record both asynchronously and synchronously, randomly assigning the order in which they completed the recordings. We found that women’s performances were rated 17% higher when they recorded asynchronously, and that this effect was driven by the degree of creativity in their singing, based on ratings by experts in Baul folk music. (The experts assigned overall ratings to every track as well as timestamped all creative choices made by the singer.)
This creative freedom when singing alone was further captured in interviews with the experimental subjects. After recording asynchronously, one woman said, “I was completely free. I could sing as I wished. I missed some notes at a place, but then I caught on with it later on. I had complete independence and it felt like I was flying like a bird.” Men’s performances were not significantly different in the two conditions, and thus asynchronicity seems to help women without hurting men.
Although surprising to many, our findings are consistent with other research on creativity. For example, some research emphasizes the importance of “safe communication climates” (similar to psychological safety) in order for creativity to thrive. Similarly, some research has shown creative benefits of asynchronicity for brainstorming: the largest quantity and best quality of ideas are generated when people can work separately first, then bring their ideas together.
This previous research has overlooked the value of asynchronicity for low-status members of creative teams. Our expectation is that women and marginalized people often do not feel that their team’s communication climates are safe, and thus they cannot take creative liberties without fear of being unduly criticized or interrupted. Consequently, they are likely to express themselves better creatively when they work asynchronously.
While these findings are relevant to creative fields ranging from film crews to marketing teams, creativity is not synonymous with innovation or product development. Improving business processes or complex product development requires deep knowledge of an organization and interaction with other teams and team members; in such contexts, synchronicity might still be valuable.
However, asynchronous restructuring of at least some tasks is an effective and largely feasible solution to inequality in creative teams at many organizations. In facilitating women and marginalized people’s freedom of creative expression, asynchronous work may not only improve short-term performance, but have a powerful impact on the root causes of workplace inequality. By enabling greater creative freedom, asynchronicity may increase women’s motivation to continue working rather than exiting their field or the workforce altogether. Furthermore, improving women’s performance may help to extinguish the stereotypes that nourish gender bias. By amplifying underrepresented voices in creative spaces, asynchronicity can provide a way forward to a more equitable future of work.