One of the biggest challenges we face when working physically apart from each other is communication. Use of tools, routines and agreements are only successful if you communicate effectively and frequently.

Why is frequent communication important?

• Information conveyed by someone’s physical presence, including non-verbal communication between any video conversations, is lost when we work remotely. We know less about what is going on in their lives and how they are feeling.
• Trust diminishes as we spend less time together because we see them doing what they say they will do less often. We used to see it, and now we don’t.

Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know

Jim Rohn

So what is successful frequent communication? There is no one answer. Everyone is different, which means what one person feels is frequent, maybe overbearing or underwhelming for someone else. You need to learn what feels right for you, and the people with whom you work.

Three tips for achieving the right level of communication for you:

1. Balance use of informal messaging, email and conversation
2. Communicate with purpose
3. Connect individually and in groups

1 – Balance use of informal messaging, email and conversation

Communicate most frequently through chat applications like Slack, Workplace or Yammer. Think of quick messaging as replacing the continual flow of information that your in-person presence provided. Consider sharing how your day is going, challenges you are facing, and what is amusing you. Using a tool like Slack or Workplace, you can share with your colleagues informally to build and maintain rapport.

2 – Communicate with purpose

Be clear what you want to achieve with your communication, failure to set intent leaves a message without context. At best, the other party is confused, at worst they are offended. Rather than building trust and rapport, the outcome may be that you create an emotional distance.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.

Plato*

Your purpose may be social

• Open up to let people know more about you – share your experiences, provide insight into what is going on in your life. Doing so enables them to have empathy and to put a context around interactions they have with you
• Have fun – forward a joke or meme (suitable for work) to brighten someone’s day. It is a great way to let people know a little more about your style and values
• Show appreciation of others – commend or thank someone for even small things to let them know their efforts made a difference. Even an emoji response can show you acknowledge their thoughts

Your purpose may be business

• Advise an outcome – share minutes of a meeting to detail who will do what when, or the result of an action
• Share knowledge – forward an article, advise on an event
• Seek information – ask a question, request a review of a document

3 – Connect individually and in groups

• Get people together to hear the same words at the same time, this a powerful way to align a group. Inclusion or relevant people shows you respect their involvement while building collaborative energy.
• Schedule time with individuals from outside your team which you interact with frequently, don’t rely on just on just written communication or aligning in group discussions.
• Plan regular catch-ups with everyone in your team, for some people this may be a quick daily call, others it might be weekly. Test and learn with them – tell them that you want to get the right rhythm and decide a pattern to try, then assess after a week or so.

To keep a team together, set the example.

• Start an informal chat on whatever tooling you have. Consider it an experiment, and reflect jointly with your team members to keep what works, and lose what doesn’t.
• Think about what you want to achieve in your communication – having fun is allowed, even encouraged! Be yourself while you show consideration.
• Take time to connect both with individuals and with as a group. Use a mix of messaging/chat and live conversation to build an authentic connection.

* Plato - https://www.tameday.com/team-communication-quotes/
** Jim Rohn - https://www.facebook.com/OfficialJimRohn/posts/effective-communication-is-20-what-you-know-and-80-how-you-feel-about-what-you-k/10155654356195635/

Agreements between team members on desired behaviours, supporting actions and communication has three clear benefits:

• Sets a team up for success by establishing a joint “best practice” for effective collaboration
• Provides guardrails that allow self regulation of behaviour
• Lifts engagement

What are team norms?

“Team norms” are a set of guidelines created by the team, for the team, that inform how best to interact with each other. Other popular formats include “team working-agreements”, “team contracts” and team member “user guides”. While the formats are different, they all created by the team members to define the desired behaviours and outcomes.

Setting up for success

When establishing a team, the individuals involved go through a well-documented pattern of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing as explained by Tuckman*. The process of working with a team to develop a set of agreed behaviours, helps the group fast track through the Norming and Storming states, to begin Performing sooner.

