COMMUNICATION TOOLS: WHICH, WHEN, AND WHY

To follow are the top-recommended tips for effective communication.

USE VIDEO REGULARLY—ESPECIALLY FOR MEETINGS. While some might think using video often is overkill for some types of communication, most team members I’ve spoken to have found regular use of video to be key to effective workflow. Video is also great for sending more complicated information; given that humans are so predominantly visual, a video message can be much more effective than email.

ALWAYS HAVE MULTIPLE COMMUNICATION CHANNELS. In terms of software glitches, of course, this is a no-brainer. But more so, the benefit is that different channels work better for different situations.

We use video and audio, but also chat because if our video and audio go down, we need to coordinate on how to get back together. You’ve got to be tech-savvy enough that you can use the different technologies and have your Plan B for when those technologies fail.

—MARK KILBY, Agile coach, Sonatype⁸

Stick to the facts online and save the complicated emotional stuff for a higher-bandwidth channel like video or face-to-face.

—PETER HILTON, consultant, Signavio⁹

In order to be virtual but not distant, real conversations are a must. We need to be able to agree and disagree quickly and be spontaneous. That’s one of the drawbacks of email. Though a lot more thought goes into them, you still lose that spontaneity. And spontaneity is part of healthy communication.

—PILAR ORTI, director, Virtual not Distant¹⁰

MAKE IT EASY TO MOVE FROM ASYNCHRONOUS MODES (email or text) TO LIVE ONES (phone or video). “Non-expressive” modes of communication—such as email and text, which offer neither body language nor tone of voice—can be problematic if a conversation includes any confusion or emotion. So, many recommend switching from a more static mode to a more personal one as soon as the need arises.

A one-to-one IM chat can get tiresome. One of us will usually hit the voice button and turn it into a voice conversation. Those transitions need to be smooth and seamless on remote teams. Things need to happen fast—as quickly as walking up to somebody in an office, hopefully quicker.

—TOM HOWLETT, COO, River Agency¹¹

We could work completely differently and independently and then hook up when we needed to. We used asynchronous communication most of the time and then went to synchronous communication as needed. When the communication by email was not flowing well, we booked a Skype call. Usually a short chat would solve everything.

—LUIS GONÇALVES, management consultant and founder, Evolution4All, on cowriting a book remotely ¹²

AGREE ON THE TOOLS YOU’RE GOING TO USE—AND BE DISCIPLINED ABOUT USING THEM. Often on remote teams people will just start using whatever tools they like the best: some like email and some like IM, while others may prefer Slack. But communication works best when a team agrees on a tool—and the etiquette around that tool—and then sticks to that agreement. In his Harvard Business Review  article “Communication Tips for Global Virtual Teams,” Paul Berry notes how his team members, who span more than twenty different countries, stay aligned by using email as their primary mode. The reason this approach is effective for them is because each member commits to checking email as the “absolute highest priority.”¹³

Once we’ve established when we will use which types of tools and why, we need to select the specific tools to use. For example, partner Cris Hazzard of digital creative agency Sanborn notes: “For us, a combination of Slack, Trello, Google Apps for Work, and Zoom does the trick. We’re constantly trying new tools and integrating them when it makes sense.”¹⁴ And for the fully distributed accounting firm Why Blu, Scott Hoppe shares: “We use Asana, Slack, and G Suite. We use Slack for all the quick communications, the under-five-minute stuff. Anything that needs multiple inputs, anything over that five minutes, goes into Asana. Internally, we do not email each other, but we do use email with our clients.”¹⁵ (If you haven’t yet read the previous chapter, note that we discuss different tools at length there. Also check out the RESOURCES section’s “Technology & Tools,” which starts off by naming the tool suites most commonly used by scores of companies [ p. 301]. In the meantime, the following sidebar offers one company’s collection of tools.)

Then, once those tools have been chosen, we need to make sure we’re savvy in using them. And since some teams opt to try out a tool for a few weeks or months before making a final decision, for some the selection phase and the savvy phase go hand in hand.

Also keep in mind that we all can have different, random preferences. Some people like tools for seemingly weird reasons, and sometimes the “perfect” tool on a team just doesn’t work for them. I once built a help manual using a wiki. It was a work of art; everything was hyperlinked to everything else, and it could be updated by anyone at any time. But no one used it—they preferred separate Google Docs. The upshot: if the team won’t use the perfect tool, it’s not the perfect tool.

COMMUNICATION ETIQUETTE: HOW

Next up: establishing our preferred etiquette for all interactions, the how of the team agreement. This is when the chance for individuals to air their preferences will prove particularly helpful, since the personal style of one could be grating to another.

