knowledge-base

Communication Modes

Much of this is inspired from Florian and findings regarding on how remote work can work.

Dictionary

• contextualize: To give the broader or surround context or background of certain information that allows to better understand and interpret the information.

Summarized Tips

• Distributed teams are better than localized teams — not because they’re distributed, but because they’re asynchronous.
• Avoid anything that makes a distributed team run synchronously.
• Use less chat.
• Have fewer meetings.
• Write. Things. Down.

Remote Work

If you want to make remote work, work, you must learn how remote work can work. It won’t succeed when sticking to old habits that are not compliant with remote work. For remote work to succeed, you must adopt and new skills to make it work.

Working in a distributed team means working asynchronously. Being productive in a distributed team is a skill that most people must learn; it is not innate to us. Nothing has as dire an impact on productivity as poor communications. A capable distributed team habitually externalizes information.

Information is generally far less useful when it is only stored in one person’s head, as opposed to being accessible in a shared system that everyone trusts and can use. If you take important information out of your own head and store it in a medium that allows others to easily find and contextualize it, that’s a win for everyone.

Wiki’s should be your default mode of communication in remote or distributed teams. That does not use any other method at all. You should be clear that Asynchronous communication is norm in this situation.

Clear rules on how to communicate does a long way.

Types

Chat/IM

• Synchronous/Asynchronous Communication, but best for Synchronous.
• Often the norm (especially in remote/distributed work).
• Excessively using chat isn’t being efficient. It’s being lazy.
• It’s easy: Fire and forget
• Difficult to find information after the fact.
• Even harder to grasp the whole context around the information you search for.
• If this creates an expectation for others to respond quickly, it is very bad.
• Use for:
  • Collaboration that requires immediate, interactive mutual feedback and confidentiality from 2 or more participants.
  • Good for actual Synchronous communication.
  • Using chat in distributed team should be an exception to the norm.
• Requirements:
  • You need immediate feedback from the other person,
  • you need mutual back-and-forth with the other person,
  • you don’t want others to follow the conversation.
• If you need interactive and immediate feedback, chances are that you’re working on something urgent, and it is far more likely you’ll eventually need to poll other opinions. Just use a shared channel from the get-go.
• Pinging (like mentioning them)
  • Same as walking up to someone and ask a question, people will feel compelled to answer promptly, no matter where it is your intention or not. Unless they are so used to it and ignore you.
  • You probably broken their train or thoughts, keeping or interrupting them from doing productive work.
  • Avoid “Empty or naked Pings”
    • Pinging with just ping or how are you? or can I ask a question?.
    • Better to just be direct Can I get your eyes on this pull request <insert link>.
    • Be explicit if something is not urgent.
  • See also this post, if someone responds to your ping later, you might be focused, be interrupted yourself and even forgotten what it was about.

Email

• Asynchronous Communication
• Easier to share with a person or group.
• Harder to loop people into an ongoing discussion after the fact.
• Still hard to find information, although you marginally better than chat, because of its threading.

Wiki

• Asynchronous Communication
• Very easy to share, find and contextualize information (given view permissions are open).
• Wiki means any CMS meant to document and share.
• Issue Tracker means any Jira, ADO, …

Video Calls

• Synchronous Communication
• Sharing information works, but does not scale. It’s in everyone’s mind, not written, hard to access later.
• Sharing recording doesn’t allow for easy discovery of information, nor fast consumption.
  • Unless the automated transcription, proper summarization by GenAI and then storage of that information is on point.
  • Until machines get intelligent enough to automatically transcribe and summarize words spoken in a meeting, write notes and a summary of every meeting you attend, and circulate them.
• They give you the ability to pick up on non-textual and nonverbal cues from the call participants. But that’s really the only good reason to use them.
• Needs an agenda, if you don’t share this in advance, you are setup for ineffective meetings.
  • Have a purpose
  • Document the meeting
  • Document the outcomes
  • The record of the call is more important, else it does not scale to other people or for later reference.
• To be useful, the write-up of a call takes more time and effort than the call itself.
  • This challenges the notion of a “Video Call” being less work. It’s less work if you’re lazy about it and don’t want or need to contents of it.
• Outline
  • Meeting title
  • Date, time, attendees
  • Summary
  • Discussion points (tabular)
  • Action items
  • [Optional] executive summary, allows people to decide if they
    • should familiarize themselves with what was discussed, immediately, and possibly respond if they have objections, or
    • only want to be aware of what was decided, or
    • just keep in the back of their head that a meeting happened, that notes exist, and where they can find them when they need to refer back to them.
• Once you do meetings right, you no longer need most of them.
  • If you follow this, you might decide that a collaborative document works better.
• When to use it?
  • Recurring meetings as opportunity to feel the pulse of the team.
  • Obviously, a distributed team has few recurring meetings, because they are synchronization points, and we’ve already discussed that we strive to minimize those. So the idea of having daily standups, sprint planning meetings, and sprint retrospectives is fundamentally incompatible with distributed teams.
  • having perhaps one meeting per week (or maybe even one every two weeks) in a video call is useful for being able to pick up on nonverbal clues like body language, posture, facial expressions, and tone.
  • These meetings are less about getting work done and more about syncing emotionally and picking up non-verbal cues.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

• Synchronous requires all participants to be available at the same time. Meaning, calendars need to be aligned, meetings might be in the middle of someone’s “focus” time, others need to… It has many ripple effects and comes with a lot of overhead.
• Asynchronous requires improving your writing skills to communicate clearly.
• Asynchronous is the norm in distributed teams.

Water cooler talk

• If 90% of your company’s knowledge is only in people’s heads, you’re dead without the lunchroom.
• There must be a habit of externalizing information if you work as a distributed team. The water cooler works well when people work in the same room, yet they depend on others for access and discovery. Externalizing helps significantly.
• If you have a team that’s functional and productive, because it habitually externalizes information, the absence of chit-chat over coffee has zero negative impact on information flow.
• People working in distributed teams are often introverts. Or they simply choose to have their social relationships outside of work.

Extravert in distributed teams

• All you need to do is agree on a signal that means “I’m taking a break and I’d be happy to chat with anyone who’s inclined, preferably about non work related things” (or whatever meaning your group agrees on).
• It could fail for the simple reason that almost no one never took breaks that happened to overlap. So it might not work for all.
• You can have a channel in which you can discuss completely random things that are not work related.

Externalization of Information

By adapting modes of communication that requires to externalize information (habitually especially) you will bear the fruits that come with clear thinking as I laid out in my blog post.

ChatOps

• Might work well for Ops but not as generic communication approach for a team.

Resources

• https://xahteiwi.eu/resources/presentations/no-we-wont-have-a-video-call-for-that/
• https://xahteiwi.eu/devopsdaystlv-2019/#/
• https://blogs.gnome.org/markmc/2014/02/20/naked-pings/