Performing is where you want to be

The Forming process involves team members understanding the challenge ahead and politely orientating to the tasks at hand. The Storming phase involves individuals sharing their ideas with people typically beginning to experience each other’s working styles. Agreeing on acceptable behviour within the team helps address early, the conflict which can arise when individual styles clash. The earlier you deal with this the better.

Through collectively discussing working styles in the “safe” setting of a workshop, disagreements can be resolved in a calm and blame free manner, versus the chaos which can erupt when surfaced while trying to get work done. By consciously dealing with norming behaviours, the team matures more rapidly by establishing the patterns of positive interaction required for high performance.

Guardrails for self-regulation

With an agreement in place, there is less pressure when addressing undesired behaviour. Where all team members participate in the development of their behavioural norms, they are more comfortable using them to self-regulate the team. For example a team member’s behaviour of checking their phone disrupting daily standups, may be called out as being against the joint agreement. Revisiting and adjusting these rules of engagement to cater to new or altered circumstances enhances trust between team members as they observe action to look after each other.

Lifts engagement

By crafting the type of environment in which they want to work in, individuals are more likely to want to stay with their team. A reduction in behaviours which are deemed unwanted, removes friction to getting work done, eases interaction within the team and provides for the opporuntity for fun – resulting in a happier place to work.

If you want to enable your teams to succeed and showcase their work with a sense or pride, take time to ensure they have team norm working agreements in place.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development

There is a myriad of tools that can help people collaborate across location and across timezones. Below are my top 3 things to remember when selecting and using them.

Tools will not fix lousy practices

If your processes or procedures are flawed, moving them to a tool will probably allow you to do bad work faster and at a larger scale.

• Examine your workflow – Understand where things go wrong and where they go right. Before moving to a tool, or any form of automation, consider what you are trying to achieve and ask if the way you work is the best way. Make changes to workflow and try it out before embedding into a tool.
• Understand what is working well – Ask if there is a way to build on that and make it part of your work system. An example might be using file links in chats. You might choose to build on this success by accepting versioning in SharePoint so that those links remain correct as you no longer have version numbers in the file name.
• Set behaviour standards – Poor behaviour face to face is likely to continue when using digital channels. Use team norms to agree on what is acceptable and have the team address failures in retrospectives.

Choose tools to fit your needs

Explore a range of scenarios with your team and agree on which tool you might use in each one. Every month new software is launched, there are many opportunities to get a good fit.

• Agree on what tool to use when – A team norms session can be help to focus on which tool to use in which situations, e.g. use Skype for text and video chat, Zoom for large scale conferences, email for official communications and SMS for urgent messaging.
• Consider what you have available to see what meets your needs – Are tools available for both mobile and desktop, do they cross the operating systems your team uses (Andriod/IOS, Windows/Mac). Pre authorised and licenced tools will be quicker and easier to implement. They may also have a degree of technical support which will make their use easier within a corporate ecosystem. Review the list of software your team uses from time to time, consider trialling new tools to see if they are a good fit. Evaluate new features as they become available and see if they become part of how you work.
• Learn how to use them – Not everyone has the same interest or experience in collaboration software. When selecting a tool, consider creating a simple “how-to” guide for repeated actions. Test the software before needed. An example of how this can help is to have a test call with each team member ahead of a daily standup so everyone has the same understanding of how they will join in and some confidence in doing so. You want to avoid situations where managing the software takes more energy than the outcome it enables.

Nothing replaces communication

Encourage positive practices as behavioural norms within the team. Remind people that communication helps us get clarity, builds trust and can be fun.