For example, I once worked with a woman who used email like an IM tool. Instead of sending just one email, she would send a flood of thoughts, one after another. At first it was slightly annoying but still manageable, especially since excess emails can easily be deleted. But over time I found I wanted to communicate with her less. And on remote teams, if physical distance is already a barrier, the addition of emotional distance can be downright destructive. Since small niggles can build into bigger frustrations, the setting of communication ground rules can keep the communication channels fully open and the team running smoothly.

As for quantity of messages, consultant Peter Hilton offers: “My rule of thumb is: don’t send faster than you can receive, and then don’t send faster than the other person is sending.”¹⁸

Customer support specialist Laura Rooke has a different pet peeve about IM: “I treat my instant messages the same as I would a conversation. You wouldn’t call across to somebody in the office and say, ‘I have a question for you,’ and then turn and walk away. So don’t send someone a question via instant message and then not answer back. That’s like a drive-by hello.”¹⁹

Given the fact that incoming communication can often be a disruption, for many the most important factors of etiquette concern timing, the urgency of the content, and the effort required to respond. In Laura Rooke’s example above, the “drive-by hello” was annoying because the very purpose of instant messaging is its spontaneous nature—which comes with the assumption that the intrusion is coming fast and its duration will be brief, its completion clear to both parties. (In chapter 4 we noted how one coworker’s careful, slow typing made IM agonizing for his correspondents, who felt obliged to stare at that blinking screen awaiting whatever would eventually spill forth.)

As another example, I know of someone who collaborated with two outside freelancers whose work regularly required getting answers to questions. One freelancer saved up several questions and then called to ask them all in one shot; the other simply picked up the phone the second she had a question. (This was back when email was still being developed and was not yet widely used.) The one-shot freelancer enjoyed a good relationship with her contact; less so the other, since the annoyance of the constant phone calls eventually eroded that work relationship.

Though I personally prefer the one-message approach—and now I’m talking about email, not the telephone—I’ve corresponded extensively with someone who hated multi-issue emails. She got two-hundred-plus emails a day, most of them “one-item quickies,” as she called them. When her meetings for the day were done and she turned to tackle her email, she’d want to quickly forge through them. So for her, receiving a message that called for more than she could produce in the moment both bloated her in-box and weighed down her nagging to-do list.

As an aside, note that an additional advantage to one-item quickies is that their subject lines are more likely to match their content. Hassan Osman at Cisco Systems recommends changing the subject line of email threads as the conversation changes so that the information can be more easily tracked down in the future. This searchability—as well as the option to group different topics in different channels—is one of the reasons many use Slack as one of their communication tools. (The Slack etiquette sidebar lower down details both different channels and threading conversations.)

As you can imagine, asking teammates to offer their preferences in an agreement conversation is invaluable, in part because any story behind a preferred work pattern gives the team a chance to learn more about each other. And note, the team agreement can also include which “standard” professional protocols your team might not want to follow. For example, the Embrace Video—and Do It Right section ( p. 166 ) of chapter 7 specifies the professional approach to using video, especially for remote workers at home. Ideally, a video call from a home office will be no less professional than one from a work office. But as Agile coach Mark Kilby shares in chapter 8: “On my team, nobody gets upset if somebody’s kid pops up in the background and says hi, or a family member walks past. In fact, it can help us build camaraderie.”²⁰

The following sidebar offers an example of one team’s established communication etiquette, in this case Happy Melly’s etiquette for Slack.

COMMUNICATION MIND SET

Though we noted this in the previous chapter, it merits another mention. The last element to tuning your team is to agree to communicate from a mind set of positive intent. The simple truth is that misunderstandings happen when we don’t have the full picture, and those misunderstandings can derail a team’s alignment—not to mention its productivity. Since small frustrations tend to build up over time, it’s a top priority to address misunderstandings as soon as possible so as to regain that alignment. In brief, don’t let things fester. If something is irking a team member, it’s important that he or she feels able to express it. But in that expression, it’s essential to assume positive intent—as well as to use phrasing that’s constructive rather than critical or accusatory. We cover this important issue again in relation to cross-cultural communication. But before we venture into different cultures, let’s consider the game rules called for when team members simply work in different time zones.

TIME ZONES AND WIDELY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS

An additional consideration comes into play when the time zone differences span more than just a few hours—and when teams in one region rely on input and assignments from another. As mentioned in chapter 6, one solution is to hire workers who are in the same time zone, or at least workers who share a considerable overlap of working hours.

