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Remote Team Communication

Many companies sent their employees to work from home. People who have had little such experience will encounter communication and procrastination problems. I have been working from home since 2013, so I would like to share my experience in this article.

Be available


Do not disappear. Ideally, you should answer the question in the messenger right away, as if you were both sitting in the same room. If you answer with a delay, the communication process is stretched and the efficiency decreases. In addition, a person on the other hand begins to get nervous and offended.

To avoid such problems, determine your availability hours with the team and observe them sacredly. There is nothing worse than working with a remote man who disappears all the time, and then says “I moved”, “I went to the auto repair shop”, “I went to the store”, “I was invited to ride a surf”.

Warn the team that you are going to the abyss. To do this, you can create a separate channel in the messenger with a vacation table and messages about periods of inaccessibility.

It is very likely that on a remote site you will often leave for personal affairs, and answer questions from the phone. This is often acceptable, but keep in mind that you won’t be able to view the code from your phone. Therefore, your answer may not be as good as if you were sitting near a full-fledged PC. As a result, you will sacrifice the effectiveness of the team to solve personal problems.

Use the push notification model


Try to notify your colleagues about important changes (push) yourself, do not wait until you are asked. This interaction strategy will allow colleagues not to distract you, which will greatly increase the effectiveness of the team. Get thematic channels in the slack and inform your colleagues about what may be important to them. For example, if your colleague is really waiting for the build, then write that the build is ready in the Deployments channel and tag it.

In the office, you can hear important things out of the corner of your ear. For example, if DevOps drops Jenkins, then you will hear swearing from a different corner of the open space. In the case of a remote, you will not understand for a long time why your tests do not pass until DevOps writes to the chat that CI has fallen.

If employees are silent, then on the part of managers there is a feeling of loss of control. In this regard, advice to managers: do not engage in micromanagement, it is better to teach people to inform you themselves.

If you want to write a lot of text, first write a short TL; DR. Not everyone may be interested in the details, but many may find it useful to know about the event.
Inform your colleagues about important changes: this can be done in daily reports. If you write them in a special Slack channel, then you can mention colleagues who need to know this.

Keep track of infrastructure


Messenger, bugtracker, wiki - all this needs to be kept in order. From a distance, the importance of these tools is increasing. You can no longer afford flood in slack, tasks with the name “Bug1” in JIRA and rotten manuals in the wiki.

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If you understand something wrong, then most likely you will do something wrong, and as a result, the team will spend time correcting it. In a face-to-face conversation, you can see a misunderstanding in a colleague’s look, while on a distance, non-verbal communication is often unavailable. As a team leader, you must be sure that you are understood correctly, and the employee should ask questions if something seems strange to him.

If the developers do not discuss much, then they are probably doing something wrong, or doing nothing at all.

If you ask a question, remember that you distract a colleague from current tasks, try to save him time to understand your problem.

  • Write your question in one big post. Do not say hello .
  • Do not tag everyone in a row if you ask a question in the chat.
  • Use thematic chats.
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Ignoring problems in shared chat rooms is much easier than in the office. Ignoring the problem slows down the work of the person and the whole team. Forgotten questions tend to return in the form of bugs.

Spend your time answering. If you don’t know the answer, but you know someone who knows, then tag it.

One of the tasks of a team leader in a distributed team can be reading all the questions of colleagues and forwarding them to those who can answer them.

If you have a question, then maybe someone else will have it. If you received an answer not in the thread of the channel, but during the oral meeting, then transfer the answer to the thread of the question in slack, so you will help those who will look for an answer in the future.

Consider context


Do not speak in riddles. If you use abbreviations, abbreviations, references, then be sure that your colleague knows them. Do not force people to be decoders: you will save a few characters on the letter, and a colleague will spend time on Google or the reverse question to you.

Conclusion


In general, remote work requires proactivity, responsibility and motivation to understand other people's problems. On a remote site, you need to care more about how your colleagues will understand you.
I hope my advice will help you not to lose efficiency, and work from home will become part of your process.

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