• Face to face communication should be encouraged as often as possible – The extra dimension enhances trust and builds relationships within the team. Many chat programs now have video options. Where you can’t use a desktop computer for video, consider mobile apps.
• Frequent informal communication should be encouraged – Chat programs are ideal for this. Skype, Slack and others enable quick brief messages with little effort, use of emoji convey personality as well. For people who are working across time zones, this is an effortless way of carrying on a conversation where individuals can drop in and out as they wish and still see the context.
• When in doubt, reach out – When we work side by side, we often keep a banter going where we use each other as sounding boards. We test our ideas; however, more importantly, we test our understanding of other’s ideas. There is a temptation to stop this when it is no longer as easy as asking, “Hey, do you think they meant this when they said that?” Make an effort to over-communication, keep realigning and confirming with each other.

As you work remotely and use tools to communicate, collaborate and visualise your work remember to reflect. Take the time to ask what is and what is not working routinely. Adjust when you need to.

A team that aligns frequently, delivers good quality work at a predictable pace. By having a focus on high value output they work on the right things. Conversely, a team which does not align frequently can fragment rapidly, be inconsistent in their delivery and expend energy on low-value activity.

It is all about the Why!

People are motivated by doing things that matter. One way to ensure that team members understand their efforts matter, is through regularly engagement. Engagement can be made meaningful by explaining the what the desired outcome is, that they are being asked to contribute along with the reason why that outcome is valuable.

In a constantly changing world, there is a need to update teams with changes in priority and include them in the early thinking behind changes. This will enable them evolve their thinking and adapt as required.

Frequent alignment sessions build inclusion, alignment and consistency

The mission

A team with a mission is a team with a purpose. Team members know where they are going and what they are likely to encounter along the way. As teams form, they do so as a group dedicated to fulfilment their purpose. They will hone their skills and apply their energy to achieve success.

Alignment is necessary to reconnect team members with the mission and purpose as context changes to ensure they know which direction to head. As we build teams of competent people and provide them with purpose and prioritisation, they are able to put their skills to work to develop the solutions using their expertise.

The team output

Alignment allows synchronisation and collaboration. Together, this is a basis for shared work experiences which in turn help create an environment to establish trust. This trust forms a virtuous feedback loop to collaboration which is improved, to further build that trust.

Synchronisation – By knowing when and how the team is going to meet, an individual can match their own cadence to the group’s rhythm. Without frequent and regular alignment, each time they meet, it will feel ad hoc and require an expenditure of energy to figure out how to conduct their catch up.

Collaboration – By talking at frequent intervals, people can balance their own contribution with the opportunity to share and ask for help. Breaking work up into small items enables an understanding who is working on what and when provides the opportunity for an individual to be somewhat autonomous.

The individual’s contribution

Knowing the context of the work being done and having regular interactions with the rest of the team creates enables an individual to contribute their best. When provided with the right information to enable success, a motivated person who is part of a team with the required competencies, is able to deliver quality output.

Alignment and autonomy allow people to exert their skills and do their job often with a lift in satisfaction and quality.

In a face to face world, we often know where to find each other. We know that to find the team we need, we can take the elevator and walk down the appropriate corridor. Walls often display the team’s work progress, and there is usually someone around to ask a question.

In a world where people are working flexibly across different hours and locations this doesn’t work – we need other solutions.

You want people to alert you to the things you need to know!

You want people to be able to find you

When working as part of an organisation, there are going to be times your team is impacted by the work others do. You want to be aware of such changes before they happen. If who are are, and what you do is hiding in some corner of the intranet, it will be hard for people to identify you and your needs. Critical changes may take place with results varying from less that optimal solutions to devastating consequential effect.

Make an impact

With a little bit of effort, your team can begin to advertise their existence. Your team is probably part of a larger group which already has a presence on SharePoint or similar, talking vaguely about what they do.

You want to ensure that your team’s presence is loud and proud; you want others to reach out and include you when needed. 

Tap into one our your team member’s creative superpower to establish a positive online presence. Showing a little inspiration will provide others with the confidence that you know what you are doing, and it is worth engaging with you.

Tell the world who you are

Now you have someone’s attention, make the most of it. Tell them what your team does and does not do. People can then begin to frame their engagement with your team or keep looking for the right contact. Both of these will save you time. More of the right questions and less of the time-wasting ones.

