Long Distance or Endless Meetings : Breaking Through Communication Barriers
More than ever it is important to be able to communicate with team members, regardless of their location. These skills aren’t just for remote or distributed teams; all day meetings, working from home, and other temporary interruptions can demand a change to your communication strategy. If increasing your confidence and comfort communicating digitally feels like a burden, you aren’t alone. These three tips can help improve productivity and collaboration, no matter where you are.
Collaboration spans time and space
Getting everyone in a room together to solve a problem isn’t always possible. Even with dedicated, local teams, people may not be able to make it to working sessions or important conversations. Constraining your collaboration to in person meetings can make it difficult to get the time and attention of your team. This can be a major roadblock to progress, but it is just as risky to silo a subset of your team away from critical conversations.
If you find yourself or your team in this situation, it is important to find ways to keep communication open to everyone. Collaboration needs to happen beyond the whiteboard.
Try this
- Use digital collaboration tools — such as Miro, Sketch Teams, Zoom, and Google Drive — if you have remote team members so everyone can participate.
- Avoid hand-offs by ensuring everyone has a role in the problem solving process. Help keep members of the team accountable with daily stand ups and one on one video calls to talk through progress, ideas, or problems.
- Over-communicate. Create channels in Slack dedicated to a particular feature or problem you are working on. Start threads for ideas, sketches, or demos to keep the channel organized.
- Summarize key questions, decisions, and to-dos from meetings and keep them centrally located.
- Sketch Teams is a new, web based toolset for Sketch. It offers helpful features like built in version control, web-based commenting, and annotations. The best part? Sketch Teams replaces the need to buy an annual Sketch license, essentially making the toolset free for anyone on your team who already uses sketch! Now is the time to get everyone on your team should be using Sketch.
- Miro is a remote white boarding tool that makes it easy to digitize discussions and collaborate anywhere. Although nothing quite compares to a whiteboard marker in hand, Miro comes close with a powerful set of brainstorming and low-fi sketching tools. It is great for keeping your information accessible to the whole team and centrally located.
Face time is important, even if it isn’t in person
Humans rely a great deal on non-verbal cues when communicating. If you ever find yourself in a video call where no one else has their video on, it can feel isolating and a little uncomfortable. It can also be very difficult to feel like you are a part of a conversation when you are the only person not in the room. No matter your location, speaking face to face is critical for building relationships, working through problems, and communicating clearly.
Try this
- If you are on a video call, have your camera on as much as you can. Not only does it help people feel more engaged, it also makes it easier to communicate.
- Maintain a digital open door policy. Have clear times during the day where you can always be reached, even if it is a video chat or instant message. Take the time to have video calls just to say “hello” or catch up.
- If it is not possible for everyone on your team can meet in person, try having everyone take the call from their desks. This levels the field for everyone to have a chance to chime in, instead of trying to speak over a whole room of people. If joining the call separately from your desks wont work, consider using an Owl camera in frequently used conference rooms.
- Slack is a great tool for teams to communicate and organize information. Group or individual video calls make it easy to connect with people to get feedback, talk through a problem, or ask a question. Although it is important to set ground rules to avoid a wayward 9PM @channel messages, Slack can make it easy to stay up to date and connected.
- Zoom is an ideal video conferencing tool for larger, organized meetings. It helps organize participants so you can see everyone’s face, even when someone is sharing their screen. Compared to WebEx and other enterprise conferencing tools, Zoom has a great balance of features and usability.
What’s working? What isn’t?
One of the most important aspects of building a strong practice of communication is feedback. Old habits often die hard and people can make mistakes. If you are missing out on information or feel disconnected, it is important to let people know. Retrospectives can be a good platform for addressing team level communication breakdowns, but also be sure to give one on one feedback if someone makes a mistake.
Try this
- Remember that good communication practices are beneficial to the whole team, not just remote team members. Be sure to gather feedback consistently and adapt your process with new tools or habits.
- Make a point to ask people, one on one, if they are getting the information and involvement they need. Set up regular team meetings and one on ones so everyone has a chance to share feedback.
- Ask people how they like to communicate. Some people prefer text, others prefer face to face. Have shared expectations around communication and when information should be captured or shared with others.
- Don’t be afraid to reach out. If you haven’t heard from a team member for a while, be sure to check in.
- Navigator can help teams keep meetings productive and provides an easy way to capture feedback. This tool is helpful for facilitating transparent and productive conversation between peers, team members, and leaders.
Local or remote, there is no substitute for good communication
Building a successful team starts with collaboration, consistent face time, and continuous feedback. Although developing better communication habits can be a challenge, it can go a long way in improving employee happiness and performance. No matter where members of your team are located, breaking through common communication barriers will help your team do their best work.