Established teams can also maintain smooth productivity via simple planning. Blossom VP Sebastian Göttschkes pads his schedule to cushion potential delays.²⁴ To address issues that require group input, ScrapingHub director Pablo Hoffman will schedule a call within everyone’s working hours to “force” a decision.²⁵ And on Happy Melly’s fully distributed team, Ralph van Roosmalen initiated a great approach for making efficient decisions: the “proposal document.” This is a team-accessible Google Doc that includes: the decision to be made, its pros and cons, all variables—including if there’s any pending information to be added, and a section requesting feedback. By this means everyone’s voice gets a chance to be heard—asynchronously.

In one last point, RebelMouse CEO Paul-Andrea Berry-Breanna offers: “You can also prevent communication frustration by making sure everyone has multiple tasks in their queues. That way, if something gets stuck in a communication bottleneck, remote employees can move on to the second or third task on their list while they wait for a response. . . . This keeps everyone moving full speed ahead—no matter where they are in the world.”²⁶

Now, let’s add cultural differences into the mix.

RESPECT AND APPRECIATION

Agile expert Hugo Messer puts it succinctly: “Accept that there will be cultural differences, and organize around them.”³¹ To follow we’ll cover many ways to organize around those differences. But before we get too clinical, we’d be wise to deepen that awareness to one of respect and appreciation.

While it’s true that managers hire some far-located workers with cost savings in mind, those workers were nonetheless carefully selected for what they bring to the table. What those from other cultures bring should not be considered within the caveat of an unavoidable “minus,” as in, “they’re great—except for the language barrier . . .” This is because in many cases the pluses of diverse teams far outnumber any supposed minuses. (For more, see the sidebar to follow.)

MULTILINGUAL COMMUNICATION

The all-important topic of communication has its own concerns in the multilingual sphere. Just as teams might choose a common time zone, multilingual teams will often choose a common language. While this is likely the only viable means of aligning the team, it still leaves some members speaking and writing in a non-native language. That means all but those fluent in the chosen language start out with a disadvantage.

That disadvantage is often most prevalent with the written word, since many find it easier to speak in a foreign language than to write in it. But then again, for some the difficulty is in parsing a strong accent. Either way, opportunities for misunderstanding abound.

The best way to address this concern, ironically, is to have an open, honest, team-wide conversation. This way you can assess exactly what language disadvantages exist within the group, as well as learn each member’s preferred workaround. For example, this is why Conteneo designed their Weave decision support platform to provide a built-in chat interface along with decision-making frameworks. As CEO Luke Hohmann explains: “When teams with mixed languages need to reach a decision, they need to have the time to reflect on their choices. The integrated chat capabilities of Weave provide exactly this capability, enabling the group to make decisions that motivate action.”

Now, that conversation might seem easy enough, but note that people from some cultures might be reluctant to air their personal views. In his article “Managing Cultural and Language Divides Within Your Remote Team,” Deven Bhagwandin explains how “employees from Japan, who typically speak perfect English and can communicate with ease,” often don’t express their thoughts “because it is traditionally not within their culture or rights to express their own opinions in the workplace.” And so Deven recommends leading by example by “encouraging open communications from day one, especially with the internationals on your team.”³⁵ One way to effectively identify any reluctance: have team members complete an anonymous questionnaire that asks, in part, how likely they’d be to ask questions and offer opinions. And then lead by example, emphasizing that those questions and opinions are welcome—because they’re conducive to team building and productivity.

For this reason and others, the various multilingual concerns can be summed up in two recommendations. One: do your best to avoid using idioms, jargon, and slang words. And two: overcommunicate.

But note, as Silvina Martínez from the consulting company Managing Virtual Teams points out: “Overcommunication doesn’t mean that you’re constantly talking to your team or sending a thousand emails per day. It just means that you’re making an extra effort to explain what you need to share.”³⁶ Essentially, the best way to ensure that all members have the information they need is to convey it more than once and in more than one mode—perhaps even in more than one language. Just as it’s prudent to follow up a phone call with an email confirming what was discussed, take every opportunity to clarify your meaning, especially for those reluctant to express that they’re confused. Similarly, Brie Reynolds recommends speaking up if you don’t understand something. Model a culture of open honesty.

The concept of conveying information in more than one mode applies to visuals as well. In a Fast Company article, John Rampton suggests using signs, cue cards, and other visual aids whenever possible, especially for conveying instructions and assignments.³⁷ As phrased on Sococo’s People-Centric Communications blog, “Whatever you’re trying to communicate, it’s vital that you spend some time thinking about how you can use visuals to help get your meaning across.”³⁸ (To get you started, check out the following sidebar.)

Now that we’ve considered our options, let’s move on to actually crafting a working agreement.