It is not enough to only talk about the work you do. Organisations are groups of people and these connections make the work possible. So, tell them about yourselves.

• Who is in the team
• What are your skills – things you can help with today
• What do you want to achieve – what would you like to be doing tomorrow

Sharing who is in your team and what they can do, will help your team create useful networks, by assisting like-minded people both today and tomorrow.

Share your value

It never hurts to share success. By adding some success stories you:

• Let others see why your team exists
• Build trust that you know what you are doing
• Enhance each team member’s professional presence within the organisation

Each of these things is important for when you need to reach out to others for help. Your online presence demonstrates you value others time and will enhance communication with stakeholders, build coalitions of like minded people and other teams moving forward.

Agile emphasises the importance of co-located cross-functional teams. Cross-functionality is important as we want teams to be as independent as possible which often requires the utilisation of the full experience and knowledge of the group. Co-location helps unlock the cross-functional expertise across the team to increase speed and improve the quality of work. As an Agile coach, I typically advise against breaking a team into groups which become sub-teams, creating mini-silos. The reason for this is that all the delays, misunderstandings and lost opportunities that come from work spread across different teams become replicated within the team on a smaller scale.

When team members are not co-located or working the same hours we have to acknowledge there are trade-offs. In this case, the frustration of not being able to contribute value outweighs the downside of working independently within the team. Breaking the work up, to specifically enable task assignment to individuals or groups based location and working hours, empowers people to work with a degree of independence resulting in getting more done.

Redesigning the work for people

The individual worker

This person may work different hours for flexibility, be in the same city or a different country but not frequently in the same office. This kind of worker can effectively contribute through:

• Reviewing work – often the ability to not have the interruptions that come with working in a dynamic team space provides the opportunity to read thoughtfully. Not being part of the creation process for a piece of work, enables fresh insights which test the concepts in a new way.

• Documentation or calculation – separation from the core team, can sometimes help with work where concentration is more important than collaboration and can result in faster turn around of iterations for review by team members and stakeholders.

• Follow the sun – people working later in the day can often pick up urgent work, enabling the team to progress more work in each 24-hour cycle.

The split team

Sometimes teams are located by skill set. Allocation of work where most, but not all the skills exist at a location, often provides the opportunity for team members to develop more T shaped skills, the broader knowledge (the broad top of the T) to complement their speciality knowledge (the narrow vertical part of the T). Peer review of work by swapping between locations can help teams stay aligned but be realistic of the physical separation.

The remote product owner

A typical scenario is for Product Owners to sit with the team stakeholders, rather than the team. The Product Owner is an integral part of the overall team and is accountable for their own work to propel the team forward. This output takes the form of a prioritised backlog of Epics, Features and User Stories. The highest priority work should be refined with clear descriptions of who the work is for, what the need is and why that is important. Additional to this, there should be a description explaining the elements which would make it complete:

• Plan to plan – Agile models detail a Product Owner responsibilities to include interpreting the needs of the business into a prioritised work backlog. This description can lead people to believe that there is little difference between collocated and remote Product Owners. In practice, it represents a change from informal and continual work design to a more structured approach. An effective remote Product Owner has a plan on how they will gain feedback from the team to inform the work they prioritise. 
• Redesign the work rhythm – A collocated Product Owner absorbs and shares information with the team almost seamlessly through ongoing conversation, ensuring that everyone enters planning sessions with a clear understanding of the work to be discussed. A remote product owner will need to introduce enough structure to let people be prepared for planning discussions, mitigating the absence of the side conversations. Achieving this may involve creating a rhythm where they have regular discussions with team members to test their ideas about what is possible and gain information about dependencies, technical debt and unrealised opportunities. It would not be unreasonable for a team to ask the product owner to have frequent check-ins to test the direction of the work throughout the sprint.
• Clear expecations – Being remote increases the importance of having clear expectations of any help the Product Owner is looking for to build the backlog, and any information the team may need while doing their work.