How to Make Team Communication Effective When Working Remotely?
So, your team has fully moved to remote work. You are probably already used to working in your pajamas, having endless snacks and communicating with your colleagues via Slack or Zoom. And suddenly you find out that your work has become less effective. It’s all about the discipline, you think at first. And your team thinks the same. And your manager. And to get your work back under control you start inventing new means of communication, having more meetings and then a few more. When hearing others’ experience with home office, the most common complaint (apart from having children at home, of course) is spending too much time on meetings. What can we do not to feel drowning in them?
In this blog post, we offer some possibilities to consider that might make your communication less disruptive and help you focus on your work instead of distracting from it.
Strategy 1. Document more
It sounds counter-intuitive — no one likes spending time on documenting each step or filling in lists of specifications and instructions. However unpleasant the process may be, it will boost the company’s effectiveness: on-site, people come up to each other’s desks to ask questions or just listen to conversations. Though fast and informal, this method can lead to rumors-like communication where the truth is eventually lost. With proper documentation, the team has a single reliable source of truth for all questions.
Make documentation everyone’s responsibility
Docs as Code is the approach that is gaining momentum now. It treats documents as a part of your code, ensuring version control, cooperation with other team members — and the importance of writing documentation for everyone. Even outside IT, this approach ensures that over time, teams that own their documents grow more responsible and respectful to one another’s time, move fast by adding changes to already existing docs, and are able to communicate the knowledge effectively across teams and to newcomers.
Having documentation on the project somewhere in Gitlab is good, but when you don’t have a handbook that is reliably actionable, it can feel burdensome to seek answers in a repository. Handbooks usually are more human-friendly, as people tend to trust other humans who address them directly more than abstract words written online.
Documenting all your solutions makes communication more effective for team members who join a project or conversation midstream and need to understand what steps have been taken thus far, new hires who try to catch up with the rest of the team, managers who need to track the work done, and, finally, customers who want to understand what they get.
Strategy 2. Embrace textual communication
A logical extension of documentation, text communication can feel unusual or even uncomfortable for many. In remote environments, or in teams spread across countries with different time zones, communicating through text is ideal. It prevents a vicious cycle of meetings which serve only to “bring people up to speed.” Communicating answers to problems via text makes documentation easier and more trustworthy.
When all your meetings are moved online, it’s crucial to maintain a written account of all the words said. Try to write everything down — from meeting notes to quarterly objectives. Before meetings, the lead can create an agenda and ask participants to add items for discussion. During meetings, team members or one person in charge can write down decisions, ideas, or notes to specify who is responsible for specific tasks or to trace the chain of reasoning leading to decisions. Documenting everything makes for a stronger, more informed, more trusting, and more connected team.
Writing down things is far from exciting, but it will provide you with reference that will evolve together with your team.
Strategy 3. Switch to asynchronous communication
We all are most likely used to communicating synchronously — gathering in the same place (physical or virtual) at the same time. An asynchronous workflow allows moving forward even when other stakeholders are unavailable. Asynchronous communication, by definition, is any type of communication where one person provides information and then there is a time lag before the recipients take in the information and offer their responses. Essentially, asynchronous communication is when you send a message without expecting an immediate response. The most common example of such communication is, of course, sending an email.
The major benefit of asynchronous communication is that it relieves employees from the burden of being always online and ready to react. Constant disruption of the work with requests for immediate reaction does not allow team members to concentrate and dive into the project, increases the stress and reduces their productivity.
However, though there are many tools of asynchronous communication — Google Drive, Monday, or Asana, to name just a few, they all have one prerequisite: a standardized method of documentation. Without a corporate standard, team members will be left to determine their own methods for communicating, that will inevitably lead to chaotic document movement across teams and departments.
Strategy 4. Make meetings optional
When we all have to work from home, sitting at another meeting becomes even more frustrating than ever. The way to avoid spending time on unnecessary meetings is to make them optional to attend. It is easy to reduce the number of mandatory meetings, if every meeting has an agenda that the team can collaborate on. The simplest way is to create a Google Doc that allows the team to contribute or modify questions. When the agenda is shaped, every person can decide whether to participate, or to catch up on the outcomes afterwards.
However, it is necessary to assure that all the information will not be lost even if some team members aren’t able to join you online. For example, Loom and Zoom allow recording meetings, which is particularly useful when some of the key stakeholders are absent.
Probably, the idea of “optional meetings” is absurd to those who are used to synchronous communication, but with the team working remotely, it is handy to ask people to contribute whenever they have time — with a deadline, of course!
Strategy 5. Maintaining informal communication
When people are physically located in the same place, informal communication is natural: social connections are crucial to build trust within the organization and to encourage knowledge sharing. Moreover, if we have friends at work, we are also more satisfied with our jobs and the company. But when working remotely, it may sound intentional and fake.
One thing that is easily transferred from personal conversations is using emojis to express emotions. Both remote employees and managers should feel comfortable using them in everyday discourse in professional settings. When working remotely, such visual tools bring about a larger pallet of tones and emotions, creating more empathy and the feeling of human connection. On top of this, using custom emojis allows colleagues to develop their own signal language and build more ties between team members.
It goes without saying that we all have a long way to go to adapt to working from home, and the feeling of isolation from your team is only one, though crucial, side of the overall struggle we are all having. The key to quick adaptation is to adopt a strategy and to try to find order in the present-day chaos. Let’s try and clean up our communication channels — and in the next post, we’ll talk about protecting our workplace from cyberattacks.
