I have had multiple occasions where our India team was stuck for weeks on something despite sending daily messages back and forth. Then I called them late a night my time and could resolve the issue in a few minutes. It's funny that the same management that thinks collaboration needs everybody to sit in the same open office has no problem having workers in a timezone 12 hours off where you can never talk directly.

I think that example may be more a matter of being separated by a common language (and/or poor written communication skills) than a time zone difference.

Not at all. You can’t document everything precisely when you do new and complex stuff. Sometimes it’s way more efficient to talk to people directly.

It's interesting that you jumped from "communicating well in writing" (and, as I implied, idiomatically, or at least using shared idioms), to "documenting precisely".

When you say "talk to people directly", do you just mean by voice (so you have the extra channels of verbal stress, pauses, and intonation), or do you mean by video or in person (where you get to add gestures too)?

Yeah, "ask a question via email, wait for a response" while using a nominally async channel isn't really adopting async processes (neither is your manager emailing you at 7pm your time and expecting a reply in less than 14h). At the minimum, that email should be going to an internal mailing list where some other knowledgeable employee can answer, and in any situation where that one Q is actually blocking and there is no other work that can be done in the interim, there ought to be a root cause analysis done, at least informally, to prevent that from happening in the future (probably resulting in some docs being updated or expanded).

Other async tools and channels: bug and issue trackers, kanban boards, wikis, forums, pull/merge requests, version control commit messages, annotation/commenting systems like hypothes.is, even NNTP.